In 1980, Negativland released its first self-titled album with handmade covers and distributed it through a few record stores in the California Bay Area.
“We thought we might sell 100 in the next five years, and we sold all 500 in three months. So we kept going,” said band co-founder Mark Hosler of the experimental sound collage record, which eventually sold 15,000 copies. “We were shocked that people were interested in something so strange.”
Hosler started the group with David Wills and Richard Lyons, but the Negativland lineup has changed, and the range of its work expanded over 46 years.
The multimedia collective has produced more than 30 albums and EPs, as well as fine art, books, radio and live performances that mix found and original material. The band came up with the phrase “culture jamming” to describe its approach to layering art from various sources..
Negativland continues to innovate and perform, collaborating remotely. Its live show, Over The Edge: Significantly Less Deceptive, at the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters on September 16, will combine sound, music, radio, humor, and sonic experimentation. Hosler, who lives in North Carolina, will be on stage with San Francisco’s Jon Leidecker (“Wobbly”), a collaborator with the band since 1985, while Wills contributes by phone from his home in Seattle.
Negativland Live at Internet Archive
September 16, Doors @ 6pm / Show @ 6:30pm
IN PERSON @ Internet Archive
Tickets: $20, register now: https://eventbrite.com/e/1994683818998
Negativland has been influential in the remix space. It has challenged conventions around media, copyright, and artistic freedom. Hosler said the band wanted to carve a space to talk back to power through its audio collage art.
“The thread that goes through all of our work is that we are always responding to and describing American culture,” Hosler said. “It’s our perceptions of power, money, capitalism, who runs things, who’s in control and how the media works. We are creating this alternate, weird, parallel universe version of reality as we perceive it.”
Fair Use and Preservation
The group was thrust into the limelight when it released a record poking fun at, and sampling from, the U2 song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The Irish band and their label sued Negativland for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and defamation of character in 1991 and, with Negativland’s “U2” record having been released by the label SST Records, the group reluctantly settled.
Negativland used the episode and attention from the media to highlight the need for copyright reform. It shared the story of its legal battle and argument for the right to make new art out of corporately owned culture in the 1995 book, Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral Two. The book led Hosler to give more than 140 lectures about appropriation, corporate ownership and the intersection of art and law at schools and universities around the world.
In 2015, the Internet Archive partnered with Negativland to preserve and provide free public access to more than 4,000 hours of Over The Edge, the group’s legendary weekly freeform radio program that has aired since 1981. Don Joyce, a collaborator with Negativland for years until his passing in 2015, was a driving force behind the program. It is now hosted by Leidecker (“Wobbly”) at KPFA in Berkeley. The first 34 years of radio shows are archived and freely available at the Internet Archive to listeners around the world.
Performing for ‘Oddballs’
National Public Radio featured Negativland in its Tiny Desk (Home) Concert series in May 2021.
The members of Negativland have been fluid over the years and most balance their contributions with day jobs. They don’t include photos with their faces on albums. “We really want to direct attention to our work, not to us as personalities or individuals,” Hosler said. In addition to the core group, there are people who help with videos, website design and other aspects of the art that are integral to the work, he added.
In 2022, Ryan Worsley used years of the band’s audio and video footage to produce the film, Stand By for Failure: A Documentary about Negativland
Hosler said the band always knew its audience would be small, but the members were motivated to invent something out of the box. He said he assumes fans are thoughtful, curious and have a sense of humor.
“When we perform shows, a lot of our audience seems like people who don’t even fit in with the people who don’t fit in,” Hosler said. “That’s cool. Our live shows are sort of a safe space for people who are just real oddballs.”
Negativland’s work encompasses sampling music, but also photography, visual arts, graphics, art shows and live, improvisational performances. Its work has adapted to the evolving technology of the past four decades. Hosler said a creative impulse drives the collaborators to keep innovating and sharing their work with the public.
“For many years when critics would write about Negativland, they just couldn’t describe it very well. From a marketing standpoint, that’s bad,” Hosler said. “But from a creative and artistic standpoint, that’s awesome. It’s fantastic. If critics can’t figure out how to talk about the work, maybe it means we actually are doing something a little bit different.”