Director as DJ: Paul D Miller, aka DJ Spooky, aka That Subliminal Kid

by Hilary RAWK!
www.myspace.com/rawkmagazine
rawkmagazine@yahoo.com

Best known for his DJ mixes and production, Miller has also written for several influential art and social publications, created art and mixed media, written two books, worked with the United Nations in Angola, Africa, directed a film, collaborated with artists like Yoko Ono, and that’s just scratching the surface. He is always reading, always learning, always creating. He is one of the most intellectual and grounded people I’ve ever known.

How did you first get into music?

My father collected a lot of records, so I would go through his records and check out stuff. I was just checking out what was around the house--mainly jazz and classical. One of the records my dad had was Glen Gould—he did these recordings that are pretty much considered the benchmark for how you play classical music.

And I was really into video games when I was younger, too, so I would listen to records while I was playing video games—this is like playing Atari or Commodore 64. It’s amazing how cheap the graphics were, compared to the way things are now.

What was your first concert?

I think it mighta been Michael Jackson on his Moonwalk tour. My mom and my sister were really into him. They made a limited edition vinyl of that concert with a glove—remember had that silver glove? Then I saw Prince as well, and I remember seeing Doug E Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew.

What inspired you to start making music?

Well, you know I grew up in DC, and the city being sort of a hybrid and having a diverse but also dynamic local scene. I grew up with friends from around the world—we had a few exchange students in my family. We had a German exchange student one year, and we also had a Nigerian staying with us. My mom made it a point—she really wanted us to grow up checking out different situations and scenarios.

What are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned so far?

Always keep cool. Always keep open. You know I travel a lot, and I’m in a different city every couple of days, and I enjoy that but sometimes there’s a delay, and you have to stay in an airport for five hours. So it’s like, “Okay, I’m sitting here in an airport. Am I gonna get irritated and lose my temper? No.” So I’ll just chill, read a book.

What do you mean by always keep open?

A lot of people, as they enter the scene, catch like an ego-trip vibe, and that’s usually a drag. I have to deal with a lot of people in the music scene who are egomaniacs, or artists who think that they are just like the greatest artist. It’s funny, as people get into their career they get into all of this ego stuff, and it’s usually just a shell for their insecurity.

I’ve heard people refer to you before as a ‘musical genius.’ How does that affect you?

Well, I don’t know about all of that. (laughter) I enjoy art and music and writing. I just finished my first book, and my second book is coming out next year, so . . . everything is connected, and music is just one part of anybody’s brain, so I don’t think you can say ‘genius’ . . . when people look at life and enjoy life that makes them want to get into things and figure it out.

The problem with American culture right now is we’re all in this kind of “Starbucks Cosmos.” I mean, no disrespect to Starbucks cause I think they make a wicked soy chai latte, but . . . standardization, finality, everybody watching the same Flava Flav reality TV show, or listening to crappy, mainstream radio . . . it’s standardization . . . it’s amazing how . . . I remember 10 years ago when I was on campus, we barely had the Internet, and we had to use TelNet, which was like a weird, old, out of date email. And this was just a few years ago. And now there’s wireless everywhere, there’s email everywhere, there are cell phones everywhere.

How do you think the Internet has affected music?

On one hand, online there’s lots of diversity, but the major issue is that when you leave that world that a lot of people are pretty standardized in terms of their lifestyles and what they’re into and their music taste.

Like if you glance at a people’s IPods, for example, which I usually try to do jut to see what their playlists are. I call it Playlist Psychology. Most people have a really narrow playlist, and they’ll only listen to stuff they’ve already heard, and they’re not adventurous, and it’s like, “You guys, there’s a whole planet out there.”

I just got back from Angola, and it was just wild, man. They just ended a 20-year civil war, fueled by oil, gold and diamonds, and that’s a really combustible mix. And because they’re off the grid, and because their country was Soviet-African, which is just crazy, all their architecture is Soviet, and there’s this like weird, bootleg culture . . . everything was bootlegged. And so because of that they had total irreverence for radio, whatever, and I think that was one of the most interesting cultures I’ve seen in a while. There is no Starbucks. There is no Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken, or whatever. Even the clothes—I mean, people are improvising with that. It’s just beautiful to see.

You’ve talked a little bit about the Internet and how we’re all sort of connected in this network . . . do you think the fact that we are so connected is good thing?

I definitely think it helps people understand that communication is crucial.

You can only say that music is about information, and it’s always trying to get people to look at the world from the viewpoint that the artist can bring new information to light. And that’s what I try to do with my music and my mixes—just get people to think another world is possible.

I saw you in Chicago showcasing your recent In Fine Style compilation, and you mixed music as well as video . . . how do you think the visuals affect the audience’s experience of that album?

I think it makes people kinda feel like nothing is permanent, and to me that’s really important because I don’t want people to think that this whole scenario that we’re in is just a lockdown. It’s completely about a certain type of flexibility and looking at the world as if it could change tomorrow—like you wake up and everything is different.

