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[accordion playing, typewriter keys clacking]
[music fades out, sound of typewriter carriage return]
Miller: And for me, the idea right now is to say that you have art and sampling and DJ culture,
there is no boundaries anymore. Anything goes.
So the idea of looking at how theater and sound—'cause we're talking about communication, we're talking about literacy,
we're talking about new ways of storytelling—all of that comes home to roost with this idea of "the mix."
So what I want to do for a quick minute is take you guys back in time for a second to a little bit of what we call "old school."
This is going to take a second to load.
One second. All right. This is me in Japan at the Mount Fuji Festival
and I'm talking about Jean Cocteau, for a second while the film loads.
And while it's loading, I just want you to think about what would happen if you had a cell phone DJ battle,
'cause we're eventually going to do a DJ battle based on the whole iPhone application I've been developing.
All right, that's loading. One second.
Okay. All right. One second.
We can just have, you know, a little breakdancing. Hold on.
[baby crying in background] Wow, baby is hearing the hip-hop there.
All right, one second. I want to show you one of the first recorded MC battles.
Okay, there we go.
All right, one second. [audio from MC battle video begins]
Video Voiceover: [applause from video crowd] Jam Master Jay from Run-DMC!
Yo, you all rocked it. All right. Well let me tell you something.
There are two other fresh MCs in the house: Special K and Kool Moe Dee of the Treacherous Three.
What's up? You know it, you know it.
Now there's word out that there's a battle brewing
between Run-DMC and Special K and Kool Moe Dee.
So I think I'm just gonna back out. Word.
Kool Moe Dee: One two, one two. On the mic at this time the coolest of the cool, they call me Moe Dee in the place to be.
Miller: [pauses video] By the way, just for basic reference, that's Vincent Gallo.
I don't know if anyone knows the actor. But he's in behind—that's when he was twenty. [audience laughter, video resumes]
Kool Moe Dee: Jam Master Jay! [beat drops, rap battle begins] One for the treble, two for the bass / come on Jam Master let's rock the place.
I'm a dominator in my field / And when it comes to rap other rappers yield.
'Cause when it comes to rap, I'm the epitome / The rappers' idol and my title is Kool Moe Dee.
Run: They call me iller than iller, there's no one chiller / It's not Michael Jackson and this is not Thriller.
One def rapper, cold know I can hand / I'm Run from Run-DMC, like Kool from Kool & the Gang.
Special K: Well I'm one of the chosen few / So when you need that lift just to get you through
All you have to do is say Special K / And help is on the way.
D.M.C.: Well I'm D.M.C. in the place to be / And the place to be is with D.M.C.
And by the time I'm through you will agree / No other MCs rock the house like me.
Kool Moe Dee: Well I'm the coolest of the cool, they call me Moe Dee / It ain't another rapper who's as bad as me.
I got a high-powered voice, I'm the party peoples' choice / I got so many rhymes you gotta take invoice.
Run: Now party people I'm so happy I don't know what to do / 'cause I'm the MC with the rock, cold down with the crew.
Rhyme from Africa to France and then to Kalamazoo / And every place that I play, I hear a "yeah" and a "woo!"
Special K: Well I know that when a party is packed / you need a guide to show you when and where to react.
You need a motivator, that means you'll need me / Special K, huh, from the Treacherous Three.
D.M.C.: D.M.C., that's who I am / I love to perform but I'm not a ham.
My mother said, "Do it." I said, "Yes ma'am." / And I can do it 'cause I know I can.
Kool Moe Dee: Well don't touch that dial, just sit tight. Special K: If you liked that battle, huh, that was light.
Kool Moe Dee: I know you're gonna love this next act. Special K: 'Cause we'll have Shannon when we get back.
Kool Moe Dee and Special K [unison]: Graffiti rock!
Video crowd [chanting]: Graffiti rock! Graffiti rock! Graffiti rock! Graffiti rock!
Miller: All right. [laughs, live audience cheering and murmuring] So isn't that great?
Old school, you know. You gotta love those sunglasses, right?
It brings back—I was about two years old when that was going on, but nonetheless, the fashion statements, right?
