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Spooky’s world
Paul D. Miller’s ‘Rebirth of a Nation’
BY JON GARELICK
Related Links

DJ Spooky's official Web site

No one has been more on the cusp of the expansion of what’s been called "DJ culture" than Paul D. Miller, more popularly known as "DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid." Since the mid ’90s, Miller has been using the expanded tools of the DJ — turntables, samplers, and the mix tape — not only as a means of entertainment but as a way to analyze and critique society and, he hopes, provoke social and political change. Pointed political rapping has been around since at least Grandmaster Flash, but Spooky has focused on the mix itself — the collage and juxtaposition of different music, spoken-word bits (from Patti Smith to Marcel Duchamp), from found sounds to varied beats — as a way of looking at the whole world. For Spooky, there’s nothing that isn’t a source waiting to be sampled and mixed.

Traversing the worlds of underground club culture, conceptual art, and academic literary theory, Spooky helped spearhead a Lower East Side– and Brooklyn-based movement called "illbient" — a low-key DJ response to the beat-heavy world of house, techno, hip-hop, and even the chillier vibes of trance and drum ’n’ bass. On Necropolis: The Dialogic Project (Knitting Factory Works), Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and Incursions in Illbient (both Asphodel), and in countless club and loft party multimedia happenings, Spooky and his cohort took turntablism into a sometimes beatless ambiance of found sounds and spoken word. Rhythmic patterns came from spare bass beats or, more likely, the echoing click-and-rattle of subway tracks. Occasional synth and piano motifs offered the only clues to a melodic narrative. Back then, in 1996, Miller told me that illbient was an attempt to put a "New York spin on things." It was ambient, for sure, but in distinct opposition to the warm aural baths of Brian Eno. "I distinguish what we’re doing from Eno specifically because of that urban content. It’s not a withdrawal from the urban landscape, it’s an immersion in it."

Since then, Miller has broadened his scope considerably. For him, the mix tape was a metaphor for breaking down barriers. An academic might describe a Spooky mix as "intertextuality." For Spooky, it was about mixing styles, neighborhoods, ideas, languages. He’s shown up more and more as an ensemble player in a variety of settings with jazz, rock, and classical musicians and composers: Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kool Keith, Killa Priest, Wu-Tang Clan, Thurston Moore, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono. Illbient is still a big part of his approach, but you can also hear plenty of beat-heavy mixes on, say, 2003’s Dubtometry (Thirsty Ear) featuring dub masters Mad Professor and Lee "Scratch" Perry, and especially on the forthcoming Drums of Death, a collaboration between DJ Spooky and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo, the duo being joined by, among others, Living Coloür guitarist Vernon Reid and Public Enemy rapper Chuck D. Not only does Chuck D. deliver several hefty PE-style raps, but the album (due for release by Thirsty Ear in April) also juxtaposes hip-hop beats with passages of guitar-shredding thrash metal, perhaps in a look back to Miller’s teen years in Washington, DC, where hip-hop rubbed shoulders with a salient local hardcore scene.

These days, Miller’s work can be found as often in museums (as part of multimedia installations) and theaters as in clubs and lofts. His new Rhythm Science (Mediawork/MIT Press) is a collection of essays that’s part manifesto, part autobiography, and it’s often dense with the language of the post-grad semioticist. (He was a philosophy and French major at Bowdoin College.) But it’s also often poetic and politically incisive. And at Sanders Theatre next Friday, Miller will be performing his "digital exorcism" of D.W. Griffith’s controversial three-hour 1915 Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation — reduced to a 75-minute multimedia "remix" presentation on three screens and titled "DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation."

Hip-hop expanded the word "DJ" to mean more than someone who played a sequence of records; it became someone who used those records as source material to be manipulated — through quick cuts, scratching, and overlays — into new music. Now the term "VJ" is expanding in the same way — not the MTV "host," but the VJ who mixes audio and visual components live to create new images. Although the live-mix VJ is not new, it’s hard to think of anyone who’s taking it to the extreme that Miller is with "Rebirth of a Nation."

Certainly Miller can’t.

"On a full-scale story?" he replies when I reach him by phone in New York. "Not so much, no. I mean, there’s lots of video stuff that people play at a party in the background, but not in this way, that I think is a lot more nuanced than that."

Miller says he was moved to take on Birth of a Nation after the 2000 presidential election. "It made me feel so numb about America’s possibilities of trying to realize some kind of real democracy, and then I started thinking that maybe we never explored this in depth, so let me think back through history. And I thought The Birth of a Nation was the perfect jumping-off point for an artist to explore this kind of stuff right now."

The Birth of a Nation is generally depicted as one of those oddball classics of cinema history, along the lines of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, in which pathbreaking — and viscerally exciting — technical virtuosity is put to the service of dubious ends. In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith, who was himself the son of a Confederate officer who died of wounds suffered in the war, portrayed the South as victims of Northern aggression, freed blacks as evil tools of Reconstruction, and the Ku Klux Klan as saviors. It’s no wonder that college film-studies programs would rather explore the work of the father of American cinema via such later works as Intolerance and the Lillian Gish vehicle Broken Blossoms.

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Issue Date: March 4 - 10, 2005
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