By Will York

'IT'S INTERESTING WHEN I meet people and they say, 'Whoa, you guys get sued all the time! When's the last time you were sued?' " Negativland cofounder Mark Hosler remarks. "And I'll say, 'Well, in 1992 ...' It's been a long time. We were only sued twice."

Certainly, there's more to Negativland than a couple of lawsuits. The Bay Area sound collagists, celebrating their improbable 25th anniversary this year, have a list of accomplishments that makes most groups look lazy. They helped invent a genre of music, plunderphonic, which now has its own section in some record stores. They also coined the term "culture jamming," which has come to denote any art that recontextualizes mass-media sounds or images with the aim of sticking it to the man. They've released more than a dozen albums, EPs, and singles, most of which are available through their own clearinghouse, Seeland. Finally, they've hosted their own weekly radio show, KPFA's Over the Edge, for more than 24 years, making it the longest-running show on public radio, according to the band's own research.

But just as pop bands are defined by their hit songs, and Norwegian black metal bands are most famous for their murders, the avant-gardists in Negativland will likely remain best known for the legal fallout from their 1991 "U2" single. (Refer to Negativland's own book-CD project, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, on Seeland, and the subsequent faux-bootleg, These Guys Are from England and Who Gives a Shit, on "Seelard," for everything there is to know about the strange saga involving Island Records, U2, SST, and Casey Kasem.) And much as pop groups often spend the rest of their careers either trying to rewrite their big hit or forget about it altogether, Negativland have spent the past decade alternately departing from and returning to the copyright and intellectual property issues at the center of the U2 controversy – issues that are much more interesting than the controversy itself at this point.

No business as usual

Their newest project, the elaborate book-CD-whoopie cushion set No Business (Seeland), is definitely a return to these issues following the release of 2002's Death Sentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak (Seeland). Musically, it finds Negativland doing what they do best: sampling at will, putting words in people's mouths, and cutting and pasting sounds with no regard for decorum. It's all in the name of fun, and while some of it is grating (the marathon spoken word cut-up "Piece a Pie"), some of it's very funny too. The highlight is easily the title track, a jarring edit of "There's No Business Like Show Business" that features a digitally manipulated Ethel Merman proclaiming, "There's no business like stealing!" among other things.

There's a serious subtext to it, although the casual listener could be forgiven for missing it amid the silliness. Unlike Fair Use – whose CD portion laid out both sides of the copyright debate in an entertaining, documentarylike collage – No Business is basically a series of lighthearted musical gags. Even so, its very existence amounts to an act of civil disobedience, as it consists entirely of uncleared samples. It's another deliberate violation of copyright law by a band with a track record of doing just that.

"We know what we're doing, and what we're doing it to," Negativland member Don Joyce explains via e-mail, "but it's not the point of doing it; it's just the risk in doing it." One could be forgiven for suspecting the group of openly courting trouble, but Joyce denies as much. "No, we don't really pursue such excitement at all. It's more like the ideas that pop into our heads seem to end up getting us in trouble occasionally. But that doesn't make them wrong."

Given their reputation, it seems like it would be impossible for Negativland to get away with anything anymore. In the late '80s, they fooled reporters into believing one of their songs inspired a Minnesota teen's multiple ax-murder spree – a morbid prank documented on their recently reissued Helter Stupid CD (originally released in 1989 on SST). It's hard to imagine anyone falling for such a stunt now, just like it's hard to imagine copyright holders not catching wind of the blatant samples used on No Business and many of Negativland's other post-"U2" releases. Then again, given their exhaustive documentation of the U2 ordeal, who would want to mess with Negativland at this point?

The group, which includes Richard Lyons, David Wills, and Peter Conheim of Monopause, are careful to point out that not all of their work courts controversy to the extent that No Business or their 1997 statement on the cola wars, Dispepsi (Seeland), did. Death Sentences was an entirely instrumental electronic-noise album, and their series of Over the Edge releases is more radio theater than plunderphonic sound collage. Still, for those not intimately familiar with the group's timeline, there seems to be a funny chicken-or-egg question at work regarding much of Negativland's music. That is: Which came first – their desire to make music that just happens to violate copyright laws, or their desire to protest copyright laws by making music that violates them?

