DJ Spooky And The Rebirth of A Nation

Date: 6/01/2004
Author: Larry Queen

Released in 1915, Birth of A Nation elicited furious outcries in response to
the film's derisive portrayal of African-Americans and the valiant light
cast on the knights in white, the clansmen of the Ku-Klux Klan - "brave" men
who hid behind sheets. Eighty-nine years later it's making its way back to
the South, but with a different agenda, name, and new look.

DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) will stage the US Premier of Rebirth of A
Nation, a reimagined take on the film, to the Spoleto Festival, in
Charleston, SC. I find it interesting that he's bringing the project to the
south.
"Yeah, I got a whole bunch of feedback about doing this in South
Carolina," admits Miller with a laugh as he walks through the streets of
Manhattan talking on his cell phone. "I think the important thing is to get
people to think outside the box on this kind of stuff. You know, multiple
interpretations of history is what my remix of the film is about it."

The film is based on one part of a trilogy of plays written by Rev. Thomas
Dixon Jr., who was a former Baptist minister from North Carolina. The
play, written in1905, was called The Clansman (Originally, so was the
film), and was the second installment in the trilogy, which in full was: The
Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, The Clansman:
An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, and The Traitor.

The film plays to perennial fears about interracial unions - marriage, sex
(Hmm, sound familiar? Think gay marriage). Also the fear of empowering
a race of people in minority to the white majority - that those in suffrage
would rise up and destroy the comfortable life the majority had long
enjoyed. The film vilified blacks and glorified the Klan as would be saviors
of the White South. And, this was a successful film at the box office! In
fact, for two decades it was the most profitable film ever made until the release
of Snow White and The Seven Dwarves in 1937. That says a lot about who
we were as a nation then, but, more importantly, the question that begs to
be asked is, who are we now?

That is precisely what Miller is asking by creating this dialogue that
attempts to reconcile our history with what may be our future. His vision
for this project is in direct opposition to the agenda of the original - his is
not to rewrite history, but rather to juxtapose images from the film against
imagery from other films to encourage further introspection of who we are
as a society in today's world of multi-culturalism.

"Basically, I apply the idea of DJ remix culture to the actual film, and put
it in the context of American history," he says. "I was thinking how the film
was used to show one version of history, and then to have a DJ to remix
the whole idea of what the film stands for."
"It's a full-scale project; you know, editing from the ground up, and
sequencing," he continues. "I composed the music for the soundtrack and
I'm remixing that and remixing the film live, so it's all about contemporary
classical music and the art side of Hip Hop. The soundtrack is going to be
more of an ambient, blues thing, kind of based mainly around Robert
Johnson's early phonograph blues - the early forty-fives. Basically, the
idea is to apply DJ culture to contemporary cinema by using the prism of
the past. America's culture has a strange amnesia. I always think of
cinema as our collective storytelling, you know."

And Miller is a storyteller. His writing has appeared in many publications
- Raygun, Artforum, The Village Voice, The Source, and Paper Magazine
to name just a few. Now he's a novelist.

"I have my first book coming out soon," he says with some well-deserved
pride. "It's called Rhythm Science. It's on MIT Press, and it's coming out
now. It's about DJ culture and contemporary art."

He's also a visual artist whose work has been featured in The Whitney's
Biennial (2000), Museum of Contemporary Art (2001) in Sydney, and many
others. In fact, he says Deejaying was never his primary path in art.

"I'm mainly a writer and artist, and deejaying was always meant to be kind
of a hobby," says Miller, his voice elevating in order to be heard over the
din of traffic, as he tries to cross the street on his way to have lunch.
"It took over though, and now I'm kind of going back to my roots as an artist
in a way that allows me to be outside normal DJ culture."
The book actually has a CD that accompanies it in the packaging.

"The basic idea was to think about all these different, floating aesthetic
situations that I do, and try and juggle them in a way that was like a mix
CD," he continues. "So, there is a mix of literature; there is a mix of
music, and there is a kind of conceptual framework around how DJ culture has
kind of absorbed a lot of what was going on in the art world. On the mix
CD, I have a lot of really rare spoken word stuff from, like, James Joyce,
and Gertrud Stein mixed with electronic music."

Whether it's as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, or as Paul D. Miller he has
room to roam artistically through writing, multi-media art, writing music,
or collaborating with a vast swath of other musicians that include everyone
from Yoko Ono, and Thurston Moore to Kool Keith and Killa Priest to
Iannis Xenakis.

"For me it's always been a conceptual thing. You know, I just wanted to
carve some space as an artist to be able to do different things. Doing the
same thing over and over would be a real drag."