POP MUSIC REVIEW : Negativland’s U2 Obsession

LOS ANGELES —  In his memoir “U & I,” author Nicholson Baker writes obsessively, at book length, about his relationship with novelist John Updike, their intellectual confluence, the space Updike takes up in Baker’s life . . . except there is no relationship--Updike doesn’t know that Baker exists, and Baker, in fact, has barely read Updike’s work.

The Bay Area electronic ensemble Negativland has lately been working out a similar obsession--in its case, with the band U2--and its long, cerebral, U2-soaked multimedia extravaganza at the Roxy earlier this week was a veritable “U2 & I.”

Like Milli Vanilli or 2 Live Crew, the deeply underground Negativland may be more famous for its litigation than for its music, and its legal troubles--stemming from a copyright-infringement suit against the band by U2--have stripped the band of its label, its money and apparently most of its copyrights. Negativland, PiL, Public Enemy--pop artists concerned with media manipulation eventually become concerned mostly with the media that gather around themselves.

These guys are very inside, and their cut ‘n’ paste media-collage set pieces included a salute to the U2 airplane, the “U2” single that caused all the bother, a televised talking head scatting on U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” . . . and a threatening phone call from the head of their former label, a onetime member of Black Flag, sliced and diced and segueing into Black Flag’s lyric “Gimme gimme gimme/Gimme some more.” It doesn’t get any more self-involved than this.

But while Negativland (which also played Thursday at Bogart’s in Long Beach) occasionally descended into some incoherent cyberpunk vision of stoned-hippie comedy ca. 1972, the set was as compelling as first-rate performance art.