The rock star-up on stage, bathed in light, inaccessible-more and more seems like an outdated image from a defunct society.
The first time I saw Spooky spin the Abstrakt was last fall. I was aimlessly wandering the New York City streets in the early a.m. hours when some music seeping out of a dark doorway on First Avenue drew me in. Stepping down the metal stairs and through the door, I found myself in a dark, candle-lit box of a space. In the shadows of the small chill-out lounge, people sat at tables, nodding their heads in the flickering light as the music washed over the room. In one corner, a tall young black guy with blue dreads was spinning the records: DJ Spooky, Tha Subliminal Kid.
Though I'd been to a lot of clubs, I'd never watched the DJ spin before. But at the Abstrakt Lounge, Spooky's mix commanded attention. Licking his finger, he'd slow the record down to speed, listening in on his headphones, a few grooves ahead of us, to match beats before he hit the cross fade and brought the tracks together. Flipping through his crates of records, he would expertly locate the vinyl and track it on the turntables, adjusting the levels, channeling in the effects, reaching into the spinning spiral oil spills to cut, scratch, and transform the mix as he felt it. His records spanned every genre through space and time – the music of Mingus and the spoken word of Burroughs, the latest trance music out of London, and science fiction soundtracks of the '60s – old school, dance hall, funk, hip hop, soul.... his hands on the tables, he would smoothly thread connections through music spanning generations and thousands of miles, weaving a seamless sonic structure of the present moment.
As the days got cooler and shorter, I became a regular at the Abstrakt Lounge and became friends with Spooky. He drew me into the DJ world, an extensive subculture on a global scale.
There are different DJs for every different music style – techno, acid jazz, hip hop, ambient – but all of them are essentially doing the same thing: manipulating information. Recorded music is stored information, and the best DJ has the best record collection – the best information. This consists of the most current, updated information (recent releases); the most solid base of information (standards and classics); and the most esoteric, rare pieces of information (out-of-print records). The one who can manipulate information in the freshest style (cutting, scratching, mixing beats) is the best DJ.
In a world where information plus technology equals power, those who control the editing rooms run the show. DJs are editors of the street, using technology to structure an alternate sonic reality. They are the first musicians to turn a medium into an instrument – a natural step for a society that spends increasing time interfacing with communications technology.
In the past, young people bought shitty guitars to learn the chords to "Crazy Train"; now they buy turntables and records to perfect cuts and blends. The DJ illustrates where innovative, progressive music is headed: realized through technology, in the studios and the clubs, the music discards classical "instruments" as we now think of them. And it discards the image of today's classical rocker, as well.
Kurt Cobain's relentlessly reported suicide wasn't so much the death of a person as the destruction of an image. Mercilessly reimagined on MTV screens and in photos for a few years, he had been transformed from a person into an image: the Rock Star. Kurt was pulled further and further away from the audience he was trying to communicate with. Even his suicide method was a final, violent rebellion: he didn't pull a gas park in the garage, or shoot a golden bullet up his arm; he blew his image to pieces.
The DJ is the anti-image musician. The setup of the equipment takes the focus off of a central place or figure, and places it onto the music. At most clubs the DJ is either out of sight or down on the floor, at the same level as the groovers. Through music emanating from surrounding speakers, performer and audience are blended together. With computers, global communication, and the decentralization of power upon us, this setup is more reflective of where we're heading. The Rock Star – up on stage, bathed in light, inaccessible – more and more seems like an outdated image from a defunct society.
DJ Spooky got into DJing like many others – his natural musical ability combined with an ever-increasing record collection – and he took off from there. But Spooky is unusual in that he is a margin walker – most DJs specialize in hip hop, techno, dance hall, or ambient, but Spooky can hang in every school, pulling influences from each one to form his own sound. Aside from music, Spooky draws on the insane amount of reading he has done – science fiction, philosophy, classical literature, and seemingly everything else. Burroughs's cut-ups play a part in his mix, and his moniker "Tha Subliminal Kid" is a bite from Old Bill's Nova Express, a character who manipulates reality through random recording and cut-up playback.
