There’s an eerie turn in every counter-culture arts movement where those who sought to foment a rebellion find that, in order to keep its ideals alive, they must create some form of establishment.
Urban art on alley walls gives way to a studio with an internship program. Abstract painting is taught as a community-college course, worth two credit hours. Jazz, once the model of rules-free improvisation, stiffens into a formal course of study. And rock ‘n’ roll becomes something to teach kids at summer camp.
Now it’s happening to hip-hop. But if it had to happen, one could do worse than learn about it from technologies author/sonic experimenter Paul Miller.
Wait. Scratch that … hip-hop isn’t quite institutionalized yet. Let’s try again: One could do worse than pick up a few pointers from digital madman/turntablist extraordinaire DJ Spooky, aka Paul Miller.
He’s a rare performer, having forged a series of unlikely links between the worlds of indie rock and hip-hop through albums like Drums of Death. He also scored the massively successful film Slam; wrote a widely praised manifesto on the underlying cultural and artistic nature of remixing (Rhythm Science); created the music/theater/film remix of Birth of a Nation, entitled DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of A Nation, which is still touring the world; and managed to pen a few articles on music and culture for no-name rags like Slate, The Village Voice, Artforum and Raygun.
If that weren’t enough, he also tries to spread his unique vision of 21st-century art—the art of remixing pretty much everything—as both an instructor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland and as a touring lecturer.
So what is it, exactly, that Professor Spooky teaches?
“Flow. Like Yoda used to say in Star Wars, the force is strong,” explained Miller via e-mail shortly before boarding a plane to Istanbul.
“Seriously,” he went on to write, “I guess it’d be that we all experience things in different ways, [and] sampling opens the door to it all. We are all fragments.”
Gleaning answers out of Miller’s stream-of-consciousness text proved difficult. Not because he didn’t answer the questions, but because he answered them like he views the world—as seemingly unconnected thoughts and ideas brought together to create a new meaning. It’s as though he were a living collection of samples, hyperlinks and references, all trying to find an art big enough to contain them.
Asked about the methods he uses to teach his art theory, he responds: “Whenever I create, I pretty much use the same screen—the problem with today is that we think about everything in 20th-century terms. The ‘screen’ of the 20th century isn’t the screen of the 21st. One of my favorite films that covers this kind of thing is Timecode by Mike Figgis—all characters are on screen at the same time, and you just roll with the flow. Doug Aitken’s show at [the Museum of Modern Art] in NYC was kind of an update of the same thing—the art of being simultaneous. The 21st-century screen is everywhere—your iPod, your windshield in the car’s GPS unit, the cell phone, the laptop, Times Square. I make art that reflects that—sampling lets you move from screen to screen; you edit the sequence. So I guess I just use the same ‘screen’ as anybody else, it’s just that my screen has a lot of screens at the same time.”
Miller proved to be the conversational equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. One of the few straightforward answers he gave was when asked about this tag-cloud-like way of communicating, which sometimes borders on a philosophy.
“I don’t really have a natural thought process,” writes Miller. “I’m responding to these questions at 2 a.m. after a 15-hour flight from Tokyo. It’s a well-caffeinated thought process. Philosophy is just the side effect.”
On March 28, Miller will teach a class at UNCA on the evolution of DJ culture, modern and multimedia art, and the larger ideas behind remixing. In previous lectures—some of which are available to watch via YouTube.com—he’s used this same style of communication (as well as PowerPoint and a turntable) to impart to listeners the importance of creating something both familiar and unique.
If there is, indeed, an academic institution emerging out of the fusion of thoughts, arts and ideas that form today’s still-evolving hip-hop culture, who better to chair it than Miller—a scholar who name-checks Chuck D and Duchamp in the same breath? Now, if only he had a translator …
Paul “DJ Spooky” Miller will teach a free lecture on the evolution of DJ culture at UNCA’s Lipinsky Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 28. A CD signing will follow. For more info, visit djspooky.com or call UNCA at 232-5000.
It’ll probably drop off the main page before the end of the week, but for those of you who’d like to read last week’s blog entry with the whole interview, click here.