Despite his subtitle, "that Subliminal Kid" holds thoughts which are quite conscious between his headphones. On November 30th, 1998 Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, lectured to a full classroom of Harvard students and faculty. Paul paused to demonstrate concepts with a short film by Emergency Broadcast Network, and of course he also had some points to illustrate with his turntables. In a stroke of generosity, he passed out handmade, hand-tagged mixtapes to the 60 or so present. The mix blends noise, rock, rap, dancehall, jungle, found sounds and at least one track from his own recent release, Riddim Warfare. The tape's feel ranges from distinctly funky to, well, challenging.
The 28-year-old conceptual artist studied philosophy and French literature at Bowdoin, and this focus shows in both his art and his ideas about performance. In addition to spinning at clubs and at his own musical events, Paul scored the 1998 film Slam and has collaborated with other artists on gallery installations in the US, South America and Europe. His writing addresses issues of art and performance. His lecture touched on sampling, performance art and creative multiculturalism.
DJ Spooky: When we look at art we see how cultures become cross-fertilized. In the US there are many cultures, North/South American, African, Asian...The US has the widest variety of cultures in the smallest geographic region in the history of human civilization. So when you have access to the recordings of all these diverse cultures, continuous access to them, that's when things get really interesting. With collage, anything goes, anything can be mixed and transformed. Art is a reflection of culture, and to me music is our social reflection.
There was an artist named Joseph Beuys who was working in the 60's and 70's who did what he called "Happenings," conceptual art events where the work of art was the interaction of human beings within a space. For example, he had a room called the Velvet Room, where people would go and they'd say, "What's up? Where's the art? What's happening? There's nothing on the wall here!" (It was just) how people would look at each other and think, which was a pretty deep situation.
Then of course we had post-Warhol repetition of visual images. We're now in 1998, where anything goes, digital media, video, turntables, sound samples, you name it. To me, a lot of what we're seeing is continual textual quotation.
At this point DJ Spooky showed a short video piece by Emergency Broadcast Network. The piece utilized video FBI warnings, nature footage, Muzak, canned TV announcer voice-overs, movie clips, propaganda, news footage, arms training videos, and advertisements. Beginning on a note of consummate blandness, the film becomes more and more a full on visual/audio assault, culminating in an intense drum and bass noise/image extravaganza.
EBN manipulates images just much, and as fluidly, as I manipulate sound. They could sample anything on TV, but they always have a strange political subtext to what they do...it deals with censorship, control of media imagery, the distribution of information...they're using sampling to critique actual social conditions.
I'll do a mix to highlight different styles of scratching. Holds up record sleeves. I have works from John Cage, Joseph Beuys, different mechanical pianos, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis... you'll hear them all mixed and collaged. It's always human interaction- gesture, movement, inscription, sound. These are issues that performance art has been dealing with for the past 30, maybe even 60 years.
One thing I find amazing in the last 20 years is how technology has really caught up with...what's going on in performance art. There was a performance artist, for example, Valentine de Saint-Point, who worked in the beginning of the century through the 20's and 30's. She had projections of calculus equations and different mathematical formulas projected on her body. She called it "Poems of Atmosphere." She would scream poems of hate, poems of love... Projection, emotional response, and her actual physical presence were critiqued, but on the projected terrain of a woman's body.
Whenever you hear music, you are dealing with a unified field of culture. Whether it's bass frequencies, drums, samples...the body itself is immersed in a field of sound.
DJ Spooky mixes, scratches.
What I wanted to demonstrate was the live interaction between me and pre-recorded elements. There were all kinds of snippets in there, from Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" to NWA, film references, Ornette Coleman's free jazz...What I wanted to demonstrate was the live interaction between me and pre-recorded elements. When ever you see someone moving, you're seeing an invisible sculpture being created; with sounds, you're using shards of time. There's a sense of pulling together a temporal space. In other cultures, specifically African Yoruba culture or Afro-Brazilian culture, music acts as total theater, where all aspects of human culture are "in the mix," so to speak. DJing is, in essence, bringing that same narrative back. It's a fusion of these West African traditions through the African diaspora to the US, but through the filter of high-end digital technology. DJing stands at the crossroads of these different expressions; whether it's film, performance art, conceptual art, or traditional pop culture, there's always a sense of dynamic engagement, and nothing is meant to be just sitting still or standing there. Everything is meant to be a tool for the artist.
Hip-hop, dancehall reggae, jungle, ambient, rock, all these things are (created in) the studio... In the art world (the word "studio" gives one) a sense of the painter, someone who creates in an isolated environment. The studio has become a place where you create something that is automatically made for reproduction and replication...it's all about transmission and replication. There is the Walter Benjamin essay about that, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," where he talks about films, and stuff like that... (but in that essay) "replication" deals with the exact copy. DJing deals with sound as...a way of representing different cultural moments, and also different spoken thoughts. It's a way of creating a weave, or a fabric, of sounds...you can create an entire milieu based on sound- I call it "the virtual theater."
