''No Business'' is the tenth

album An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm records co ...

by the

sound collage In music, montage (literally "putting together") or sound collage ("gluing together") is a technique where newly branded sound objects or compositions, including songs, are created from collage, also known as montage. This is often done throu ...

band Band or BAND may refer to: Places *Bánd, a village in Hungary *Band, Iran, a village in Urmia County, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran * Band, Mureș, a commune in Romania *Band-e Majid Khan, a village in Bukan County, West Azerbaijan Province, I ...

Negativland Negativland is an American experimental music band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. They took their name from a Neu! track, while their record label (Seeland Records) is named after another Neu! track. The co ...

. While the songs encompass a variety of topics, the overarching theme of the album is

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

issues, especially those pertaining to

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...

. Although the title track and especially the track "Downloading" are the only ones that explicitly relate to this topic, the rest of the album can technically be considered so, because they consist entirely of samples, unlike Negativland's other albums.

History

The album is especially unique in Negativland's body of work because it is their first to not contain any original sounds by Negativland, but use exclusively "stolen" sound. It does not come in a regular-sized CD case. Instead, it comes in a flip-open package about the size of a book covered with images of copyrighted characters (again referencing copyright issues.) The package contains the CD and two other items: ''Two Relationships to a Cultural Public Domain'', a 49-page

essay An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal a ...

book A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physi ...

pertaining to copyright law; and a

yellow Yellow is the color between green and orange on the spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a dominant wavelength of roughly 575585 nm. It is a primary color in subtractive color systems, used in painting or color printing. In the ...

whoopie cushion with a

black Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white ...

copyright symbol The copyright symbol, or copyright sign, (a circled capital letter C for copyright), is the symbol used in copyright notices for works other than sound recordings. 17 U.S.C. The use of the symbol is described by the Universal Copyright Conv ...

on it, referencing the band's motto-of-sorts "N©!". The CD itself also contains a bonus

music video A music video is a video of variable duration, that integrates a music song or a music album with imagery that is produced for promotional or musical artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a music marketing device ...

for an earlier track, "Gimme the Mermaid", which first appeared on '' Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2''. The surreal video was created by then-

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

animator

Tim Maloney Tim Maloney is an American filmmaker and animator who has made films for the band Negativland, the Walt Disney Company, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is the creator of Cat-Head Theatre, which is included in the DVD compilation ...

using his company's equipment during after-hours, and is the first-ever music video for a Negativland cut. One can load the CD on a computer and check its contents to find the video. The audio tapes used to create the song "God Bull" on this album (from

Disneyland Disneyland is a theme park in Anaheim, California. Opened in 1955, it was the first theme park opened by The Walt Disney Company and the only one designed and constructed under the direct supervision of Walt Disney. Disney initially envision ...

's "

Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln ''Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln'' is a stage show featuring an Audio-Animatronic representation of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, best known for being presented at Disneyland since 1965. It was originally showcased as the prime feature of t ...

" attraction, one of many sets of tapes acquired from a former employee) would later inspire the animatronic Abraham Lincoln in the Negativlandland exhibit, opened in September 2005, in Manhattan's Gigantic Artspace gallery. The audio used in the Lincoln statue, in contrast, comes from blooper tapes. The sound engineer telling Lincoln's voice actor what to do is left untouched, but Lincoln's own voice is edited into madness, conveying the image of a robot on the verge of breaking down. The songs "Favorite Things" and "No Business" both had music videos made and released on the DVD '' Our Favorite Things'' in October 2007, along with Negativland's other "hits".

Track listing

#"Old Is New" – 1:19 #"No Business" – 4:13 #"Downloading" – 9:51 #"Favorite Things" – 1:58 #"God Bull" – 4:59 #"Keep Rollin'" – 3:12 #"Piece A Pie" – 8:40 #"New Is Old" – 1:32 #"No Business Again" – 0:36 Video (available on CD): "Gimme The Mermaid" 4:42

References

External links

''No Business'' on NegativWorldWideWebland
— "No Business" and "Downloading" available as sample tracks * ''No Business'' at Allmusic {{Authority control 2005 albums Negativland albums