“They’re crushed like insects”: How Negativland made a chaotic mockery of U2
Bands and artists feuding in public has always been part and parcel of the music industry.
Simon and Garfunkel took the mick out of Bob Dylan, who took aim at The Beatles, then John Lennon took aim at Paul McCartney, who called Oasis “derivative” after an allegedly high Noel Gallagher told MTV that his band’s first two albums were better than The Beatles.
Now, it almost seems like everyone’s gone vegan, apart from Kendrick Lamar and Drake keeping the flame alive; there don’t seem to be as many feuds. If we look back to 1991, we find a conflict that wasn’t just a war of words, but a high-stakes collision between corporate monoliths and underground subversion.
The provocateurs in question were Negativland, a California-based experimental collective that specialised in ‘culture jamming’, a form of artistic warfare that involved hijacking mass media to subvert its own messages, and their weapon of choice was an EP, simply titled U2.
The cover featured a massive Lockheed U-2 spy plane, a cheeky nod that doubled as a tactical trap for unsuspecting fans looking for the latest from the Irish icons. Inside, however, was a sonic middle finger: the lead track was a kazoo-smeared, sample-heavy parody of ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ built around one of the most infamous ‘hot mic’ moments in broadcasting history in the form of a profane rant by DJ Casey Kasem.
Captured by engineers and passed around like a forbidden relic for years, the recording caught the normally polished Kasem losing his mind during a frustrating taping session. Between curses, Kasem struggled to introduce the band, eventually snapping, “These guys are from England and who gives a shit?” U2, of course, being from Ireland.
The reaction from the U2 camp was anything but humorous. Island Records descended on the small group with the weight of a sledgehammer. Citing copyright and trademark infringement, they sued Negativland for over $100,000 in legal fees, a sum, as observers noted, that was more than the experimental outfit would likely see in a lifetime. The EP was pulled from the shelves and ordered to be destroyed.
The real sting for Negativeland, however, lay in the blatant hypocrisy of the era. While U2’s lawyers were crushing Negativland like bugs, the band was touring the world with Zoo TV, a multi-million dollar spectacle defined by its use of live satellite feeds and unauthorised media samples. This irony wasn’t lost on Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, who laid out the double standard when speaking to Huh magazine in 1996: “The joke of it all is that U2 went on tour with that Zoo TV, that stupid thing, and they were sampling live satellite feeds…where people paid to see a show. So for them it’s cool and subversive, but if anyone does it with their stuff, woah, they’re crushed like insects.”
The irony only deepened decades later. In 2014, the band that once sued a small collective for ‘forcing’ an unauthorised EP into record stores, when they famously forced their own album, Songs of Innocence, into the private iTunes libraries of 500 million people without their consent, though they were never slapped with a lawsuit.
Negativland’s chaotic mockery proved that while poking fun and being subversive is great, you’d better make sure you can afford the lawyers to back it up. Decades later, the U2 EP remains a legendary artefact, a reminder of the time a group of kazoos and a leaked rant briefly made the biggest band in the world look like “that stupid thing”.