"You've got to remember how long we've been around," Hosler is quick to counter, speaking over the phone from his home in Asheville, NC, where he's lived for the past several years. "There were basically no lawsuits over copyright infringement in music in 1980. The word 'sampling' did not exist. All we were interested in doing was trying to make something that did not sound like anything we'd ever heard before."

Accidental or not, circumstances led the group to refine a thoughtful platform on copyright issues, which is thoroughly spelled out in "Two Relationships to a Cultural Public Domain," the 49-page booklet that comes with No Business. It argues that the current copyright laws are, above all, "technologically outdated" in this post-digital, post-Internet era. Not only that – they're inflexible in terms of differentiating between wholesale copying and "fragmentary appropriation in new work"; it's all theft under the current rules. Finally, strict copyrights make the concept of a working public domain, critical for the development of genuine "folk music," a legal impossibility.

That last point may seem like a stretch coming from the perennial satirists in Negativland. Regardless, they have a point. A career songwriter or jingle composer might formulate an interesting rebuttal, but Negativland's convincing essays put their sometimes obnoxious antics in a more purposeful, favorable light. Why, then, are they undermining their stance by including a title track that proclaims, "There's no business like stealing!"

"I bet most artists who reuse or transform old stuff into new stuff probably don't mind using the term 'stealing' themselves," Joyce responds. "I know I don't. As an artist, I consider it a cultural imperative to 'steal.' ... Luckily, nobody 'loses' anything when I do this." Joyce argues that copyright laws should be limited to whole-work counterfeiting and practically nothing else.

Ultimately, who cares about all this legal hairsplitting? On the surface, Negativland's crusade might seem narrow and self-serving. If it were simply a matter of the group fighting for their right – and the right of others like them – to keep making clever sound collages, perhaps it would be. Considered in the wider context of increasing privatization and the corporate takeover of culture, though, it acquires a different meaning. Take, for example, the recent documentary The Future of Food, which focuses on GMO giant Monsanto, which has taken up the practice of patenting seeds and then suing farmers who unwittingly wind up with the corporation's pesticide-resistant crops on their land. On Fair Use one of Negativland's sampled participants screams, "No one can copyright fish! They're a natural resource!" and the statement feels like a prescient commentary on this same issue.

Beyond belief

Negativland's members have plenty of other things on their minds these days besides intellectual property issues. Coinciding with their silver anniversary, this year looks to be one of their busiest. They're taking over a New York art gallery with a visual exhibit later in 2005, and they've got a DVD of short films on the way. They have no plans for a full-scale tour, but they have put together a new live show for select concert performances titled It's All in Your Head, which tackles the timeless (and timely) subject of religion. There's also the recent DVD release of the Negativland-centered 1995 documentary Sonic Outlaws (Other Cinema).

It's not hard to imagine the day when Culture Jamming 101 will be taught as a college elective, with students writing research papers that cite Helter Stupid, along with albums by fellow miscreants like Culturcide, in their footnotes. Already, the U2 ordeal commonly comes up in law school discussions of intellectual property. The once-novel aesthetic of fast-paced collage is now everywhere. In the wake of the increased popularity of hip-hop, turntablism, and MTV and the advent of the Internet, laptop DJs, and mashups, Negativland's cut-ups can't be seen as avant-garde. Even their particular brand of satirical, media-mocking humor has been absorbed by the advertising industry, and this steady absorption by the mainstream spells trouble for a group whose aesthetic relies heavily on poking fun at the establishment.

But there's still work to do. "A lot of [Negativland's music] doesn't have to do with intellectual property issues at all," Hosler concludes. "But it continues to set an example of, 'Hey, look, we are appropriating or stealing or whatever you want to call it, but look what we do: It's actually pretty uniquely ours.' I think Negativland's work sounds pretty much like Negativland, even though, ironically enough, it's made up of lots of things that we didn't make at all."

To purchase some of Negativland's music featured in this article, visit iTunes: