BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Negativland is a band of self-described "culture jammers" whose musical collage art has landed them in hot water during the last decade. The band's music is a process of cutting up, splicing together and warping various sounds and recordings, netting the flotsam and jetsam of our media culture and fusing it back together in striking, poignant and sometimes grotesque new shapes — and often, new statements. It's just like those art-school collages, only in aural, not visual, art. It's a less-traveled road which has made all the difference for Negativland. Two decades and countless lawsuits into its career, Negativland is touring for the first time in seven years. The True/False Tour brings the band's culture blending into a live and ultimately more bracing setting. The multi-media show incorporates musical instruments and countless sound devices, as well as eight film projectors and three slide projectors. "It took us two years to develop this show because we wanted to be able to do it right and to create something that very few people have experienced before," said Mark Hosler, a charter Negativland member. "About 85 percent of the show, too, is all original material that nobody has heard before. We actually even collage our own material from our own records." Indeed, by 1986 — when a group showed up named Pop Will Eat Itself — Negativland already had established the recipe for that meal. Raiding the sonic junkyards of suburban culture — television, telephones, other people's records -- and juicing up the sounds with occasional keyboards and percussion, Negativland began in 1980 making records that were disjointed aural sculptures. The core members of Negativland met at an after-school job: conducting telephone surveys about people's favorite TV shows. Discovering a shared fascination for tinkering with noises, they followed a friend's advice and assembled their first collages into a self-titled album. "The covers were all hand-made, not because that's what we wanted to do but because we didn't know how you got things printed, how you turned a piece of artwork into printed pieces of cardboard," Hosler said. "So I spent my senior semester of art class making the covers by hand, using old wallpaper books and such. The covers, basically, were collages, too." In the visual arts, this appropriation rarely raises any concerns, but in music — particularly since the advent of hip-hop and sampling — the word "appropriation" attracts lawyers like blood attracts sharks. Negativland has received more than its share of mail with "Attorneys at Law" in the return address, starting with 1989's "Helter Stupid" album, the cover of which featured a photo of convicted Minnesota mass murderer David Broom. The album was a disturbing masterpiece on media manipulation. The most famous run-in with the law, though, occurred a couple of years later when Negativland picked on someone much bigger. The band released a single called "U2," which made fun of Bono's band by picking out the melody of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" on kazoos and included tapes of a profanity-laced studio tantrum by swell-guy radio star Casey Kasem. The resulting legal battle with U2 galvanized the band as crusaders for redefining the fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law. The battle and the band's resulting theories are chronicled in a book, "Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2," and the group's web site is now a clearinghouse for discussion of the limits of sampling and collage uses of other musicians' work — the difference between piracy and "the transformative re-use of material from multiple sources to create new, original works . . . Collage is not theft." "In the visual arts, collage is making one-of-a-kind pieces, and it's under the label of fine art. Music, though, is mass produced. It's pop culture. The monied interests are more involved and they make it into a whole new ball game," Hosler said. "Nobody cared when we were doing this back in the '80s. Only with hip-hop becoming a bigger part of music did things change. "The mentality has changed. We saw it happen with the `U2' single, and now it's happening with computers and the Internet. Napster is a front-page story on USA Today, and it's all about the issues we started dealing with in '90 and '91. Once it becomes digital, the concept of theft and property is turned on its head. The original and the copy are the same. And the way the music industry makes money is by having tight control over the distribution, so once that becomes endangered, they freak out. These threats against Napster are the terrified screams of a dying industry that wants to stop the future from happening." Hosler, in fact, sees virtually all art as collage art. In other words, every new idea is simply the recombination of other, old ideas into a new form. "That's the natural creative impulse — it's transformational more than purely creative, as in starting from nothing," he said. "We take chunks of actual things and recombine them. It's not outright counterfeit when you create something new. But now these businesses want to stop that, stop people from being creative. Time-Warner and all that — they want total control of everything and they want us to sit back and be passive consumers. If you follow that logic all the way through, it's the death of culture. It's mean-spirited, and it's just dumb." Negativland When: 8 p.m. Thursday Where: Other Side, 6906 S. Lewis Ave. Tickets: $15 at the door Comments are closed.
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Thomas Conner
These online "clips" reproduce a self-selection of my journalism (music etc) during the last 20+ years. It's a lotta stuff, but it only scratches the surface. I do not currently possess the time or resources to digitize the whole body of work. These posts are simply a bunch of pretty great days at the office. Archives
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