Negativland

Biography

Negativland, a group of self-professed musical/cultural terrorists, enjoyed fleeting but disabling celebrity in 1991 when they became embroiled in a legal tussle with U2 and US television presenter, Casey Kasem. Their U2 EP featured a parody of that band’s ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, and came in packaging that the band’s agents claimed looked ‘deceptively like a U2 record’. One of the mixes also included an unfortunate but real studio out-take from Kasem (‘The four-man band features Adam Clayton on bass, Larry Mullen on drums, Dave Evans - nicknamed the Edge on... This is bullshit. Nobody cares. These guys are from England and who gives a shit’). U2’s label and publisher relentlessly pursued the band, as did Kasem, leading to the near collapse of SST Records, their long-standing record label. Many castigated U2 for their passive role in attacking artistic expression, criticisms that reached a...

Read the Full Biography of Negativland