BC: How does this fit in with copyright law? Do you pay for samples, and do you expect people to pay you if they sample your music?
DJ Spooky: I've been sampled a lot, no (I don't charge)... Copyright law...is inherited from British common law, which was based on their interpretation of what was going on with the Romans. It's a really outmoded way of looking at the way information moves through a culture. hip-hop's a perfect example. A lot of MC's will take someone else's lyrics, and they'll rhyme it. There always that question, is that biting, or is it homage, or what? Who owns those lyrics?
I tend to look at things like (this)...everything has it's own rhythm, a cadence...and this was going on in the seventies, with what Derrida and Foucault called "The Death of The Author." You get to a certain point where the individual simply acts as a refraction point for all the information moving around. With hip-hop you get the beats everyone samples. There's this one beat called "The Acoustic President Beat," by The Honeydrippers, and then there's James Brown's "Funky Drummer" beat. Everyone sampled them, they became part of the basic fabric of how people were making records. At this point in the ballgame, forget it- every record is made of ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred other records. The same thing is going on in visual culture, in film, in architecture.
As artists, we're in an interesting position right now. There's a sense of "what's happening, what's next?" If corporations own the memories (we use to make art), then how can we work anymore? Who owns the language? When I hear the word "copyright," I think to myself, "Who owns English?" That's the language we speak. Everything from the logos on our shoes to the brand name I brush my teeth with to the memories of the way I'm speaking... I use samples to speak, someone else might use painting. It's the classic example of how art can be controlled by economics. It's about access. On a certain level, a mixtape is the best way to do it, to bypass it all. I think once it's out in the world, it's public domain. Anything goes.
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| DJ Spooky and your host, DJ BC, chilling on Prescott Street. |
But then, how does the artist get paid? How do we make money? It's a thorny problem. I have a feeling that the whole structure will dissolve after a certain point, when perfect, crystal clear copies of whatever you want can be copied, downloaded. They said that DAT would be the end of the industry, perfect duplicate copies could be made. But you know what, the structure is still here, people are still making money, they're still doing their thing.
MC BEV: Do you think the free usage of information that is currently the trend in any way brings the "death" of the artist, or the author, and brings the performance aspect back into this at all?
DJ Spooky: Yeah, I mean when you look at what I'm trying to do, or DJs like Mixmaster Mike, The Invisible Skratch Picklez, The Executioners, or Q-Bert, they are all about performance. They're taking records from all over the place, and (those recordings) are atomized to the point where you realize that it's their own take on it, and their own expression. I think there are many ways to approach it, though-you can do really clean, smooth mixes that respectfully reference established styles, or, I'm more into the atomizing style. I like playing with people's memory of sound, like if you hear the Psycho strings, you automatically know it- then it quickly switches to something else.
It's a big trend right now. DJing has brought back vinyl, and there are many DJ record stores selling vinyl now. It's getting bigger and bigger as it goes. I definitely think it's had a real impact. And "freedom of information"- that's the US's motto, but we're actually the worst about it. We're usually pinching a lot of stuff from a lot of different places. It's an interesting situation. Once something gets online, that's a whole new ballgame. Everything's totally copyable, and not copyrightable- it just goes through your hands like so much water.
Harvard Student: Do you have any predictions for the future of this art (turntablism)? Do you see it accelerating, or do you think there will be a backlash against it at some point?
DJ Spooky: Most kids these days are growing up with the notion of continuous media. Kids I know who are much younger than me are really into video games, radio, video. That's just the ocean they swim in. It's amazing to see how much, and how naturally, they get into it. So I just think it's going to accelerate.
Somebody's always going to try and figure out a way to make money off what's happening. Otherwise you wouldn't have the transactional corporate system. They're running the ballgame, on a certain level, globally. DJing restructures, it reconfigures, but everyone always shifts. Whenever there's a new vibe, a new space, territorially, all of us just rush to get in, set it up, stratify it. The internet is a prime example.
Harvard Student: Do you think that means the homogenization of world cultures?
DJ Spooky: Probably, yeah. I think we're probably the first truly global civilization…or who knows, perhaps there was something back in history. But when I go to Japan, they're wearing Nike, Adidas, jumpsuits, trying to dress like New Yorkers dressed 2 years ago, when New York was trying to dress like London dressed 5 years ago, which was trying to dress like Harlem was dressing ten years ago. Then you go to Australia, or Brazil, and in a small village they're drinking Budweiser. I don't know that's good or bad, but you can see it happening. The Golden Arches. It's definitely happening, but I don't know if that's homogenization, that's an aspect, but I don't think any culture will ever truly give up it's essential geographic, specific identity.
Words and photos by Bob Cronin. This originally appeared in Decontrol Magazine, Winter 1999.