"Scratching is reinterpreting the song ... putting your presence into it," he told me one night. "You're sort of destroying this received object from corporate culture and then putting your own take on it. Instead of receiving as a passive consumer, you begin to transmit."
He went on to draw parallels between gene splicing and DJing; the "recombinant genetic mix." "The reason I say it's genetic is because sound is representative of a certain person – their expression goes out into it. So you're recombining one person's expression with your own.
"The idea is to have it so subtle that you don't know if it's you scratching or the record scratching. You blend yourself into it. I put my own imprints on all these songs, and then change them. In a certain sense it's beyond computer hacking. It's reality hacking."
At midnight one Monday I sat in a cab cutting through the downtown grid, closing in on Futur Space. Mixmaster Morris, a prominent ambient DJ from Europe, was jetting in from London, and Spooky was scheduled to drop Abstrakt in the back room. DJ Abraxas sat next to me in the back seat. A globe-roving DJ with a Franciscan-friar haircut and big pants, he's pulled by promoters all over the world to spin; he has stamped his way through two passports in the course of his work. He is also the owner of Subtopia Records, a major techno/trance/ambient outlet on the New York vinyl scene.
"The major labels are trying to keep up with the music, but trends go so fast," DJ Abraxas said. "Grooves don't stay around long enough for a corporation to smother them.... By the time a major can get all the samples cleared, the promo, advertising, and money backing – it's dead." It rings of guerrilla warfare: mobile music attack-forces engage and elude mega-armed corporations in the battle zone of '90s pop culture.
I had talked to Mixmaster Morris for a while before he took the wheels. His eyes darted about the room as he rocked back and forth in his seat, burning with electric energy. Countries he was spinning in flew out of his mouth: Bali, Israel, The Netherlands, England.... He is helping to usher in ambient music, the smooth, ethereal electronic sound currently breaking on the Euro scene. After seven years of the pound of techno, the bottom finally dropped out: the beats have all but disappeared in the cyberstream mixes produced by programmers like Aphex Twin and the Irresistible Force.
At Futur Space, a doorman checked us off the list and let us into the mix. Ambient parties have an ex-temporal vibe about them – like you've walked into a space that has dropped out of the clock the rest of the world operates on. As the DJ manipulates the equipment, sending sonic waves washing over the room, you can almost see the displaced time hanging suspended in the air in front of your face, swirling with the slow spirals of cigarette smoke.
Mixmaster Morris was navigating the main room mix. Decked out in a silver lame kit with matching hat, he tweaked the dials and turntables to provide the Futur soundtrack.
I walked along the bar to where Spooky was spinning the back room, mixing on three turntables. He had ambient flow on one, backed by break beats on another, as he scratched and cut on the third wheel. Film projections criss-crossed and angled about the room, the tinted, abstract images bleeding down the walls. On the overstuffed chairs and couches, grouped together on the floor, the Futur stylers rolled up the buddha and smoked out to the trance until the room was shrouded in chronic clouds.
This is how it works for young DJs on the rise. Through word of mouth and circulation of their tapes, they hook up with a promoter who'll give them a chance to spin the chill-out lounges and back rooms of a happening space. As the DJs with props spin the main room, the younger DJs get a chance to build a following as a sort of opening act. They'll bring their own crowd and also get the benefit of exposure to the main DJ's crowd. Once a DJ's reputation – and crowd – builds, he or she will graduate from the small rooms and get a chance to channel the mix through the thunder systems of the main floor. Once their reps are made in the clubs, DJs can move to the studios – to create their own beats and breaks and to produce other projects.
Matt E. Silver is the promoter who put the Futur Space together and got Spooky the gig. A fast-talking hardcore New Yorker, Matt E. is a prominent player in the techno/cybermusic scene. A few days earlier, Spooky and I had stopped by his downtown office.
Posters of computer graphics for past tours pasted the walls, CDs and tapes cascaded over the desk and onto the floor, and a rhythm of information beat through the fax machine behind Matt E.'s city-speed monologue.
