Trivia / Negativland

• Approval of God: U2 themselves approved of Negativland's U2 EP, and were understandably pissed when their label sued the group without their knowledge; by the time they found out about the lawsuit, it was too late to stop it.
• Creator's Oddball: Death Sentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak is Negativland's instrumental album. It is a noise album with no dialogue whatsoever that was intended to be listened to whilst reading the book of the same name.
• DVD Commentary: Our Favorite Things doesn't have any for its' main course - aside from a completely separate extra, "Gimme Miranda", in which a young girl reacts to (or, more accurately, narrates what's going on the screen) the "Gimme the Mermaid" music video. Then there's the "At Home With The Weatherman" extra that has not one, but two commentary tracks!
• Feelies: A Big 10-8 Place came with a bag of lawn clippings. They later took this to another level with pre-ordered copies of Over The Edge Vol 9: The Chopping Channel which came with two bags: one containing an original radio cart made by late member Don Joyce, the other containing a portion of his ashes. Here's a promotional video showing Jon Leidecker as "Dave" spooning Don's ashes into plastic bags.^note "This is not a hoax. We've decided to take the Chopping Channel concept to its logical conclusion by 'productizing' an actual band member. It is also a celebration of the degree to which no idea in art was ever off-limits to Don, and offers a literal piece of him, and of his audio art, for the listener to repurpose and reuse. We are pretty sure he would have wanted it this way." And from Mark Hosler in an interview with Clrvynt's Dan Weiss in December 2016: "What he was concerned about was that Negativland kept going. That’s a conversation we had with him very directly. It was a weird one to have, but given that he was a very important part of the brain trust, we asked him, "When you're gone, what should we do?" He was the most fully committed human to his art practice of anyone we've ever known. I always felt like a flake by comparison. He lived it, he breathed it."
• He Also Did: A few, but most notable are solo projects Wobbly and Jet Black Hair People, side projects Sagan, Lyon In Winter, and The Freddy McGuire show, and supergroups Neung Phak (aka Mono Pause) and Malcolm Mooney And The Tenth Planet.
  • Don Joyce started as a visual artist, with a master's degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. He was also an essayist whose articles on consumer culture and the legal ramifications of intellectual property ownership used to run in underground zines and industry-related publications. Fans are probably most familiar with his Crosley Bendix cultural reviews, but listeners tuning in to Over the Edge often found themselves listening to a rant on compact discs or an observation on UFOs and Christmas.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The "U2" single, which featured unauthorized sampling of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", and came in a sleeve which had "U2" in huge letters and "Negativland" in smaller letters underneath. U2's record label Island Records were not best pleased and tried to sue Negativland and SST Records for (supposedly) attempting to pass off the release as a U2 album. Even after Island backed down (it took a while), the single still couldn't be legally issued because of ongoing objections from Casey Kasem, whose outtakes had also been sampled on the disc. The tracks were eventually made available for free download after Kasem's death.
• Streisand Effect: The "U2" single would probably have remained little-known but for Island Records attempting to sue Negativland and SST. Although the record itself ended up in limbo for years, not only did Negativland get a lot of free publicity out of it, but Island came out of it looking so bad that nobody's seriously tried to sue Negativland since.
• What Could Have Been: In an interview Mark said the group was going to do an album about UFO's, but they ultimately scrapped the idea. There are plenty of Over The Edge episodes about UFO's though! Look for the "Another UFO" series on the Over The Edge Internet Archive collection.

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