Spinning Culture
DJ Spooky interviewed by Pravin Sathe
Photographer: Michael Raz-Russo. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, mixes the worlds of academia, literature, music and video. Often referencing historic events, DJ Spooky’s multiform work melds the past and the present, and hints at the future. Following his most recent book, Rhythm Science, which has been added to the curriculum at some major universities, DJ Spooky has just finished ‘remixing’ Birth of a Nation, and recording a new album, Drums of Death, with Dave Lombardo of Slayer and Chuck D of Public Enemy. I talked with him about copyright, culture, and plain old propaganda.
Pravin Sathe: Give us a brief background on how you became a DJ, or more generally, a remixer of culture.
DJ Spooky: Growing up in Washington D.C. during the height of the Reagan era and the Bush era left me with a sense that America was at some kind of twisted crossroads. Those two [administrations], plus the riots in L.A. plus Mayor Marion Barry getting put in jail for smoking crack–it all seemed so utterly pathological. D.C. has kids that play buckets on the street like in the subway in NYC, and one of my earliest memories is seeing those kids play buckets down near Dupont Circle. DJing is partly an observation process and partly a collectors’ virus. I grew up listening to so much music that it just seemed natural that it would progress into something more collage oriented. It’s a psychological shorthand really. There’s so many strategies of memory: think of Proust and Grandmaster Flash. I like to just connect the dots.
PS: You have fused the formal education you received throughout your life with the traditional influences of a DJ. How did you blend these influences?
DJS: You have to remember: I went to a small liberal arts college in Maine called Bowdoin College and I did two degrees there, one in French literature and the other in philosophy. My angle on philosophy was to think of art and architecture, music and language, as reflections of one another. My book Rhythm Science is a reflection of this kind of mentality. Hybrid form, hybrid function: it’s all about getting a practical approach to media philosophy into the arts. I really like to think of digital media as my home, but it relates to almost all of the other arts now. I didn’t get any formal training on that kind of stuff. You really have to learn about it as you go, which means, basically, I read a lot.
PS: You’ve collaborated with many artists whose genres seem polar opposites, whether it’s rap and hip-hop or classical and jazz. How do you tailor your work to these projects?
DJS: Yeah, it’s all about having different conversations with different practicing artists. You’d be amazed at how closed a lot of people are. I like to think of life itself as a kind of mix tape, so who can say what’s going to pop up next in the mix? Living like that means you have your structure open, and it means there’s going to be a lot of different people in the flow of things. I celebrate that, I treasure that diversity, and I look at my projects as a way of giving that mentality a more solid environment to operate from. Most artists are pretty locked down: they really just collaborate with people they think will advance their career. I’m genuinely interested in a lot of phenomena, and that means I could work with someone like Yoko Ono and with a philosopher of media like Lev Manovich, or a science fiction writer like Bruce Sterling. I really enjoy waking up in the morning to different projects and different situations.
PS: Your most recent film remix was of Griffith’s infamous The Birth of A Nation. What drew you to this film, and what was your thought process in remixing it?
DJS: It’s essentially the first film to show a deeply flawed election, and it’s something that fascinates me in terms of how much its content is still with us. Racism, sexism, torture, you name it, it’s all become a kind of numb panorama after we invaded Iraq. People don’t realize the propaganda issues involved with maintaining the secrecy of the Bush Administration. Basically the entire populace is being told to fuck off. My remix of the film is sometimes angry, sometimes completely over the top. It’s a set of snapshots taken from the film and animated in a way to hold the story together. Griffith came up with so many things that are still in movies today: the cross-cut, the cross-fade, the close-up. I just play with the elements and make the architecture flow.
PS: The core of DJ culture is to mix, or more accurately to remix cultural influences from the world the DJ lives in. Yet these days we are increasingly being told that what you do is stealing, or it will be considered stealing unless you get permission from the copyright owner first. What’s your response?
DJS: Yeah, this is how we roll. Let’s look at it as a metaphor mapped onto another metaphor, or a mirror held up to another mirror: you get my drift. The idea here is that samples are part of how we remember things, and if you look at the way sound functions in a culture based on ‘records’ of events, the issue of the ‘moment-event’ (a la Heidegger or event-oriented philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari) becomes multiplex. I play with that kind of strategic ambiguity in my mixes, texts, and tracks, and even in the way that I perform. The rest is up the listener or reader. Collage, Database Aesthetics, archeology of multi-media, layers of erasure–these are the methodologies. I collect records as an art project, and deploy them as a strategic arsenal. They reconfigure not only aspects of how people recall different forms of memory in an era of saturation, but also show that another world is possible. Sound is that intense. It really has the ability to move people into other thought configurations. After that, it’s up to the listener to move on the impulse.
PS: You’ve been an outspoken advocate of copyright reform, and you’ve favored a general rethinking of the idea of a permission culture. It’s rare for an artist to align himself with something as un-cool as copyright law unless there’s money to be made a la Lars Ulrich. Can you explain your position on the confluence of copyright and culture?
DJS: Yeah, I look at the way the law is written versus the way it’s lived, and see a huge gap. People will only respect the law as much as they see it as an integral part of their lives. The copyright law system of the U.S. was written several hundred years ago, and was based on medieval copyright and common law. How does that relate to us in our era of high bandwidth culture based on an experience economy? Go figure.
This kind of stuff can sneak up on you and flip your whole world inside out. From the infamous case of Steve Kurtz [an artist who was arrested by Homeland Defense for having some harmless bacteria at home that he was modifying to create an art project], to stuff like Joe Wreckker, who got put in jail because he sang the lyrics on how to decode a DVD, all of this stuff is mad flipped out, and is getting weirder. That’s why I think writers like Lawrence Lessig are so important for this era. They give people tools to think about how to begin asking questions about how this information ecology works.
PS: Your promotional CD for your new album is just one track that’s over an hour long. It forced me to think of it more like a movie or a book than a work that could be cut up. Was that intentional or by accident?
DJS: Definitely intentional. Book: Rhythm Science. Film: "Rebirth of a Nation." New album: Drums of Death with Chuck D from Public Enemy. It’s all linked.
