Kill Bono

Dan Hoffman Arizona Daily Wildcat Mark Hosler speaks about the origins of his musical group Negativland, Friday afternoon. His speech, sponsored by the media arts department, concentrated on copyright law, specifically Negativland's legal battles with U2, Island Records and Casey Kassem.

Hosler is one of the founding members of Negativland, a group he describes as making "attention deficit disorder music." The group makes highly edited collages of sound from radio and television broadcasts, musical recordings, power tools and other noises of modernity.

Hosler spoke to about 50 people Friday afternoon at a colloquium sponsored by the University of Arizona's department of media arts.

"I was a 17-year-old kid who thought it was fun to record my mother baking in the kitchen, and take the noises of pots and pans and mix it in with short-wave radio noises and out-of-tune guitars," Hosler said.

In 1991, Negativland was sued by Island Records for copyright infringement for a parody of a U2 song.

Since then, the band has been at the forefront of a public battle over the fair use of copyrighted material.

Now, with a new compact disc made largely of sounds hijacked from Pepsi commercials, Negativland is picking another fight for the artistic right to recontextualize sounds and images in the public domain.

Prior to the Island suit, Hosler said the group thought very little about what they were doing. They were simply gathering and mixing up sounds from the suburban and media landscape around them, he said.

"That lawsuit is the reason I'm here today because so many ironic and bizarre events came out of it," Hosler said.

At a Negativland performance in Portland, Ore., in 1989, a kid gave the band a cassette tape, Hosler said.

The tape was a collection of outtakes from "Casey Kassem's American Top 40" radio show.

In the tapes, Kassem becomes foul-mouthed and nasty while introducing the pop-rock band U2 and after mangling a listener's dedication to a deceased dog.

The tape was so funny, Hosler said, that the band was inspired to use it to make a record.

In 1991, it released a single called "U2/Negativland," Hosler said.

The record was a parody of the U2 song, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for," featuring a nasal, inane-sounding recitation of the song's lyrics mixed with the Kassem outtakes and various recorded bits of people looking for things.

The record was "sued out of existence," by Island Records, U2's record label and Kassem, Hosler said. A court ordered the recall and destruction of all copies of the recording based on a violation of copyright law, he said.

"We essentially were sued for the entire way we were doing things since I was a kid.

"This thing of having Island Records come down and squashing us with their big corporate thumb and vaporizing our album off the face of the earth, it politicized us," Hosler said.

Negativland began thinking about corporate power and the way celebrities are used in advertising. They thought it would be fun to pick one corporation or product and make a recording that represented the public advertising of that product, he said.

Looking through their extensive archives of found sound recorded over nearly 20 years, Hosler said the group's members discovered they had a preponderance of recordings of Pepsi commercials and people talking about Pepsi. This material became the theme of their next album.

"The whole album is meant to viscerally simulate the psychic bombardment we get every day from advertising and the media," Hosler said.

"It is a creative opposition to those companies that shoved their advertising and their logo down my throat and I've chewed it up and spit it back out," he said.

Hosler called media saturation of commercial products "psychic carpet bombing."

"On your campus you have entire rooms sponsored by corporations. Private corporations are encroaching in every area of public life," Hosler said.

"It's really bizarre that there are so many people walking around wearing a Nike swoosh, paying money to advertise a company and thinking it's just a hip and fun fashion statement," he said. "It's the most incredible head fuck I can imagine."

It took Negitivland three years to complete their latest album, released two months ago, and titled Dispepsi, though the letters of the title were scrambled to avoid trademark infringement, Hosler said.

The 13 tracks on the CD all have something to do with Pepsi, with celebrity voices from endorsements throughout, he said.

A track Hosler played for the audience echoed with samples of Ricardo Montelban introducing himself in what became the chorus of a song zigzagging with scrambles of voices including Michael J. Fox, Pepsi slogans, soda jingles and found noise.

Hosler said he doesn't feel the use of the commercial material violates any sort of copyright laws because the noise is simply a part of the public landscape, available to anyone's reaction.

"Nobody asked me if they could put a billboard advertising Pepsi on the street, so I don't feel I have to ask them if I want to scramble it up, and put it back out there," he said.