interview: Negativland

I have to say that up until a few weeks ago, when I learned that Negativland was playing their first ever Dallas show (on Sunday at Sons of Hermann Hall), I really hadn't listened to their music much. Of course, I had read about the group's interesting ability drum up controversy, as well as their epic copyright battle with the band U2 and their own record label, SST, profiled famously in Naomi Klein's massively influential book No Logo. However, after a few listens to their groundbreaking 1987 record Escape from Noise, I became much more interested in finding out more about them, as I found their tracks just as intriguing as their somewhat well known back story. I was lucky enough to speak with founding member Mark Hosler about the history of their band, their approach to making music, and his take on the nature of media and copyright law. Here is what he said:

Could you tell me the story of how the original Negativland trio got together?

Well one thing I should mention is that I'm one of the founding members of the group, but I'm not the leader or the spokesperson or anything like that.  We've been around for a long time.  We got together in 1979 and our first record came out in 1980 when I was still in high school.  I met the core members of Negativland at an after school job in high school calling people on the phone asking them questions about their favorite tv shows, so it was an appropriate starting place.  We were just really interested in unusual music and strange noises and didn't know a whole lot about the history of avant garde music and collage and cut up and appropriation.  But there was something we wanted to hear that we couldn't find out there in the world.  We were living in the suburbs so we were fairly isolated culturally, but we just started mixing things together.  We liked the sound of taking instruments and synthesizers and plugging them in the "wrong" way and seeing what happened.  And we also liked taking things from the world around us and mixing it in, and the world around us, since we were growing up middle class west coast white suburban kids, was the t.v. set and sounds of the neighborhood and the radio.  And of course, there were five or six channels and that was about it.  We mixed all that stuff in the music, and we just loved the sound of taking things out of one context and repurposing it in another context.  We weren't trying to make a statement about the world or media or anything political, we just thought it sounded really cool and interesting and different.  Ironically, to us, what sounded new was using something old, but in a new way.  

When you first got together, was the band primarily interested in making music and writing songs, or did you focus more on creating some kind of conceptual sound art?

Kinda somewhere in the middle, I know some of these questions if you asked another member of Negativland you would get different answers, but I always liked that spot where the avant garde is getting appropriated into popular culture, because there is a funny little edge there. For us, we were always trying to take these more experimental approaches and conceptual approaches to sound and mix them in with a pop culture sensibility. So we were making little songs. From the first record, there are little weird, messed up songs that are on there, scattered throughout the work.

It sounds like you were just as influenced by non musical ideas and things around you as you were by music.

Sure, I would say that we were very influenced by things like listening to Pink Floyd records and listening to Monty Python or the Fireside Theater. I know I was probably very influenced by stuff the Beatles were doing. Tubular Bells was influential too because it was this continuous piece of music we really liked, and our first record, which came out on vinyl, has lots of tracks on each side, but there is no track points in between, it just plays as one continuous thing all the way through. I remember when I heard Tubular Bells, not only was I excited and inspired by the music, but it was done by a kid who was 19 years old, and he played all the instruments by himself. These days, this is a very easy thing. You can have your own little lap top studio and do production on an inexpensive bunch of equipment that you would have needed thousands and thousands of dollars to get back then. So back then, it was super inspiring to find out that some kid did it, and I was only a few years younger. I was working on the first Negativland record when I was 17, and it came out when I was 18. Of course, if you asked someone else in the group, you would get a different set of answers, but something like David Lynch's Eraserhead was influential too, stuff where you had a sense of whole different worlds that had complete logic and concepts behind them. We didn't want to imitate any of this stuff, we wanted to make something that was unlike anything we'd ever heard. I've always been puzzled by people that start bands and want to sound like their favorite band. It's like "your favorite bands are already doing that thing really really well, why would you want to copy it?" Seems kind of ridiculous to me, but that's just me.

Do you think the music you make should or can be judged or assessed using any of the same criteria that people use to assess pop or rock music? Is it fair to do so? Or does it require a different mindset and criteria to understand?

