Freestylin': DJ Spooky, a.k.a. Paul Miller, In His Own Words

Paul D. Miller, better known as DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, must have 48 hours in his days. In addition to his Sanders Theatre performance of Rebirth of a Nation, the artist is working on countless projects in every media imaginable.

The “DJ Spooky” persona will appear in Miller’s to-be-released novel Flow My Blood the DJ Said, a takeoff of the classic Philip K. Dick novel Flow My Blood the Policeman Said, which examines the links between semiotics and the DJ culture. The name “Spooky” refers to the eerie interplay between the absence and presence of sound, whereas his “That Subliminal Kid” epithet refers to a character from William S. Burroughs’ Nova Express.

The 34-year-old New York City-based artist boasts an impressive résumé: his essays have been published in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, and Paper Magazine. He is also co-publisher of the magazine, A Gathering of the Tribes, Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture’s first editor-at-large, and is working on the new webzine 21C.

In addition to teaching at the experimental European Graduate School, Miller has performed at the Whitney Biennial, the 2000 Venice Biennial for Architecture and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; he has collaborated with artists as wide-ranging as Wu-Tang Clan’s Killa Priest and Yoko Ono. Most recently, he has published his first book, Rhythm Science, an acclaimed manifesto for how patterns in sound and in culture result in artistic creation. Miller is releasing his newest album, Drums of Death, a collaborative effort with Slayer’s Dave Lombardo, Public Enemy’s Chuck D., and Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jack Danger, before mid-year.

The Harvard Crimson conducted an e-mail interview with Miller, whose responses were always beguiling and informed, if a little unexpected.

Q: On your online notes for Rebirth of a Nation, you draw a line between the montage filmmakers of the 20th century and the DJs of today. But cutting and sequencing beats to create a narrative has been reconstituted by the MTV generation as an ADD alternative to actual storytelling. How do you reemploy the method to startle and challenge audiences? What is the future of the DJ mix?

A: Basically I think everything will be visual—these days you have gangs with videos against “snitching” or governments creating propganda as a video game…It’s pretty much along the same lines. Media literacy is the common denominator, I’m just focusing on the way to connect the dots between all of these disparate situations—I guess you could say my remix is about a kind of visual politics of sound. And that’s the order of the day in our media ecology.

Q: Rebirth raises a concern many film historians have had concerning the recutting and recombination of films in “director’s cuts” and “special editions.” Is there anything sacred about the filmic art form? Can we draw a line between sacrificing the artist’s vision and reimagining a work of art?

A: The remix will be the 21st century equivalent of what Walter Benjamin referred to in his classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—but with a twist—it’s all all about digital copies, so the cultural operating system is whatever you feel like downloading. The rest is like Amiri Baraka said so long ago—all about the “changing same.” The Beats of the 20th century—William S. Burroughs “cut-up” technique, Jack Kerouac’s “school of disembodied poetics,” Amiri Baraka’s “jazz aesthetics”—become the beats of the 21st century. And like Martha Stewart says, ahem, “that’s a good thing.”

Q: Which artists are taking full advantage of the freedom the genre of remixing provides?

A: I’d say there’s plenty of people doing cool multi-media remix stuff—eclectic method from the U.K. are some of my faves, Hexstatic, Panoptic, Eyewash... there’s lots. There’s even multi-media school programs cranking out film directors who are doing multi-media. This is pretty much just the beginning.

Q: People will approach the show with an expectation of controversy and thematic density, but others won’t: what’s in the show for the latter?

A: Think of this as a kind of exorcism—a way to show multiple perspectives of sound and image. Plus there’s the whole idea of ambient cinema. I come out of a tradition of collage—Harry Smith, Marcel Duchamp, Charles Ives, all European/Anglo American traditions, meet stuff like GrandMaster Flash, Afrika Bambaata and the Bomb Squad that produced Public Enemy. Plus I remix old blues records for the show as well. The idea is to apply DJ technique to cinema, but to keep things well chilled out and fun.

Q: You’ve said you have over 20,000 records. What have you bought recently? What artists have you let influence you in the current cultural landscape?

A: Lately I’ve been swamped with a zillion records. Stuff I like—Chris Rock’s new album Never Scared is hilarious—he does his Michael Jackson skit, et al., and the Sri Lankan/London native M.I.A. whose parents were in the Tamil Resistance—she mixes dancehall with a lot of cool South Asian material, and then of course, there’s my new album Drums of Death with the folks from Slayer and Public Enemy. I listen to a lot of different styles, so that tends to flow through my stereo system. It’s cultural origami, y’all!