So what I want to do is just kind of get you guys into thinking about that was not only about storytelling,
because they had to walk you through the rhymes, but it was about an active social critique of the people in the room.
What we call contested social space.
So in the theory and literary world, instead of an MC battle you would call it a "dialectical process." [audience chuckling]
And what I want to try and figure out over the next couple riffs here
is just how people think about sound and memory.
So the first record to really be made of strictly other records was pretty much Grandmaster Flash's 1981 "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel,"
where essentially he took a whole bunch of other people's music and just played it all the way through.
He didn't clear it; it just was a continuous DJ mix, and they put it out as his record.
So there you have it: Grandmaster Flash meets William S. Burroughs
with a little dash of Thomas Edison thrown in the mix.
So the boombox that you're seeing there is a kind of machine statement.
Back in the day it was a portable sound system, and that was something that would be able to think of portability as a basic social space.
I.e. you were able to move with the soundtrack wherever you were, people would set up, people would start breakdancing, hang out.
The outdoor scene was always how the art form was made to evolve.
So "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" and the boombox. Now if we want to go back in time a little bit,
one of my favorite composers is a gentleman named Stravinsky, and he has a great phrase where he says,
"A good composer does not imitate. He steals."
So if you compare Stravinsky to Flash, you can even see a very funny situation
where Stravinsky remixed the American anthem and got put in jail in 1940.
So that's his mug shot. So I guess we can say he's a gangsta composer, right?
So the pun here is it not only used to be considered very bad to consider remixing,
and the American anthem was meant to be a very specific sound that you were not allowed to ever change,
but of course anyone in the room could probably hear [Jimi] Hendrix's American anthem and realize that that was something that was a signature sound of the 1960s.
Changing and transforming a memory that many millions of people know of.
So in one era you'd be put in jail, in the other era you'd be on the stage at Woodstock.
Now the idea here is that a composer is an inventor of music,
and the reason I'm using Stravinsky is that he's very core DNA for 20th-century critique of both repetition and dissonance.
And of course you think about hip-hop, the idea of the riff, repetition is what makes a track work.
If it's too scrambled up, if it's too what they call "glitch music," it doesn't really work for certain specifics.
So I'm looking at that as kind of a bridge between what we call "high" versus quote-unquote "low" culture.
So speaking of "low," let's go back to the bass.
In 1915—and one of my favorite writers is a gentleman by the name of Luigi Russolo; he has a book called "The Art of Noises,"
or in Italian "L'Arte dei rumori"—and in 1915 what ended up happening is that he created this manifesto for noise.
And the book—The Art of Noise actually became a pop band in the '80s,
if anybody remembers the band The Art of Noise.
So the reason I'm using this as an example of the art of the sound system
is that essentially what ends up happening is he wanted to get rid of the band altogether.
The audience went into the show and there were all these loudspeakers playing crazy noises, and people got really pissed off and they started throwing bottles at them,
they'd take their shoes off and throw it at them. So this is like original punk rock circa 1915. [audience chuckles]
And the sound system and the idea of getting rid of the orchestra at that time was a really radical move for contemporary art.
So if you fast-forward to Jamaica in the 1960s,
by the time that comes along—like I was saying earlier, Stravinsky gets put in jail but Hendrix gets put on the Woodstock stage—
you have this idea of the sound system becoming a force in its own right.
So in Jamaica, what ended up happening is that they would record what they called "dub music,"
and reggae was coming out of this idea of the sound system so that you could have instrumental versions of songs that anyone could use.
Now on one hand this went to karaoke, believe it or not.
On the other hand, it went to hip-hop and techno and drum 'n' bass and dub and dubstep.
So the record, the instrumental version became far more important than the vocal because anyone could use it.
It democratized sound; it made sound open to anyone's voice.
So in the 1960s, guess what? A lot of the British rock bands like The Rolling Stones and, in the '70s,
The Clash, The Police—all of them were hanging out and going back and forth between Jamaica and England.
And what ended up happening is that The Rolling Stones even have houses now in Jamaica,
the idea of taking the bass and foregrounding it, making it much more a part of the track,
the really revolutionized the sound of rock in the late '60s throughout the '70s.
