In 1988 the Bay Area experimental band Negativland issued a bogus press release suggesting a link between their song “Christianity Is Stupid” and a set of gruesome ax murders in Minnesota. Poking fun at the way the media rarely checks sources, the hoax snowballed into a nationally reported story. Such “culture jamming” is a common interest of all the people in Craig Baldwin’s film Sonic Outlaws, which profiles Negativland and such like-minded artists as John Oswald, the Tape-Beatles, the Barbie Liberation Organization, and Emergency Broadcast Network.
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In one of the most amusing scenes Negativland’s Mark Hosler explains off-camera how Island Records crushed his band. On-screen we see an old B-movie featuring Beau Bridges as a giant who stomps around town terrifying citizens. Negativland’s legal hassles over their hilarious parody of the U2 hit “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” form the center of discussion in this spirited documentary, which examines the issues of intellectual property, fair use, and culture jamming in the arts.
The California filmmaker has long been involved in recontextualizing found imagery in mail art, zines, and billboards, but after studying with noted experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner, he focused his energies on film collage. A few years ago Baldwin met Negativland’s Don Joyce while attending a panel discussion on public versus private information, sponsored by the San Francisco chapter of the National Writers Union. The men discovered they shared common ground as collage artists. “Their [Negativland’s] ideas were so rich above and beyond their manifesto,” says Baldwin. “The whole thing was tragic, comic, and ironic–I had a good story and I didn’t need a scriptwriter for it.”
