Even a postmodern renaissance man like Paul Miller can come down with a case of information overload.
Better known as DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid, possessing a resumé that could pass for a small-town phone book, Miller is — get ready — a musician, author, academic, musicologist, filmmaker, conceptual artist and, of course, philosopher. He's a guy you can routinely find, in his words, "answering three phones, checking e-mail and listening to the music for a project," all at the same time.
Yet there was Miller just a few weeks ago in remote Costa Rica. "I went hang-gliding," he says by phone from his New York studio, a hint of rapture in his voice. "Just up in the air, floating in the current, it was amazing. The pure sense of floating — that is peace. There was nobody around, no paved roads."
This in no way suggests that Miller is considering monkdom on some yonder mountain (although he does muse during our interview about getting out of New York). "I like people too much," he says when asked, playfully, whether he could enter a life of solitude. "I'm too interested in humanity."
Miller comes to USF to do a presentation he calls Rhythm Science, which is in many ways a "conventional lecture/demonstration," says his long-time manager Stephen Cohen. "He shows video clips from his laptop. It has a classroom feel to it. He's a great classroom guy, entertaining and informative."
Miller describes his presentation in more cerebral terms: "The basic idea is to look at digital media and how it interacts with other technology and contemporary art. It's about how software has changed creativity."
Miller's 2004 book Rhythm Science is a collection of his essays, many of them high-handed manifestos that contain sentences like, "Rhythm science is a forensic investigation of sound as a vector of coded language that goes from the physical to the informational and back again." (Discuss.)
There is little doubt that Miller, 36, is one smart dude. There's also little doubt that a portion of that brainpower goes to perpetuating the DJ Spooky brand. Miller intuitively understands the techno-marketplace, how to construct and perpetuate the Subliminal Kid persona (lifted from the William S. Burroughs novel Nova Express), how to position himself for club DJ gigs in Mexico City as well as campus lectures and art openings and recording deals and book projects. The Kid gets to stick his finger in all sorts of pies. He's got a bit of the trickster in him.
Miller does not have a purist corpuscle in his body. "There's a lot of conservatism out there, even in supposedly progressive realms like electronic music," he says. "Me? I'm omnivorous."
His sample-delic art is almost exclusively built from pre-existing source materials — the mix. His Rebirth of a Nation project reconfigures the 1915 D.W. Griffiths film Birth of a Nation into a commentary on the original film's overt racism. When Miller set out to collaborate with avant-garde jazz musicians Matthew Shipp, William Parker and others on the 2002 album Optometry, he ended up getting the players together for a "quick huddle, and then I asked them to give me bits and pieces. Pretty much no one was in the same room at the same time. I went through the material with a fine-tooth comb, picked clips and edited them until it made sense."
Miller's ticket to ride on the information highway was punched early. His father, the dean of Howard University's law school, died when Paul was 3; his son inherited his vast record collection. "We're all sponges when we're kids," Spooky says. "Some kids eat their crayons. I just happened to have records instead of crayons."
He grew up in the DuPont Circle section of Washington, D.C. where a lot of ambassadors lived. His mother, Rosemary Reed Miller, who owned a clothing boutique, "was a political progressive," he says. "It's a funny thing — I never had to rebel against my mom. She was like, 'Hey, try this.' Most kids' parents lay down the law. Mine was, 'As long as it's not death, doom and destruction …' It was like, 'There are no real rules here. Just don't blow up the house.'"
Miller became a fan of go-go music, a style of rolling, call-and-response funk indigenous to D.C., but he didn't roam the tough neighborhoods in one of the blackest cities in America. "My best friend was the kid of the Argentinian ambassador," Miller says with a chuckle. "Once we snuck into the embassy and jumped into the pool."
He attended Bowdoin College in Maine and earned degrees in philosophy and French literature. After establishing himself as a prime mover in the "illbient" electronica scene in New York, Miller grew branches of endeavor and then branches upon those branches.
A particularly fruitful sprout happened just weeks ago when Miller performed at the Luanda Triennial in Angola, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. "The city [Luanda] is an ex-war zone after 20 years of tribal war, and you need a special visa to go in," he explains. "There are all kinds of people there with their legs blown off by landmines, little kids with guns. Three thousand young Africans came out to the ruins of a fortress on the outskirts of Luanda. I projected images onto the ruins."
Given Miller's thinky take on just about everything, I wondered if the commercial hip-hop community was wary of him. "Yeah," he says with a touch of rue. "Some people are very conservative. I'm not. I'm an open spirit. At the same time — ghetto life, keeping things real, I get that. But I'm not from the ghetto. I grew up in a household where women were respected. I've worked with Chuck D, Killah Priest from Wu-Tang. These are intellectuals, not knuckleheads. There's a rapper from Miami, can't recall his name, whose songs are mostly about dealing cocaine. It's safe to say I'm not gonna be in his demographic."
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2007.