So as we now fast-forward to the 21st century: techno, hip-hop, all the main styles of the urban landscape
come out of this collision between reggae and the idea of the use of the studio as a compositional tool.
So the reason I'm focusing on the connection between
the avant-garde of 1915 and the art of noise versus this idea of bass minimalism
is it leads us to this idea of the art form of the remix.
Now the person who invented the concept of the remix is a gentleman by the name of King Tubby, and in the late '60s—
you can see him with a tape-editing machine where he would edit out voices of songs and have just the instrumental version with a little bit of sound effects.
And what ends up happening is having an instrumental version of the song and then playing it through a very large sound system
allowed him to have different MCs come in to sort of rhyme over the instrumental versions.
So reggae leads straight to dub,
and there's a great idea here of looking at dub as the origin of hip-hop: its bass minimalism,
taking certain very specific repetitive pieces, and having someone rhyme over them.
So contemporary storytelling is a theater of rhythm.
So the sound system becomes basically the DNA of how we think of hip-hop. DJ Cool Herc was Jamaican and he came to New York,
and he's considered to be the inventor of DJ culture along with Grandmaster Flash.
So the Jamaican aesthetic, bass minimalism, telling stories with sound,
telling stories with the idea of repetition: Now this is a global phenomenon.
Anywhere you go—Japan, Russia, China, Brazil—the electronic music that we all know comes out of the logic of the city
mixed with the logic of this idea of repetition.
So I'm going to wrap up in a second. I just want to ask one or two quick questions and then open it up to discussion.
How many out there have heard of Garrett A. Morgan? Anybody?
Okay. He's an African-American scientist who invented the street light as we know it,
but he's also one of the first black millionaires because he invented hair-straightening cream, you know? [audience laughs]
A lot of Jewish and black women would buy his hair-straightening cream and straighten their hair and so on.
You can see he's got a of Fonzworth Bentley style going, you know, OutKast kind of style.
[audience laughter] So basic vibe:
One day in 1923, he was on his way home and he saw a Model T Ford car hit a horse carriage in the middle of an intersection.
You have to remember American cities were built on the grid, but the grid was unregulated.
So you'd have motorcycles going, you'd have Model T Ford cars, you'd have horse carriages, you'd have people just randomly walking around.
So there was quite a few accidents. And he went home, he said,
"Why don't we regulate the movement of the urban landscape and create a way that people have to start and/or let other people pass?"
So that's the invention of the street light. So whenever you see the red-yellow-green of a street light,
you're thinking about a kind of choreography, a way of dancing with the city. Especially, say, for example,
if you go to Times Square and you can see millions of people move with the traffic and the flow of the patterns of the traffic,
you realize that the street lamp on every corner of the planet has now created a choreography of the landscape of the city.
So the street light: red, yellow, green, start, stop, slow down.
It's this idea of dancing with the city, moving with the urban flow,
and looking at how that becomes music. So that kind of choreography is, to me, an art form in its own right.
It looks at people like John Cage, it looks at people like Grandmaster Flash,
and it says, "We accept both." And we look at how people like William S. Burroughs or Jack Kerouac
have looked at this and made stories of collage, but updated it and made it become digital.
So for the 21st century, the new artists, the new storytellers are going to saying,
"How do we look at all of the history of these last century's recordings and make something new?"
So with that said, I'm going to wrap up and just say
it's a real pleasure to work with you all and I'm hoping we can have some great questions.
But before I do that, I just want to show you one last video clip,
which is a kind of sense of humor about how sampling has infected almost every aspect of the creative act.
Anybody out there heard of Danger Mouse? Audience Member: Yeah!
Miller: Okay. He's an old associate. So he came up with this idea of "The Grey Album,"
and what ends up happening with "The Grey Album" is that he took The Beatles album "The White Album"
and mixed it with Jay-Z's "The Black Album" and you've got "The Grey Album."
So a bizarre situation ends up happening there,
which is that he gets sued by The Beatles. And The Beatles have a lot of money,
so you never want to mess with The Beatles.
