The first angle is an essay called "Two Relationships to a Cultural Public Domain". Even though it's fairly even-handed, it is essentially polemical in nature, lucidly outlining the cultural developments and opposing points of view that will be more obliquely addressed on the CD. The crux is that the internet has galvanized a drastic ideological polarization as to what constitutes the public domain. The mainstream record industry's position is a throwback to when cultural product was replicated via physical means, which spawned material artifacts of limited supply and calculable monetary value. The opposing position stems from the prominence of digital media, which eliminates the need for costly physical production and places the power of reproduction and dissemination in the hands of anyone with a computer. It states that the internet is public domain, a concept that's anathema to free market capitalism.
As opposed to the didactic nature of the booklet, the audio portion of No Business tends more toward arch satire of the ongoing debate over fair use in digital media, creating a précis of its contradictions and ideological schisms rather than advancing a particular thesis. Some pieces simply intend to display the artistic possibilities inherent in collage, and are more humorous than pedagogical: The title track recasts Ethel Merman's "There's No Business Like Show Business" as a tirade against entertainment-industry iniquity instead of a giddy celebration of it, and "Favorite Things" rearranges the Julie Andrews classic into an appreciation of the grotesque: "Wild brown girls tied up in warm strings/ Wild wild white girls that melt into nose cream/ These are a few of my favorite things." Other pieces delight in the absurd, like "Piece a Pie", a mid-century radio drama chopped up into some sort of hellish recursive time loop, like Groundhog Day in a diner. But the album's centerpiece must be "Downloading", a long and ominously weighted mash-up of anti-filesharing speeches, Disney's The Little Mermaid ("It won't cost much/ Just your voice!"), and other wildly disparate sources, which seems to intend to limn the urgency and complexity of the debate over filesharing more than to stake out a specific ideological position.
The third stage in this three-pronged statement is a whoopee cushion emblazoned with that infamous and iconic "\xA9", and perhaps it's this portion of No Business that states Negativland's stance on the issue most clearly: "THBBBBBBBBBT!"
