Joker's wild

DJ Spooky's hip-hop tricks

by James Rotondi

"Who is DJ Spooky?" read the hand-hewn stickers littered throughout Lower East Side Manhattan's bohemian conclave of Internet cafés, dance clubs, bars, and art spaces. It's 1994, and bookish DC native Paul D. Miller, musician and philosophy grad, is just beginning to self-promote his alter ego -- DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid -- with the same guerrilla resourcefulness that he employs while spinning at divy downtown clubs like Abstrakt and SoundLab.

Four years later, it's hard to find anyone in the urban jungle who doesn't know Spooky's handle. Hoisted to international prominence, in part by the same boom in instrumental hip-hop that's made DJ Shadow ubiquitous and in part by an unapologetic willingness to spread his own urban gospel, Spooky circa '98 is both famous and infamous, the acknowledged lawgiver of the "illbient" aesthetic, Rolling Stone's "Hot DJ" of 1996, remixer of Metallica and Nick Cave, a Geffen/Outpost recording artist, and -- particularly in critics' circles -- perhaps the most controversial man in electronic music today.

But it is, after all, music that's taken Miller this far. Before he even released his debut album, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (Asphodel), in 1996, he'd overseen the remix LP Necropolis: The Dialogic Project (Asphodel), contributed a piece to Bill Laswell's ambitious Axiom Dub collection, and coined the term "illbient" to describe the dark ambiance of his own work as well that of New York comrades Byzar, We, and DJ Olive. A genuine underground breakthrough, Spooky's dub-schooled collision of hip-hop, jungle, ambient, and space rock helped shatter the already solidifying divisions among the various emerging genres of electronic music.

"When I started doing events in New York, most of the scenes were very compartmentalized: hip-hop was here, techno was there," says the 27-year-old Miller, who will perform downstairs at the Middle East next Thursday. "That's what I call `mono-culture' mentality. It reflects the basic structures of our society, where easy consumption is good consumption. You get the cultural equivalent of McDonald's."

On strictly musical grounds, there was no reason why Miller should have generated any more debate than, say, Amon Tobin, DJ Krush or the Grassy Knoll, artists similarly concerned with breaking down stylistic barriers using turntables and samplers for battering rams. But the controversy stems less from Spooky's music than from his extra-musical audacity. For one thing, despite his ability to drop science about the DJ's role in pop culture, it's only one of his many callings. Described by UK magazine The Wire as "a Renaissance man for the new Millennium," he's a journalist whose work -- reviews of a wide multicultural panoply of books and music -- appears regularly in the Village Voice, Paper, and Rap Pages. His art installation "Death in the Light of the Phonograph: Excursions into the Pre-Linguistic" opened at the Annina Nosei Gallery in Manhattan last year, featuring sculptures he calls "objectiles" -- a hybrid of object and projectile -- and invisible landscapes created from a shifting order of artificial reverbs. And in his music he's stepped outside the urban oeuvre as well, collaborating with Ryuichi Sakamoto on the symphony "Untitled 01" and even manning the tables with 20th-century classical composer Iannis Xenakis.

What's more, the lengthy liner notes for Songs of a Dead Dreamer quoted Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Gilles Delueze, Plato and, yes, Spooky himself, in a self-proclaimed "recombinant text" that constructed a theoretical, even semiotic, basis for the DJ's practice as "the forefront artform of the late 20th century," with heady suggestions that the sample constitutes a "synecdoche, a focal/coordinate point in the dramaturgical grid of life." From Cage to Derrida to McLuhan, nothing seems to escape Spooky's intellectual radar. For his frequent self-referentiality (not exactly hard to come by in the hip-hop world) and ambitious prose combat he was branded "an exploiter of the underground" and "an appropriator of youth culture" by the feisty New York Press, which wondered whether he wasn't perpetrating some "fabulous hoax."

"I've pissed a lot of people off," Miller acknowledges. "It's funny -- I'm pretty mellow, so I have no idea where this wild energy comes from. People just go bonkers."

Whereas some, like Urb magazine, hailed Songs of a Dead Dreamer as "unquestionably significant," others decried it as a long-winded series of bleeps and blurps. With titles like "The Terran Invasion of Alpha Cantauri Year 2794" it even harked back to prog-rock's epic science-fiction obsessions. (Miller calls his own urbanized take on the form "metro-fiction.") For others, Spooky's music, with its sometimes beat-less soundscapes, never quite lived up to Miller's ideas -- like other grand theorizers, he talked a better set than he played.