That's an interesting question because the answer to that has changed. What's happened is that, all the way up until the late 90s, you really had to have a very open mind to hear our music and wrap your head around it and be able to follow and understand it, because it didn't really fit a lot of people's ideas of what music is and what makes a piece of music. But what has changed is that because of computers, and the ease with which people can download and appropriate and mash up because of Youtube and Napster, etc., it has become so common now for people to do collage type work. I think a very normal teenager can be playing around on their computer and be making what can really be called some kind of avant garde tape collage thing, because they've heard this stuff and want to try it. So now, I think the answer is that it is much easier for people to hear what we do and get their head around it and say "sure, this is music, I get it." And it also means that we're no longer on any cutting edge at all with what we're doing. If you look at the definition of what avant garde even means, we're not it, because these techniques have been so popularized and spread everywhere. It's really fascinating.

And your average listener is exposed to so much more music, not only is it easier to make any kind of music you want, but it's a lot easier to hear any kind of music you want.

Exactly, that is the other important point. If you're just poking around on Myspace band pages, it is only one click away for you to hear something that 20 years ago you only would have encountered if you had one cool record store in your town, or one great radio station that played it, but if you didn't have that near you, then forget it. Now, the amount of things and different ideas that people are exposed to in politics, art, culture, music and film, everything, is fascinating. It's a whole different world.

You guys started off playing and recording a lot of your material on the San Francisco radio show Over the Edge. Did you find this format or medium to be particularly beneficial to you in some way? Because there aren't a lot of bands that get to go on the air regularly and try new stuff.

Yes, it was an enormously important laboratory for us to play around in and try out ideas and develop what we were doing. I think it was more important than we even realized. We met a guy named Don Joyce who has been part of the group since 81. He had a radio show called Over the Edge, and he played records one after another just like a normal DJ, and we had lunch with him and started talking about what else you could do on the air, and Don was interested in trying new things, and we thought about coming in and using all the different stuff in the studio. And back then, 27 years ago, there were all kinds of reel to reel tape decks and mixers and cassette decks and we could bring all of our own gear and plug it into the board. So we wondered what would happen if we approached the radio station like we make our records in our home studio. We started putting callers on the air right away, and the callers could do anything they wanted, make noise, make sounds, play tapes, say stupid stuff, and add to our mix and interact with us on the air, and we immediately started developing characters and all these different universes. At first, we did totally random mixing, but within months, we realized that we wanted something more coherent, so we would say "ok, this week, the theme is all about war, or fire, or money or holes or dirt or flying," you could pick any subject, really, and bring in all the material we had and stuff we had collected And once it was over, everything we used in the show would be archived, all the raw bits. So when it came to our studio recordings, we had this library of material that we could dip into. It's this enormous amount of really good stuff we have, and I can't really think of any other group who had that kind of situation where they could develop so much material.

Right now, the show we are bringing to Dallas is taking the radio show Over the Edge and putting it live on stage, taking some shows we did on Over the Edge that we felt contained some really powerful, good material, and stuff that had potential to work in a performance situation. So we took hours and hours of radio on one subject and narrowed it down to a two hour long best of the best of bits that we could put together in collage form on stage, and it's called It's All in Your Head FM, and it's like we're a radio network broadcasting all the time, and the network is devoted to talking about God and faiths and why the idea of believing in one single God is probably a bad idea. It's causing us a lot of problems, when we have a President who thinks God tells him what to do fighting against terrorists who think God tells them what to do.

And you guy don't play live very often right?

Well we don't tour very often, and we've never ever played in Dallas. The last time we toured the country was in 2000, so if anyone has any interest in Negativland, we don't come to your town every year. The chances that we'll come back, I don't know, maybe it'll never happen because it's just so rare that we play live. The show we are doing is unique, too, certainly. We aren't performing things from the records. Whenever we play live, we create live shows from scratch that are intended to be performed on stage, so we're trying to make it a completely unique experience for people in the audience.

Could you tell me the story of "Christianity is Stupid" and the infamous press release that came along with it?