"It's everywhere," he said, talking about the cybermusic scene. "You go to Stockholm, you go to Israel, London, you see the same people.... It's a global scene. I'm dealing with the Russians now – some gangster calls me up the other day and says: 'Bring ze American music.' And the Orb, too – that's the mack right there – tour of the summer. I've got a mountaintop rented out in Denver. Very '90s."
At the Futur Space, he's in high form, making sure all the DJs are happy, bringing them beers, talking to scenesters here and there, keeping everything smoove. The equipment went through some problems – at one point the system crashed and the music stopped altogether, in the middle of the Mixmaster's set. All heads turned in the violent intrusion of silence to see the DJ helpless, cut off from his power supply.
At around two in the morning I decided to break, and went looking for Spooky to say goodbye. I found him sleeping on a couch in the darkness at the back of the room, out solid. Another DJ was at the helm in the chill out, sculpting the air with ambient textures. Two cute young girls were softly kissing each other on the lips, and the remnants of the Futur crew were sunken into the couches, eyes glassed, nodding their heads to the no-beat.
A few days later I found myself in the back room of Liquid Sky – a music and fashion outlet – with DJ Soul Slinger, a co-owner. Out front, the pierced and inked store clerks sold oversized rave clothing, tapes, and jewelry, and the DJ kicked a hardcore techno soundtrack.
DJ Soul Slinger is a chill Brazilian who has made contact with aliens. He told me this and smiled, and then pointed to a picture hanging on the wall. It showed a pair of mellow, bug-eyed extraterrestrials that he and DJ Dimitri of Deee-Lite met, out in Joshua Tree, California. After spinning a wild rave all night, the two DJs rolled out to the desert, and it was there that they made contact.
"They came down from the sky?" I asked him, over the pounding beat of German hardcore.
"Yes," he said, pointing to his head. "They came from here."
I pondered this as I looked around the room. The walls were streaked with faded pastel colors, graffiti tags, and pro-alien propaganda. Was Soul Slinger talking about aliens from space, or an alien consciousness that already exists somewhere in our minds? In many ways, the huge raves that he DJs have an alien vibe to them. Thousands and thousands of people together for whole nights and days without a single violent outburst: That might as well be Pluto compared with the usual New York City scene.
Then there's the question of whether anyone in orbit is picking up all the energy broadcast from these events. Sun Ra made a movie called Space is the Place back in the '70s, in which he flew through the cosmos in a jazz-powered spacecraft – it comes to mind any time I'm at a huge rave. The DJ is like a pilot, charting the course and steering the group through a journey with the wheels of steel. His engine is the disparate bodies hooked into the same trance of rhythm – pistons pumping, fueled by the music. After a few hours, I get the feeling that the whole place could lift off the planet and join up with Sun Ra for the Interstellar Groove Fleet.
"I'm not as concerned with matching beats as I am with matching brain waves," Soul Slinger said. He sees the DJ as a type of environmental engineer. The soundtrack can create the landscape, and Soul Slinger is aiming to weave a positive space with his needles. Music is a spiritual experience for him. To paraphrase his words, the musicians and programmers find something beautiful in their heads and then translate it into music. As DJ, he is a conduit, broadcasting that sound to as many people as possible.
At the ideal moment, the sound is the om, the mystical, mantra syllable that has been said to contain the entire universe in its waves. Certain musicians and spiritual seekers have heard it, and Soul Slinger is one of them. He searched for the right words to describe it.
"There is a wave of sound, it's ... compressed, very bassy." He struggled with the words, making it clear that this was a rare experience that had to be encountered directly.
But until the om washes over the city, Soul Slinger's got medical bills to deal with: he went uptown to check out a friend who was spinning, and he got tangled up in some serious attitude in front of the club. "There was this big bouncer at the door, and he was wearing this hat that said 'Don't ask me 4 shit.'" Soul Slinger asked him 4 shit, and it built from there, climaxing in a new-jack swing that cracked him in the head and landed him in the hospital. Now he's got a fat stack of ill bills in the back room of Liquid Sky – a grim check from the reality he's been trying to spin out of existence.
