POP MUSIC REVIEW : Negativland’s Obsession

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 on Monday 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.

They’re inside, these guys, 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 plays tonight at the Belly Up in Solana Beach and 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.