Accusing his detractors of "historical conservatism," Spooky hit back earlier this year with the aptly titled Synthetic Fury EP, which condensed Dreamer's rambling über-ambient textures into tighter hybrids of whammo jungle beats, stabbing string sections, and aggro police sirens. And he steps up the counterattack with his newest release, his first for Geffen subsidiary Outpost, Riddim Warfare.

"I've always tried to bring together different musical, artistic and literary ideas," he holds. "But there's always a resistance to multi-anything, whether it be multimedia or multiculturalism. Whenever there's a new energy, it always becomes the old versus the new. I'm interested in developing a strategy to bypass that conservatism; that's the warfare, and that's the album's underlying theme."

Warfare breaks with Spooky's previous methods. Until now, he's been a rapper-less DJ. But Warfare features the voices of rappers Kool Keith ("Seein' Objects" and "Riddim Warfare"), Sir Menelik ("Scientifik"), Killah Priest ("Degree Zero"), and Organized Konfusion's Prince Poetry and Pharoah Monch ("Reconstruction"). It's a move that consolidates Spooky's position as a hip-hop DJ, with a style arguably as distinctive as that of DJ Muggs or the Bomb Squad. It also provides a very un-illbient accessibility to the album that balances out weirder moments like "Bass Digitalis," a gangly collage of Galaxian video-game noises and palpitating string bass.

Spooky will be challenging his modus operandi further this fall on tour with his Universal Robot Band, whose line-up includes scratchers Wiz and Mars from the DJ collective the Steel Workers, plus a drummer, keyboardist, and Spooky on samplers, computers, and turntables. "We might all wear the same clothes so you can't tell who's who, playing with the idea of who the DJ really is," he suggests. All of which seems miles away from the droning, isolationist abstracts of Dreamer, and the heavy, genre-defining Incursions in Illbient.

"My first album was instrumental," Miller continues. "It was about how voices in the computer age can be manipulated to the point where you don't even know who's speaking. It was a chill-out album. A lot of people said it was too abstract, and the beats were too chill. I was like, yeah, exactly. The earlier stuff wasn't meant for a mass audience. This one is. It's accessible, it's clean-sounding and hi-fi; it sounds good on a big system."

Still, the ghost of lo-fi haunts Riddim Warfare. In between the slickly produced rap tunes, Spooky plays with divergent production values: a field-miked live collaboration with guitarist Arto Lindsay and Brazilian band Nação Zumbi at São Paulo's Palace Theatre ("Quilombo Ex Optico"); a tinny basement tape of bluesy guitar-band jams ("Roman Planetaire"); fly-on-the-wall room recordings of Spooky displaying his scratching technique to ace turntablist Ambassador Jr; the neo-new-age clarity of Japanese vocalist Moriko Mori intoning Buddhist mantras on the closing "Twilight Fugue."

"My albums are about being a trickster with people's expectations," he explains. "I've really tried as much as possible to reconfigure what people hear as music and what they think of as musical culture. That was the idea; that's the moving situation."

And the kid's got moves. Like Plato's concept of writing as the "Pharmakon," Spooky's music, to quote one of his favorite modern thinkers, Jacques Derrida, "has no proper or determinate character," but is rather "the play of possibilities, the movements back and forth, into and out of the opposites." Spooky, in other words, is hip-hop's joker, its floating signifier, its shape shifter and its wild card. He doesn't "stand" for anything other than constant permutation, both artistic and cultural. That's what enrages the purists. He won't sit still, won't be defined; and his constant flux keeps objects in motion and critics on their feet.

And though detractors may take exception to Spooky's hefty vocabulary and postmodern thinking, one-on-one it's obvious that speaking with shades of semiotics is as natural to him as gangsta-speak is for the Wu-Tang. "I'm coming from a theory background," he shrugs. "It's not like I want to change it up and say, `Yo, I'm playing fat beats.' I respect that, but I want to represent what I'm about. A lot of people think I just like using big words. But when I was growing up, while other people were out in the hood hanging out, I was at home reading. I'm basically a nerd gone very wrong."

Above all, in an electronic-music milieu where stony silence and futuristic graphics equal mystique, Spooky actually has a message, albeit one often articulated in the language of the academy. "DJing is a way of always keeping the ties between the present and the past open for the future, and letting the future flow through you, but through the permutations of the past. It's like cybernetic ancestor worship. You take an old beat that's absolutely dope by itself, and you put your own memory on it, and put it back out into the world so someone else can flip it over in their own way. That's how language grows, and that's how viruses grow. Some viruses are benign, some healthy; they can inoculate you, while other viruses are totally ill. What I'm trying to do is create a benign virus."

DJ Spooky and his Universal Robot Band perform next Saturday, October 10, at the Met Cafe with openers Plastilina Mosh. Call 861-2142.