Usually, DJs operate with headphones so they can match beats and cue the next records off the main mix. But last night at Bliss, Spooky's cans were broken, and he was mixing live off the feed. He told me he thinks of the DJ as a connection between two worlds; recorded music is floating in the air in what he calls a "data cloud," and as DJ he pulls down the information and channels it into our reality. I saw the names on the vinyl last night as his long fingers flipped them on and off the wheels – Tek 'Em (123), Jazz Com Baz, Bionic Booger Breaks – titles from a parallel plane with its own language and logic. Since he wasn't jacked in with headphones, I felt like I was navigating the mix right alongside of him. Standing with him behind the boomin' system, controlling the floor, I got just the slightest taste of the power a DJ feels at the helm.
At around two o'clock, just as the mix was getting deep, a pair of no-neck bouncers came up and told us they were closing the room. Akin, another friend of Spooky's, was there too, so we packed up the records while Spooky went downstairs to locate the promoter and get paid.
Twenty minutes passed and the muscles at the door were giving us heat – they wanted us and the records out now. Akin stayed with the beats, and I stepped downstairs to find Spooky. The main floor was blasting: furious bodies and flicker lights in the sonic storm. Somehow I found Spooky, only to learn that the promoter couldn't pay him until three.
"I can't leave tonight without getting paid, yo," he shouted over the dolomite techno blast. The bouncers were sweating us, but it was definitely not cool to leave the beats sitting around in the van on the West Side, so Spooky gave me the keys to his place and told me to bring the records there. By the time we got back, he would be paid and we could all break. I went back upstairs to get the crates, and Akin and I loaded up the van and took off.
Spooky's current digs are in the Gas Station, a warehouse on the Lower East Side that serves as an artists' collective and after-hours party space. The metal sculptors who work there have built a menacing fence of tangled metal, spikes, gutted motorcycles, and rusty barbed wire that towers overhead and surrounds the courtyard. Junkies, hanging like phantoms on each corner, sell sealed works (clean needles) to the endless stream of addicts who pass by for H bombs.
Akin parked the van in front, and I pulled the records out. I walked to the gate and swung it open and brought the records through the courtyard. My eyes swept through the shadows, scanning for mutant rats or for junkie ghosts who might have slipped through the cracks in the metal for a quiet spot to fix.
I keyed another lock and lifted the metal gate into the warehouse itself. An experimental-film crew had been shooting for the past few weeks, and the surrealist set loomed in the darkness, adding to the strangeness. I dodged around it, balancing the crate of records and moved through one more lock into Spooky's room.
A single naked light bulb in the concrete ceiling illuminated a mess of information – books lined the walls, and crates of records covered the floor. All told, Spooky has about 10,000 records: only a few thousand were in his room, and the rest were in storage. I placed the vinyl on the floor, secured the locks, walked outside, and shut the gate. A junkie ghost on the closest corner flashed a hand signal to another up the block, and they all scattered. In seconds, a police car prowled around the corner. Akin started up the van, and we rolled back to the club.
After being frisked by security and waved inside, I searched for Spooky in the nightlife again. The promoter can't pay him until four now, so it's going to be a long night. But when four rolled around, and still no bank, I had to split – my eyes and ears had been hammered to the limit. I left Spooky sitting in the strobe lights, looking tired and bored, as a drag queen contingent arrived on platform Pumas and the DJ played on....
The music information flow is channeled through small, indie record stores throughout the city. On any weekend you can stop by a spot like Rock and Soul on Seventh Avenue and see DJs from all over – Jersey, Brooklyn, the boogie-down Bronx – making the stops to keep updated on current releases. A turntable is set up in the corner, and DJs make needle drops to decide if they need the cuts for their mixes. A needle drop is just that, an arbitrary drop in the groove that lasts no more than a few seconds – the fraction of time it takes to decide whether it's vital vinyl or not.
Standing amid the rows of pressed vinyl as the DJs crowded the turntable and dropped fragmented groove on top of groove, I broke out in a hot sweat from the information overload. Hundreds of records are released each week, and keeping up with the flow demands a tremendous amount of time. Watching the DJs at work, I began to see them as information filters, sorting through the overwhelming flow of records and extracting the relevant data. The technology needed to make records – samplers, mixers, pressing machines – is now available to anyone who can front the (relatively) small amount of money to get it. This decentralization of the recording industry has spawned several micro recording plants that make break beats and grooves pressed into 50 copies, packaged in white sleeves devoid of cover art, and unceremoniously released into the pool. There is no way to keep up with all this music – unless you make it a full-time job.
