Negativland (page 2 of 4)

Tell me about your first experience with manipulation of the media at large.
We were working on pieces that coalesced around the idea of pop music as noise, noise pollution. That became the album Escape From Noise, and it took four years to make. By then, we were working with Don Joyce and every week we’d to collect new audio to funnel into Over the Edge, our weekly radio program, which is a live-mix, cut-up show.

That particular record had the track “Christianity Is Stupid” that lead to the first time we dealt with the media in terms of a hoax. By this time we had signed to the relatively well known label SST (Hüsker Dü, Minutmen, Black Flag, Meat Puppets).

Because the record was doing so well on college radio, we thought we should actually try to tour, but the tour fell apart financially. So, Richard, in a fit of his impish black humor, came up with this uh, idea. We would blame the cancellation of the tour on quadruple ax murders that he read had occurred in Rochester, Minnesota.

We thought: if we put out a press release through SST records, which had a somewhat respectable image, it’s going to reach a lot of people, and this is an interesting area of the media to play around in.

Were there any concerns about the repercussions?
No, it was kind of an experiment. Our assumptions were: A) The real reasons for cancelling the tour are boring. B) Let’s just see how far something like this will go; it’s easy to check the facts. We were sure people would figure it out. We couldn’t have known we were going to shelve the record we were working on and make a whole album about the results of this press release.

Nothing happened for a couple of months. Then it got written up in some fanzines. These got picked up by more main-stream magazines. There was a snowballing effect. BAM Magazine was instrumental in the story reaching a whole other level. We started having meetings as a group to decide how to deal with it, now that the media wanted to talk to us. Do we tell the truth? Do we lie? Do we try to be noncommittal? We decided to deny that it could be true, to make statements like, “This must be a hoax.” The experiment was to see how far it would go, just on the basis of one press release. We had decided to refuse to talk to anybody. But when KPIX News, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco, tracked me down and said they wanted to interview us…it was just too ridiculous not to do it. I told the guy, “We’re terrified to talk to you, this is looking really bad. These murders are awful and people think we’re just trying to make a joke out of it.”

They came to our studio that night. We denied it could be true and talked about the role media played in flaming these things. We pleaded with them not to sensationalize the story. Of course he promised us that he wouldn’t. They ran this totally sensationalized piece with bodies coming out of the house in body bags, comparing it to the Manson murders. There were teasers coming over the air all day saying, “Coming up, tonight at 11, local band implicated in murder.”

The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle called. Richard, who answered the phone, did this really brilliant thing. He said, “I won’t talk to you. Someone just threw a rock through our window.” That ended up as the lead part of the story; now we were being persecuted. The person who wrote the article wanted so much to believe the story was true, that they used an old interview with the sheriff of the county where the murders happened. They took a quote from him, out of context from a two month old article, and used it in the Chronicle in a way in which it seemed he was talking about our record. I couldn’t believe it when I saw that.

We were thinking, we’re hardly even trying here. What does this say about the professional spin-miesters, the government and corporate PR people who are putting out all kinds of stories, ruining careers, getting bills pushed through or stopped. To see how totally irresponsible and stupid the media were was very shocking. We had to tell the truth, because the truth is amazing. We decided to make a record about it (Helter Stupid).

I remember thinking, this story is so black. Although we are making some great points about the media, we are also gratuitously exploiting this horrible tragedy. I thought, this is going to stick with us for life. I was wrong about that, the next record we did was the U2 single.

Your book, Fair Use, is an amazing document of the intricacies and humor of the lawsuits and publicity that came out of the U2 single. How did you manage to combat all of the resources behind U2?
By the time we put out the U2 single, we had an understanding of the kinds of stories media went after. We thought, we’ve got to write a great manifesto press release. U2 is doing the Zoo TV tour where they’re doing the same thing that their record company is suing us for. We’re being connected to the World’s Biggest Rock Band and people are going to want to write about it. We better use this chance responsibly.

We had no resources, but ended up with SST’s press list. We occasionally also get help from mysterious sources. In this case a publicist for Sinead O’Connor called us up. This woman really hated U2 and wanted to help us. She sent us Sinead O’Connor’s press list for the entire Planet Earth. So suddenly I had Irish media addresses and names, and addresses for mainstream America, like People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Post. When the Post wrote about it, it hit the AP wire, then it went everywhere. A virus, which is a kind of Cyberpunk cliché, is a good metaphor for what we had on our hands.

Would you consider yourself a media prank band?
No. There are certainly a lot of prankish things we’ve done. We’ve turned Over the Edge into a Right Wing talk show and pretended there was a major earthquake destroying the Bay Area. We’ve done all kinds of phony things to draw in listeners and get them confused. But most of our time is actually spent making music.

Whenever anyone writes about what we do, the one thing that people almost never write about is the music we make and what it sounds like.

So much time has been dedicated to these issues by Negativland, I’m sure it makes people wonder what is your main area of interest...
The reason why we got into this in the first place is that we liked making sounds. These other ideas come along, and they’re huge, conceptually. They take over in people’s minds. The CD that comes in Fair Use, that wasn’t something that we whipped off while we were busy working on all our important copyright notions, that was an epic undertaking, one of the best things we’ve done. It’s interesting to see the power of certain ideas to supersede what’s actually going on.