Features

Hi Paul, you still carry the moniker ‘DJ Spooky’, though how much are you a ‘DJ’ and how much are you an educator or a visual artist now?

I’d say a little bit of both. I mean DJing was always meant to be an art project, it’s kind of funny, I’m good friends with the band Sonic Youth and one thing we always chat about is they’re like, “Paul we are art-rock, what’s going on with the electronic music scene?” and I’m like, “Well we got art hip-hop it just never gets the same rotations as the art-rock thing.”

In hip-hop, while you have people like Saul Williams doing crazy stuff, I’d say a lot of it is really conservative and conformist, especially from the US. A lot of stuff is not as political as I’d like to see.

So is music getting dumber?

(laughs) Ahh… you know on one hand its pretty deep, America has influenced the rest of the world musically on every level. But I don’t know if we’re bringing the best of what people can think about what’s going on in America. It’s just like what rises and what gets rotation in the system isn’t necessarily the most enlightened aspects of America. I wouldn’t say music’s getting dumber or smarter or anything, in fact it’s just getting to the point where everyone is making music and that means it spreads out at every level in every direction.

What about your new album, The Secret Song, explain the ideas behind that?

Yeah, as I sit here in my chair and as you sit there in your chair or whatever, probably your cell phone or computer was manufactured in China, your computer chips are probably compiled in Malaysia or Indonesia from metal from all over the world. I was thinking that’s kind of sampling too, people pulling together bits and pieces. I loved the idea of making an album that parallels that way of thinking.

So I worked with an Australian singer, a Chinese economist, a political hip-hop group called the Coup, the Jungle Brothers gave me some material, I also worked with this singer from Iran. We had her singing in Farsi about the Iranian elections. And I worked with a political hip-hop group from central Africa, from Zimbabwe. The whole album is in all these languages; it’s in Mandarin, Chinese, Farsi, English.

How do you go about conveying such a complex idea like economics through music?

Well you either have money or you don’t right? We’re being told everyone’s wealthier and we have more money, but people are struggling like they’re on gerbil wheels. In New York it’s super-hardcore, I mean, my rent in New York is around $4000 a month!

I think that there’s a lot that artists can do to raise awareness, so it’s a couple of different angles on the scene.

I’m a globalised DJ, I was in China a weekend ago, and I just got off a plane from Brazil, and I’ve been here for a day. Your average American isn’t going to be living like that, they’re going to be sitting like “Where is Iraq? We’ve never heard of Afghanistan.”

So is that part of the concept behind The Secret Song, to show how inward-looking America is?

Yeah, and also, I had it narrated by a Chinese economist. If you have any friends that speak Mandarin and you play it to them they’re going to start laughing ’cos her voice sounds really sexy, but she’s kicking crazy hardcore economics in Mandarin. So it’s definitely got a kind of sense of humour about that ’cos people are like “why is she singing in Chinese?” and I was like well everybody will be speaking Chinese soon so get ready. The album’s got a sense of humour about connecting some crazy dots about China and Iran.

I’d just like to ask about the DVD that comes with the new album, how does that fit together with the music?

Yeah, the DVD’s taken from a filmmaker called Dziga Vertov, he’s the filmmaker who predicted YouTube way back in 1921-27.

The DVD rescores one of his early films called Kino Glaz, which simply means ‘film eye’.

I wanted to have a DVD on the new album, but I wanted to have a DVD that reflected some of these ideas of ‘economics’ and the whole Russian revolution was about economics. So I went to Russia and hung out in Moscow - um I like doing weird projects if you haven’t got that one yet - and I met up with these cats that have all this crazy Russian footage from the revolution. So I went through it and started to get some bits and pieces and that became the DVD.

So how important do you think visual accompaniments are to music. You talk about where the next step for hip-hop is, are visuals going to become a lot more important?

Oh hell yeah. I think you’re going to be seeing poetry with visual images, where every word an MC says becomes an image on the screen behind them, and other people are going to be doing much more than that.

My favourite stuff on YouTube is Kutiman, he’s this guy doing video remixes of YouTube clips. I’m following a lot of videos right now, when you’re talking about what’s next, I really think video and playing with crazy weird sampling of videos is what’s happening.

For more on Paul Miller Aka Dj Spooky visit djspooky.com.