The Story of the band Negativland the their legal entanglements with irish rockers U2. Negativland would expose U2 as hypocrites over their usage of copyright materials on their Zoo TV Tour.

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There was another alternative rock band who had a huge release that year was U2 with their album Achtung Baby. It was one of the most highly anticipated albums of the year coming out on November 18th, 1991. But some U2 fans and record stores, thought U2 had dropped the album earlier in the year. But as it turned out, one band beat U2 to the punch and in doing so created a legal nightmare for themselves. As Wired Magazine put it in 1995 WHAT HAPPENS WHEN your art consists of sampling other people's work? If your name is Negativland, you get your ass sued by U2. This is a story about the big guys bullying and fighting the little guys and then having egg on their face. Stay tuned for the full story.
This story revolves around the band U2, and another band, an obscure experimental group named Negativeland whose origins dated back to the late 70’s. Negativland were notorious for being staunch advocates of fair use doctrine, which basically allows you to take someone else’s copyrighted work and transform it in some way whether it’s sampling music, parody, criticism or providing education. Now keep in mind there is no law called fair use, rather it’s a defense used in court. And while Negativland released many albums in their career it would be one release in particular that caught the attention of U2 and resulted in an expensive legal battle. By 1987 Negativland had built up a following when they released their album escape from noise. 4 years later they were given a tape of radio personality Casey Kasem who was best known for hosting America’s top 40 radio program. The tape consisted of Kasem bearting his engineer by yelling profanities at him and disparaging the Irish Band U2. Now keep in mind this was before the days of the internet, so tapes like this were rare. The members of Negativland thought they should do something with the Casey Kasim tapes and mix in U2’s music. And Negativland up to this point in their career had never sold more than 15,000 copies on any of their prior releases. Given how big U2 was, they surely would attract more attention this time around. Negativlnad Member Don Joyce recalled
"The bulk of appropriated material on our earlier releases was from fairly obscure stuff, and U2 marked the first time we had ever taken on pop music. It wasn't even something that attracted us, but it just became appropriate because we got these Casey Kasem tapes mentioning U2. It's nothing we'd have chosen to do otherwise" he'd remember
Negativland would end up putting out a single three months ahead of Achtung baby in August of 1991 on it’s label SST Records. The cover as you can see here had the word U2 in large letter with a U-2 spyplane and the band’s name in small letters.
The U2 single would feature parodies of the Irish Band's well known 1987 song I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For including kazoos and extensive sampling of the original track. It would also be mixed with disc jockey Casey Kasem's rant I talked about earlier.

U2 for their part had two massive releases towards the end of the 80’s with 1987s The Joshua Tree and 1988’s Rattle and Hum. Fans were eagerly anticipating what the band had in store to kick off the 90’s. Here’s Mark Hossler of Negativland explaining what happened after the band released their infamous U2 single. So it ended up turning into a single so side 1 was a cover version of the U2 song I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. We had a sort of dramatic reading of the lyrics by a member of the group ah David also known as the weatherman who butchered Bono's lyrics and altered them. Now when you do a cover version of a song you don't have to get permission, but if you alter the lyrics you gotta get permission so we did that. We used a 30 second chunk of the U2 song the beginning intro of course didn't clear that. There's bad words in this and they didn't like that either, but the final thing that brought it to the attention of Island Records that really made them decide to nail our asses was that we ended up making the record look like this. And we thought, this would be funny. It's confusing it looks like a new album from U2 that's called Negativland and and we liked the idea that you put this in a record store and people are confused we liked creating at the moment of consumption you're not quite sure