Negativland is a band surrounded by myth, lies and rumors. Some say that the band is on the verge of calling it quits in the face of a class action suit from 47 concert goers in Cleveland claiming to have suffered irreparable mental trauma at a Negativland gig. Others explain the fact that no member of the group has ever been seen shirtless as proof of the band's rumored court settlement with pop rockers U2, in which Negativland avoided financial ruin by having the faces of U2 band members tattooed across their chests, Mount Rushmore style. It has long been rumored that the groups lead singer is highly germ phobic, and that his vocals are piped through a holographic projection while he remains quarantined inside a plastic bubble when the band plays live.

As with much in our highly depersonalized world of light speed information transfer and media created realities, its difficult to sort fact from grisly fiction when considering the saga of the experimental art/music/noise collective known as Negativland. Even a visit to their web site (www.negativland.com) does little to confirm or deny the veracity of these rumors, telling us only that "The only truth you can be sure of is that nothing characterizes our over-informationalised society more than our collective inability to personally verify anything." All that I could verify is this:

• Negativland is on tour, possibly their last, aptly called their True or False tour.
  
• Should they manage to keep from disintegrating in the face of a tour that has all the hallmarks of a rolling disaster, they will be playing Denver on May Twentieth.

Anything else not yet confirmed must be considered hearsay, and should be expunged from the collective memory. In fact, forget everything that I've written up to now. The Negativland True or False tour is chugging along smoothly, and the band is playing to packed houses in town after town. Rumors of imploding tour vans, collapsing sets and plummeting movie projectors turning into fragmentary explosives shearing off the ears of over enthusiastic fans are probably all lies. And if they were true, they would only serve to add to N-lands overall reputation as true, balls to the wall sonic outlaws.

The best way to describe Negativland's music: American media, entertainment and advertising is crammed into a high speed industrial blender set on "frappe" - the resulting product is then poured into a blunderbuss, which is then fired into your brain. The results have not always been pretty, but N-land has never been accused of being boring. Since their first release in 1980, Negativland has pushed the envelope with sonic collage and sound barrage, taking the listener on a trip through the steaming entrails of American popular media culture.

I first heard Negativland in 1988, when I was working as a Disc Jockey for a low powered college station in Upstate New York. I had a show called "Sonic Attack, and my core group of listeners consisted of a few Canadian drunks and a bunch of petty criminals incarcerated at the Albion medium security correctional facility. One night I played a track called "Christianity is Stupid" off Negativland's fourth album, "Escape from Noise". The track had just finished when I received a menacing call from the facility.

"You little fuck… I'm getting out in 3 weeks. I'll be waiting for you outside of the studio with a fucking baseball bat."

Something had struck a powerful chord among the inmates, and to this day I believe that only my being fired from the station three days later saved me from a savage beating. . Negativland holds an aural mirror up to American culture, a mirror that has been smashed into fragments and glued back together, producing a distorted reflection. The results are often disturbing, but the initiated know better than to turn away.

I tried to get in touch with Negativland to conduct an interview for this article, but wound up playing electronic tag with guitarist Mark Hosler. He left a message on my answering machine from somewhere on the road, telling me that I should tell my readers that the show would be a celebration of the group's first two decades of musical observations and sticky lawsuits with a millennial concert lasting over two and a half hours. "Its going to be completely over-stimulating," he promised me, "music, film collage, puppetry and…."

Then there was a horrible screeching sound, and the phone cut off abruptly. All subsequent attempts to reach the group have met in failure. Still, I have faith that the band that has refused to knuckle under in their endless legal battles over copyright infringement with U2 and Casey Kasem will not let something as insignificant as exploding tour vans and roadie sabotage stop them from their commitment of playing the mile high city. And I will be there too, staring down the barrel of Negativland's media canon. If there is no escape from noise, then we must stare it down without flinching.

By Joshua Samuel Brown
Copyright 2000

Originally published in The Boulder Weekly

Background image lifted from www.negativland.com