The track is based around a recording of a preacher saying "Christianity is stupid, communism is good, give up," and the recording is taken out of context, the preacher was actually talking about Communists taking over the country and brainwashing us and putting us all in concentration camps, and the record came out in the early 70s. We found this record in a thrift store and thought it would be something really inspiring to build a piece around. And that's another point about our work-- we get inspired by what we find. We don't pick a subject and go look for material that fits the subject, for us that is backwards. We find material and build around it. It isn't always what people are saying on a tape but how they are saying it, the quality of their voice and the way they say it. "Christianity is Stupid" is a classic example where it's not just what he said, but the guy had this really great voice, this very musical way of saying the phrases, and we immediately could hear him as the vocalist in the song. This was in 1987, we made this a long time ago, and back then it was a pretty unusual thing to do in a piece of music, and it certainly caught some attention and got a lot of play on college radio. Anyway, we were going to tour the US. We were hoping to break even on the tour, we were all going to take time off from our jobs to go do this, but it quickly became apparent that the tour was going to lose a lot of money, and just out of boredom, one of the members of our group, sitting at his all night security guard job, saw an article about a boy in Rochester, Minnesota who chopped up his mother, father, brother and sister with an ax in the middle of the night, a teenage boy. And Richard Lyons, who is another founder of Negativland, has a really black, dark, kind of fucked up sense of humor, and he wrote this fake press release that said "For immediate release, Negativland has been asked to cancel their long planned 17 city tour pending an investigation in connection between the quadruple ax murder in Rochester, Minnesota and their song 'Christianity is Stupid." And we thought this was kind of sick but funny, and we wondered what would happen if we put this out as a real press release, because the real reason we were canceling the tour was very boring, for financial reasons. So we did, we put out this press release. These days you couldn't get away with it because people would be able to check their facts really fast on the internet, but back then, the story really took off, and we ended up being in a local arts and culture magazine, which led us to getting on a CBS news affiliate, which led to us being in the San Francisco Chronicle, and then Village Voice wrote about it, and then we ended up on NPR. So this hoax story got bigger and bigger, much to our shock because we thought it was easy to figure out that we were lying. But it turns out that the news media relies a lot on other news media for it's reporting, a lot of what you see on the news is just stories taken from other stories, it's like a hall of mirrors, and trying to get any truth is almost impossible. So the story got pretty huge, and it was finally when we got on NPR that we revealed we were lying. We ended up deciding to make a record documenting the whole thing called Helter Stupid. The funny thing is that if you find this online, the liner notes explain all the context and set it up the way I have, but if you just download it, you'll never know.

I was going to ask about the big controversy with U2, and I kind of wanted to get your take on it.

(sarcastically) Oh, we're all good friends now, and we all like to vacation on the same islands, and it's a real relaxed situation with those guys now, no more trouble.

Well I was going to ask you about the nature of copyright law, because at the time, the law was used against you guys, and I wonder if you think that certain aspects of copyright law inhibit artistic creativity generally, even though it was created to protect it?

When copyright law first came into being, copyright was granted for only 14 years. Now, copyright is granted for the life of the creator plus seventy years. When it began, it didn't occur to anyone to make it as long as it is now, so copyright used to expire during the life of the creator. When I first learned that I was kind of shocked. Think about it, JD Sallinger wrote Catcher in the Rye, and the guy really never gave us another book, and it's considered one of the greatest books ever written. If his copyright had expired in 14 years, I wonder if we would have been given a little more incentive to write more books. Negativland doesn't think that the idea of copyright is a terrible idea, the notion of it is fine. It's the way it has been applied and pushed and morphed and mangled that is the problem. And it's really all for the corporate interest. Corporations are these immortal creatures that are legally seen as being persons, unfortunately, and they are legally seen as having free speech, which is terrible for our democratic process in this country. It is what has destroyed our democracy really. You can't punish a corporation by sending it to jail or giving it the death penalty, so corporations enjoy all the privileges and perks of free speech and none of the responsibilities. And because corporations can last forever, there is no time when, say, Disney, is going to allow Mickey Mouse into the public domain. Of course, this makes perfect sense given their view. So I think what needs to be seen is that copyright shouldn't be extended that long, and also the whole notion of what constitutes fair use of a copyright, which permits you to use someone else's copyrighted work in your own work, needs to be expanded, I think, to allow things like what we do to be legal. We consider what we do to be fair use, but many other people think it might be illegal, which is why we are always told to do things ourselves, like running our own record label. Because we're kind of a legal nightmare.

Negativland plays this sunday the 20th at Sons of Hermann Hall