| DJ SPOOKY THAT SUBLMINAL KID Interviewed by Peter McLennan I have seen the future of music and his name is DJ Spooky (aka Paul D Miller). Some old fogey once said something similar about Bruce Springsteen in Rolling Stone magazine about a million years ago, back in the golden age of the (thankfully now extinct) rock dinosaur. DJ Spooky is no purist; he sees no boundaries, only audio adventures that have yet to be explored. In short, he wants to fry your eardrums. I arrive for the interview at a flash city eaterie, and wait for the previous interviewee to finish up. We bowl up to Paul’s table, and straight off he notices my t-shirt. "Keith Haring, huh? He’s one of my favorite modern artists, along with Jean Michel Basquiat. I’m not so into people like Clemente, they’re a bit too European for me, y’know?" We talk art, and he checks out my shirt. It’s Haring’s famous drawing of a dog standing at the turntables, dj’ing. "I want to get me one of those. The dog, it’s a coyote, who are like, famous for being thieves, which in a way is quite appropriate as a dj." The man is deconstructing my t-shirt and I haven’t even sat down! Let's start at the beginning. How did you get into dj’ing? "I had a lot of records when I was a kid. My dad died when I was three and left me his record collection, and I just listened to it a lot. I was always really into checking out different stuff. I grew up in Washington DC, and you had Fugazi, who were then called Minor Threat, you had Troublefunk, and they all made it a point to play together, and all the punk kids would be there, the gogo and hip hop kids would be there, and the reggae kids, and they were all into the different stuff. It was a multicultural scene that I grew up in. I was really into the diversity around me. When I got to New York however, it was a very conservative scene, the rock set was here, and the hip hop set was over here, the techno set, and I just took a bulldozer and went over all the boundaries." Why did you switch from philosophy major to dj? "To me, a lot of what was going on with philosophy was a critique of contemporay society from the viewpoint of the roles people are playing. A lot of that was looking at the role that text plays in memory and so on. If you think about it, music and memory, that's how sampling is, it’s all just memory, the theatre of sound. So, to me, it was fascinating to see how on one hand you have theorists like Foucault and Derrida talking about deconstructing text, and then you’d press play on a Public Enemy record and hear the same thing. When their album A Nation Of Millions came out, there was all that ultra-collage, wild stuff happening, it was great. At the time I was saying to my philosophy professors ‘hey, you can look at KRS One, he has a song called My Philosophy’, but they didn’t get it, so I started a radio show called Dr. Seusses Eclectic Jungle, where I had records by theorists like Marshall Mcluhan and Noam Chomsky, and I was mixing that with Public Enemy and BDP. So, radio became a place for philosophy for me!" Listening to your album, it’s kind of like a collection of fragments, and you’ve bought them together, looking for the links. "Yeah, but it’s very coherent in a way. The album starts with a very classical burst, from a Haydn symphony The Creation, the first movement is called The Representation of Chaos, so I started my album with that, just as a joke. My album is kind of like a puzzle for people who know a lot about music. I sample a lot of obscure stuff. There’s this programme called Recycle, which changes sounds til they’re unrecognisable. Only three people I've met were able to deconstruct the album." Do you think you’re in danger of being too clever by doing that? "No, I just get a kick out of it. I’m not Puff Daddy, y’know! It’s for my own pleasure as an artist. You see, to me, music is a mosaic, everything’s a mix. Right now we’re hearing the vocals of this room, the sound, the music, the clatter of dishes, that’s why some of my favorite composers are the ones who are open to randomness, like John Cage, Sun Ra, or Ornette Coleman." Are you trying to educate people with what you’re doing? "Some people can walk away from it educated, some people might hear it and like the music, each person takes something differrent away from it. I was reading in the New York Times recently, they did this interview with the kids who went and shot up Columbine High (Denver, Colorado high school massacre) and the kids listed their musical influences. They said ‘we like Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Doctor Octogon, and DJ Spooky’. I was like ‘Holy shit!’ That really blew my mind; I have no idea what these kids are taking out of my music." Your work can seem quite intellectual, is passion important to your work? "Yeah, absolutely. Everything is thought. Passion is thought, see what I’m saying? You don’t think, you’re dead! I’m deeply passionate about what I’m doing, if I wasn’t I would’ve stopped a long time ago." What kind of reaction do you get to your music? "Some people love it, some people hate it. Most people dig it. I’ve gotten some really angry responses. It’s amazing, people are very passionate about defending their border turf. They’re just conservative, and in the US a lot of it is to do with race; I’m an Afro-American male who went to one of the best colleges in the country. That’s not the image people view of urban Afro-American culture. It’s breaking down a lot of stereotypes, that’s a pleasure as well. I think there’s room for a lot of different interpretations of the culture, it doesn’t need to be, wearing a baseball cap backwards or baggy pants to say something, y’know? But I like a lot of the music of the baseball cap and baggy pants scene, like Cypress Hill, Public Enemy, but there’s room for other narratives. My style is choppy and chaotic, it’s not conventional dance, it’s difficult music, y’know. I like the idea of playing what is high brow serious music, then also having some funk beats, cause usually people think difficult music has to be noisy or dissonant." Not true in this case, however. There’s some well known hip hop artists on your album, guys like Kool Keith, Killah Priest of Wu Tang Clan, is there anyone else you’d like to work with? "Oh, yeah, I’d realy love to do some stuff with Chuck D, and KRS One from BDP. I’m really into DJ Premier’s production. I’m doing some stuff with Afrika Bambaataa, he’s a really important old school legend; we’re doing a gig in Brazil, believe it or not (also on the bill are Grandmaster Flash and Soul Sonic Force). He’s making jungle tracks these days. When I get back from here, I’m doing a gig with Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and Yoko Ono. That’s going to be like weird noise shit, then I fly to LA a few days after that, and I’m doing a gig with Run DMC and Mixmaster Mike. These are all radically different people. Imagine Yoko Ono and Run DMC getting down!" What do you do to relax? "I don’t relax, I’m always working. Hobbies? Music is a hobby; it was meant to be a hobby that sprawled out of control! Making a living from it, it’s actually a lot of extra stress. But music is like such a knucklehead scene; the more pop stars I meet, the more I go ‘oh, man!’ Some of the worst people I’ve met are, Tricky, awful person. There’s a lot of those people, big hip hop ego star vibe. To me, it’s a hobby, I get a kick out of it, it’s fun. They take that rock star stuff way too serious. I’m very mellow, I try and be chill and do my thing. It’s a fascinating thing to see, people feel like that ‘there’s only one way to do pop music, man, you’ve got to have a big ego and be like this’, and I’m like, there’s so many ways to do stuff. That’s why I like someone like Thurston Moore, or Sun Ra, or My Bloody Valentine. Kevin Sheilds (of that band) did a track with me for the album, but there’s only 74 minutes on a cd, and I didn’t want to do a double cd." What have you been listening to lately? " A lot of Brazilian stuff, there’s a great album called African Funk that just came out, and these compilations called 100% Dynamite and 200% Dynamite, those are slamming. Alec Empire’s noise jungle stuff I’m into. I also listen to a lot of classical, when I want to chill, Eric Satie, Ravel. Miles Davis Bitches Brew album. My top four all time influences are John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and Afrika Bambaataa. I really like the way that each of them broke down the boundares of their own zone". Do yourself a favour; shatter some of your own musical horizons and check out DJ Spooky’s album Riddum Warfare. Be brave, sonic warriors! DJ Spooky's
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