I was at Rock and Soul Records one Saturday watching a DJ and his crew filter through the latest releases. The DJ was stationed at the turntable, needle dropping through an ever-increasing stack of vinyl that his two-man crew was assembling for him. While he worked the turntable, he called out titles to his crew, who pulled them from the racks and brought them over, taking the rejected records back to their places. The DJ's eyes stared deep into the grooves of the spinning record as his finger worked the needle, chopping the info into bass-heavy sound bites. In his mind a myriad of connections to his own information base were being made, to see which grooves might be relevant to his mix.
He ended with about 50 records that made the cut and took them to the register, where he peeled the couple hundred dollars off his dead president file. I caught up with him there to ask a few questions. His name was DJ Tasheen, and he's been in the mix since back in the day.
"DJs have grown throughout the years," he told me when I asked him how he's seen the scene change. "Back then there wasn't that many. You only heard of a few, like Grand Master Flash ... and DJs around the way, from around the neighborhood. You [had] DJs in everybody's neighborhood, bringing the equipment outside in the summertime and playing their music."
This was in the '70s, before hip hop broke in with the concept of cutting and scratching. The records were mostly disco and dance music, and the DJ's prime function was to amass a dope collection and blend it all together in a smooth flow. When Tasheen was 11, he served as album boy for his uncle, a neighborhood DJ who would plug into a streetlight outside and spin block parties. It was like an apprenticeship; he managed the files and located records for the DJ. After about six months as album boy, Tasheen started mixing himself and has been doing it ever since – for fifteen years. He practices about five hours a day and makes the step into Manhattan from Jersey City every two weeks, picking up about 50 records a trip.
"Five seconds at the most," he told me, explaining his listening method at the store. "You got to be fast. You can't just go up there and try and listen to a whole song. I skip through the records first, see all the different types of break downs.... And once I do that, I know whether or not it's going to kick at the party."
When Tasheen and his crew took off, I hung around for a while and talked with a few other DJs – one of them a guy who only spins at home. This is not unusual; many DJs never see the light of disco night. Tired of jacking equipment around and dealing with the Scene, they are unknown masters who spend their nights in solo navigation of the Mix, purely for the love of it, weaving sonic tapestries that dissipate into the urban air, never to be heard again.
I found myself heavy in the Scene later that night, when Spooky and I went to check out a hip hop party at The Grand. It's a large Saturday night jam, with loud promo that pulls in a sizeable crowd of stylers and beautiful people.
There are different kinds of clubs, with different purposes for their existence, and this party at The Grand was a mainstream, money-making gig. The organizers look for a DJ who is going to pull a happening crowd with some money to throw around, and the records should provide a soundtrack conducive to this. At a mainstream club, you aren't going to find much experimentation – it doesn't fit into the mix. The DJ at The Grand was blending beats, providing a smooth continuum of all the latest hip hop hits, tapping into the classic collection every once in a while and keeping the dance floor moving. There wasn't any cutting or scratching, no new breaks, nothing that would challenge anyone's ears.
Hip hop is now a part of the mainstream. Certain hardcore elements of it will always remain underground, but as a concept it is now intertwined with the fabric of American culture. It is hip hop that has made the DJ a prominent figure in our cultural landscape – a figure whose influence today extends further than the realm of the boom-bap, onto the cutting edge of many music fronts.
Looking around The Grand, at the models and players sparkling and smiling in the club mix, I realized how far DJs have come from the burned-out bomb zone of the South Bronx. And in the coming millennium, this change will only intensify, as we depend on them in increasing degrees to sift through the escalating music-information sound rush. Playing our culture's mediums on the streets or in the studios, DJs will continue to make the connections through past, present and future, through techno, hip hop, dance hall, acid, through turntables, mixers, samplers, and studios, through cutting, scratching, transforming, blending, and creating entirely new sounds.
And you know the mix will be deep.
