[Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part story.]
Over the course of three decades, Negativland have earned the badge of honor bestowed by the title of the 1995 documentary that examined their work—Sonic Outlaws. Using a mix of artfully edited sound samples from every corner of American culture, rock beats and a massive payload of satire, the group has skewered everything from media sensationalism to product placement to gun mania to religious hypocrisy, and a lot more. Outside of their core fanbase, they are probably best known for their pranks, such as one in which they basically created their own urban legend by issuing a press release denying a connection between Minnesota teen ax murderer David Brom and Negativland’s song “Christianity is Stupid.” Many media outlets rushed to report on the story, failing to do even the most basic reporting that would have revealed no connection was ever suggested by anyone in the first place. The furor around that prank became the basis for their subsequent album, Helter Stupid. Even more famously, they were sued by U2’s record label over their next EP, for, among over things, putting the title (“U2”) in huge typeface on the cover, with “Negativland” in small print underneath—a deliberate attempt, Island claimed, to mislead U2 fans (they never heard of a record-store return policy?).
The core of the group is Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, Richard Lyons, Peter Conheim and David Wills, a.k.a. “The Weatherman.” They come to the Crepe Place in Santa Cruz on Feb. 26 for a twisted take on their “greatest hits”—incredibly, the first tour on which they’ve actually played the songs from their records. In this second part of my interview with Hosler, he talks about the band’s past work.
SANTA CRUZ WEEKLY: It’s interesting how well your records have held up. You seem to have avoided trends and fads both musically and in your cultural references. Which is funny, because a lot of these records seemed “timely” when they came out, but now they have a sort of timeless quality to them.
MARK HOSLER: When we had the idea of making a whole record that was the ultimate product placement record, which ultimately became Dispepsi, we knew it was a strong idea, but we also thought, ‘Oh my god, to make this into a really good, complex, layered, interesting record that you can listen to for 45 minutes, this is going to take us the next three years.’ It’s not like we’re just gonna put something out to piss off Pepsi and stir shit up. Every work we make, we work on it obsessively for years, cause we’re trying to make something that holds up over time. In our minds, our goal—whether we succeed or not, I don’t know—but our goal on every project is to make something that you can listen to 20 years later and still say, “This is interesting.”
But who even thinks of these things? Where does the idea come from for a song like “The Playboy Channel”?
Well, that track is attributable to the amazing brain of David Wills [best known to fans as “The Weatherman”]. He’s not like any human being I know on the Planet Earth. He just has a very, very, very unique—let’s put it that way—perspective on things. The Playboy Channel was something that he would talk about, because for 25 years David was a cable TV installer. He was describing what he does. That’s just something David liked to talk about, and we ended up saying “David, could you just talk about that into a microphone? This could be a good piece.” So that existed as a vocal track, and the music came later, I think. In fact, the music was carefully edited to conform to the voice tape, as opposed to the other way around, where sometimes we’ll carefully edit the voice to conform to the music. There’s never any one way we work. Sometimes a track starts because of a piece of a music. It may start because of a found tape. It maybe starts because of a weird noise. It may start because of an intentional thing, it may start because of an accident. I know that whenever I’m in the studio and I make a mistake, I always sit with it and say, “Let’s give that a listen, because maybe the mistake is more interesting than what I was trying to do consciously.”
The Weatherman’s most famous delivery is probably reading the words to ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ on the ‘U2’ single.
When we did the “U2” single, I knew that all we had to do was hand him Bono’s lyrics. We just said, “Read these lyrics, and anything else that comes to mind while you’re reading them, just say it.” That’s how David works best—you can’t direct him too much. You just have to let him go. But he still needs editing, so when we did David’s vocal track for “U2,” he’s reading Bono’s lyrics, he’s riffing on them and altering them in ways that we think are hysterically funny and brilliant. In fact, I remember that when we recorded it, our studio doesn’t have a separate booth for vocal stuff, and as he was reading the lyrics, it was so funny in the moment that I had to duck down under the mixing table and pinch my nose and cover my mouth with my hands because I thought “My god, if I burst out laughing, I’m going to ruin this take, and this is gold!” ’Cause remember, we’re fans of each other’s ideas, right? We all contribute totally weird, different things to what we do. Richard, Peter, Don, David, me—we will come up with ideas that no one else in the group would come up with. That was one of those moments, where it was just, “Oh my god, he’s on fire!” He did three takes, each one different. Then what we did was spend weeks carefully sifting through the three takes, and we made this sort of perfect edit of all the best, funniest bits. You get this spontaneous, loose feeling, which I think is great, but then you hone in on it, and rein it in a bit by editing.
You’re usually working with cut-up and collage techniques. How much do the ‘found’ recordings shape the songs and themes on any given record?
Generally—90 percent of the time—we’re being inspired by what we find. So it’s not “oh, let’s make a record about this, and look for stuff that fits the topic.” No, it’s that you find something. A classic example is “Christianity Is Stupid,” where that track exists because we found that record with the voice that we used. Or the “U2” single; that track exists because we were given—by a fan, at a show, on cassette—these outtakes of Casey Kasem. This was of course pre-Internet, when this stuff was hard to find. We just loved it so much that we were inspired to build an entire record around it. In fact, it brings up for me an interesting thing I’ve been thinking about lately, which is that there’s an aspect to our work where we are all, to some degree, archivists. And we collect all this strange detritus that we find in our culture, that we take both horror and delight in. And in our work, one of the things we get to do is share it with you. I think that whole “U2” record works as a thing, as a complete work, but it is also sharing with you this really cool, weird thing we found that nobody really had. That was then. Now, the whole damn Internet is spam, porn and sharing cat videos. It really struck me recently that the whole act of being an archivist and sharing weird stuff, to some degree our thunder has been stolen from us. Everyone gets to do it now.
Part of what’s fascinating for fans about seeing you live is that for so long, you guys almost had this cloak of anonymity. Your pictures weren’t on the records, and there was no information about how they were done.
Well, that’s still true. In fact, I think that will always be true. We’ve never been shy about chatting with people. But we just think that in the actual thing we put out into the world, we’re only going to play the game of being a “band” to a certain degree. Then we say “no, we’re not playing that game. We’re not going to show you who we are, and try to be stars.” It projects something different, I think, to people who hear our work: that what we’re interested in is the work. And if you want to dig more, you can. We’re not being secretive, we’re not like the Residents, where we’re actually hiding who we are. I think it actually all started when we were doing the cover design for Helter Stupid in 1989. We finished the cover design and we looked at it and said, “Oh, we forgot to say who we are, and who did what, anywhere on the record.” I said, “Actually, I don’t really care, does anyone care?” And no one cared. From then on, it just became our thing.