And what ends up happening with that is he just took the material down from the website and was like,
"Hey, sorry. You know, no money involved." But what ended up happening is that album kind of went throughout the web,
and a lot of people were copying it, downloading it, and exchanging it. And next thing you know,
they really couldn't lock it down. So leave me just kind of go, one second.
[sighs] So many files here.
You guys are getting a little tour through my hard drive.
Wow. All right, tell you what. Let me just play the example.
While I let it play, I'll show you—
so say, for example, if you're taking this
[plays audio clip from the song "Encore" off "The Grey Album"]
[clip continues, Jay-Z rapping over hook from The Beatles' song "Glass Onion"]
Miller: Okay.
So you hear a combination not only of just a small clip of The Beatles,
but what ends up happening—let's make a visual rendition of the same material just to give you a vibe.
And here we go. [video starts, sound of cheers on video]
[Beatles fans screaming]
[fans continue screaming, announcer introduces The Beatles]
["Encore" from "The Grey Album" plays over Beatles performance footage, fans continue cheering throughout rest of track]
John Lennon: [singing] Oh yeah. [phrase repeats throughout rest of track]
Kanye West and Jay-Z: [rapping] Now can I an encore, do you want more? / Cookin' raw with the Brooklyn boy.
So for one last time I need y'all to roar /
Now can I get an encore, do you want more? /
Cookin' raw with the Brooklyn boy / So one last time I need y'all to roar.
Jay-Z: [rapping] Who you know fresher than Hov, riddle me that? / The rest of y'all know where I'm lyrically at. /
Can't none of y'all mirror me back / Yeah hearin' me rap is like hearin' G rap in his prime. / I'm young H.O., rap's Grateful Dead /
Back to take over the globe, now break bread. / I'm in Boeing jets, Global Express / Out the country but the blueberry still connect. /
On the low, but the yacht got a triple deck / But when you young, what the *** you expect? /
Grand opening, grand closing / God damn your man Hov cracked the can open again. /
Who you gonna find doper than him with, no pen / Just draw off inspiration. /
Soon you gonna see you can't replace him / With cheap imitations for this generation.
Kanye West and Jay-Z: [rapping] Now can I get an encore, do you want more? / Cookin' raw with the Brooklyn boy / So one more time I need y'all to roar.
Jay-Z: [rapping] Look what you made me do, look what I made for you / Knew if I paid my dues, how will they pay you /
When you first come in the game they try to play you / If I owe you I'm blowin' you to smithereens /
***, take one for your team / And I need you to remember one thing, one thing: I came, I saw, I conquered / From record sales to sold out concerts /
So *** if you want this encore / I need you to scream till your lungs get sore /
Multiple Voices: [chanting] H.O.V.A., H.O.V.A., H.O.V.A., H.O.V.A.
[chanting and music continues]
[music fades out]
Miller: All right. So you can't say I don't have a sense of humor, right?
But what ends up happening right now is I think you're going to see a lot more of this hybridity,
a lot more of this collage mentality becoming the basic vocabulary of how kids are going up. And you can't regulate it,
you can't say this is the way you think it could be or should be. You have to be much more open. So as an artist, as a writer, as a musician,
these are things that I'm thinking about all the time. And I use video, I use sound, I use my cell phone, I use my iPad.
I'm always trying to figure out new strategies for creativity. So with that said and done,
I just want to say thank you for coming out today. I know you guys were probably thinking maybe this would be like me in the club going, "Oh!"
[chuckling in audience] Something like that. But I just want to kind of get a little bit technical on you all,
just kind of up the formula a little bit and just have everybody thinking about not only sampling as an art form in its own right,
but music as information.
So what I've done here is make a series of DJ mixes with my iPhone application
you can download for free if you go to djspooky.com.
There's lots and lots of stuff from The Beastie Boys, from Mos Def, all sorts of people, Damian Marley.
So feel free to download, remix, pass it around, and so on.
And I like to call it what I call "the gift economy."
And if you're interested in the Arctic project, there's lots of links and bits and pieces of the whole ice music project as well.
So the website's djspooky.com, and I just want to say thanks to you guys for coming out.
[applause]