I remember in the late 80s, early 90s, when the Soviet Union went away. They just like woke up one morning, and it was gone. And it’s kind of eerie to realize that you could probably wake up one day and the United States doesn’t exist anymore, and I think we’re used to feeling like this is all permanent, but guess what it isn’t.

And my music is about this certain level about complexity, and I celebrate that. Being a DJ and an artist, I can tell you that you can remix and change anything. And that’s what my videos that go along with my music are about. There is no stable way of doing anything.

How do you think your music is evolving?

I’m kind of settling into getting out of normal DJ culture, by which I mean classical music and other forms of contemporary art and stuff like that.

What kinds of things have you been listening to and reading lately?

I’m listening to, actually from Chicago, Lupe Fiasco, and I’ve been listening to the Manderlake soundtrack . . . some classical music . . . Gia Conchelli, she does classical music—it’s almost religious. Right now my favorite thing is Evan Parker, he does jazz— he did a lot of stuff in the Chicago scene.

I’m reading Painting’s Relationship to Sound . . . it’s kind of like my first book, actually, my first book was about sound art. It’s called Rhythm Science, and my second book is called Sound Unsound. It’s about sound art and mixed media. I’ve always been curious about how painters respond to sound over the last century or so. I’m also reading a book called Abstract Painting: 50 years. Also The Future of Music—it’s kind of talking about hypothetical stuff. This book predicts that the CD will be gone as a format within two years, which I think is pretty quick but, anyway, they’ve done a reasonable amount of research. But one of my favorite books of the year was Richard Daughton—it’s called The God Delusion. He wrote this book debunking a lot of religious thinking.

So what are your plans for the next few years . . . you mentioned getting heavier into art . . .

Yeah, I mean I started out as a writer and an artist. I used to write for Art Forum, The Village Voice, and so on. But, let’s just say I think of music as a very specific response to contemporary art . . . I think, right now, music is the most fluid of all media because people really . . . it’s how they build their lives. You know, they’ll listen to things and respond, but it doesn’t necessarily make people act in a political context.

Art, I think, helps people organize an ideal movement. And when I say ‘ideal movement’ I’m talking about, say for example . . . Pablo Picasso painted Guernica after the Spanish were bombed by Hitler. And when Bush was about to bomb Iraq, he gave a speech at the United Nations, and they specifically asked them to cover that painting so he wouldn’t have to walk by and see it. The painting still has that kind of heaviness to it.

I mean, look at archeology; for example, it’s a fascinating science. You dig in the Earth, you find history. For me, I’m digging in the landscape of our contemporary culture, bizarre, crazy world. I guess I’m doing a ‘media archeology.’ I try to understand what’s happening, but I tend to think music is one layer, and art is just a layer. It’s not like one’s better than the other.

I was just in Africa . . . the Congo, which is right next to Angola, had a tribal war with something like 4 Million dead over the last couple years, and you barely hear about it in our media. And it’s more people than all of Palestine combined, but you’ll hear more about Palestine because it’s trendy.

And in Angola there were a lot of land mines, so a lot of kids had their legs blown off . . . one of the wildest things I saw was kids using a skateboard, and their torso was on the skateboard . . . they had no legs, so they were pushing themselves along with their hands. It just made me realize that we are too busy watching boring television and videos to think about the rest of the world. And I tend to think that we, as a culture, are numb because of consumerism. We buy our identities and lives from advertising and the media . . . I tend to think we are a hyper-conformist culture. I mean, I’m not saying that I’m separate and floating and observing . . . I’m in this as much as anybody else.

My first book just came out, it’s called Rhythm Science, and I wanted to look at DJ culture as kind of a template for how to think about existing in multiple contexts. How to think about sound as it relates to text and storytelling. How DJing is appropriation art—pulling bits and pieces from records, from software, from the Internet.

But, at the end of the day, life should be fun, things should be fun, and one of the things that I learned from writing that book was that I have to look inside to find out things more. It’s like we’re in the era of MySpace, of Flickr, of al these thing that kind of turn your life inside out and putting it on the web. You know, people just posting every aspect of their life online. Like have you heard of that LonelyGirl15? Yeah, that fake blog. I wish I coulda thought of something like that, it was very clever.

I want to do a series on tricksterism issues, and pushing what is real and what is false, war, peace, consumerism . . . that’s my motto for the next year: Director As DJ . . . looking at all of these things as just bits and pieces you can pull together to make a story and maybe, just maybe, get people to think about the world in a different way.

I’m an idealist at heart. I believe that human beings are essentially good. We’re just messed up with a lot of layers of bad things. I think, somehow, music and art can help. It ma y not be the be all, end all solution. But it can help.

Latest Rawk Chicago
Rawk Chicago 12-14-06
Rawk Chicago 11-30-06