Paul D. Miller is a professor of music at two universities, a magazine editor, an author, a visual artist, an app developer, and a political organizer.
Not least of all, Miller is also entering his 20th year performing as DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid. His work under the moniker includes a massive solo discography and countless collaborations. For Miller, however, there is little internal separation between the artist and academic.
“Each project helps me understand things better,” Miller explains. Of course, these “things” reach far beyond the scope that most DJs feel comfortable treading: the Spooky lexicon encapsulates musical dissertations on everything from climate change to quantum physics.
His recent release, Rebirth of a Nation, is an original composition of his performed by the legendary Kronos Quartet. The album serves as a companion and soundtrack to Miller’s fully-realized visual remix of D.W. Griffith’s polarizing silent film Birth of a Nation. A project in continuous growth since 2008, Rebirth‘s resonance and commentary deepen with each new presentation. When the remix was performed at MoMA in 2009, President Obama’s first term was in its infancy, providing Miller with an incredibly potent opportunity to juxtapose the historic moment against the events outlined in Griffith’s propagandist film. Rebirth‘s release is auspiciously timed: it’s been 100 years since the 1915 debut of Griffith’s original. The move doesn’t feel cheap, though. Rather than cash in on the timing, Miller is most interested what those hundred years’ distance means to the American psyche.
“It’s more a meditation on current political issues than a historical thing,” Miller clarifies. “It’s eerie, [as Rebirth] has been a solid chunk of my career in a weird way. It’s never something that I’d ever thought I’d be doing: going around DJing a KKK film. But the idea is, as much as possible, to show that this is now. It’s kind of a political statement from the viewpoint of sound, but also I want people to think of history as an ongoing process. [Griffith’s] original was meant to be a call to arms for white supremacy and the remix is more of a destabilizing, saying ‘Wait a minute, if that’s the case, after 100 years of American cinema, then what’s the aftermath?'”
When viewed in 2015, after the deaths of countless unarmed people of color at the hands of police officers, Rebirth speaks volumes. By touring the film at different intervals, through the end of Obama’s presidency and the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, Miller provides audiences a much-needed continuous point of reflection.
“America is the place of the Uncanny. Your policeman, your KKK, your militias, your anti-immigrant xenophobia; a lot of that is eerily resonant with the film. Disenfranchisement, fake elections, corruption — the list goes on. Griffith unassumingly put that on the shoulder of black Americans and you realize that there are only white actors in blackface, it’s a pretty searing reverse mirror image of Americana. As much as possible, I wanted to be the mirror of that mirror. To say it’s not in the rearview, but it’s now.”
Mirroring penetrates the bulk of the remix’s visuals. Characters share desperate glance with themselves, while others fold in and completely disappear in moments of crisis. The effect is unnerving, but it also invokes the sense that these people are living in two distinct Americas. Historically, they were — but there is deeper artistic meaning in this framing.
“The good news and the bad news is that this is a crazy art project,” he explains. “I think art should be a mirror that you hold up to society, not just to show what’s going on but to show what could be and has been. Art is a non-linear mirror. As we move into the 21st century, we’ll be seeing a lot of non-linear loops. Loops within loops. You know when you hold up a mirror to a mirror and you see these weird corridors? Now we’re not just holding up a mirror to a mirror, but a cellphone up to a cellphone and seeing all these different permutations of the digital possibility that our moment exists in. The eerie thing is, whether it’s the Iraq War (which was the biggest fiction in American history), one could argue that these kids of myths and stories are still very prevalent and strong. That’s why we need new storytellers, new methods of conveying difficult truths.”
The idea of storytelling is important to Miller; it comes up multiple times in our conversation. He explains how stories like Birth of a Nation eventually reach mythic status, transforming a work of fiction into a moral benchmark. “It’s about the politics of perception. Birth of a Nation essentially set the tone for how people portrayed corrupt elections, political campaigns, racial politics and of course, sexual aggression and fear. [It’s all] still there, to this day.
“To me, reality today is the cinema,” he continues. “Reality is cinematic, at this point. People are conditioned by multimedia context. Your average American watches between five and seven hours of video a day. And on top of that, it’s all on their cell phone or tablets, so when you see people walking down the street, they’ve got these earbuds in. So multimedia has kind of displaced traditional media, but there’s still a cinematic quality to that. I think it’s really important to contextualize this all, to give people better tools to pull apart the stories of our crazy contemporary reality.”
One sticking point in our conversation becomes the balance of who holds the power of myth making. Who is allowed, either through access or support, to tell the stories that end up becoming future tenets? And what will these stories look like?
“We’re at an interesting crossroads,” Miller explains, “where the power of various computational processors and microchips and hardware are getting smaller and more compact. Things that would have taken me an entire studio to do have been democratized. People are able to make their own films, their own albums. Even Miley Cyrus, who is one of the biggest pop stars going right now, her newest album cost only $50,000 to make. And whether or not you like her work, I’m intrigued that the economics have come down so drastically. So when you download an app, you’re not just getting music: you’re getting an entire cultural relationship to software and ideology as operating systems.
“For apps and mobile media, it’s all about tools,” he continues. “I wanted to make Rebirth of a Nation a tool for deconstructing and pulling apart the narrative. We’re telling ourselves a story right now — global destruction, environmental collapse — and nobody gives a fuck. We’re ants marching over the cliff. So I think artists have a role to give people better stories, or different stories.”
While Miller is confident in the strength of the counterculture’s tools, as he’s been successfully utilizing them to create new stories for two decades now, he still faces challenges of breaking out of the echo chamber. His audiences tend to be pre-groomed for his cultural outreach (his magazine Origin is distributed almost exclusively at Whole Foods and his books are published by MIT Press), leaving Miller with the Sisyphean task of finding new ways to engage the uninitiated.
“I try as much as possible to exist in a lot of different contexts and mediums,” he explains. “But there’s only 24 hours in the day. Being an artist, a writer, and a musician, you have to maintain your presence in each of those fields. I’m on my fifth book and am one of MIT’s top selling authors, I’ve had 15 million people download the mixer app, [but] we’re still a drop in the bucket compared to a crazy well-funded right wing campaign.”
In spite of the limitations of his personal reach, Miller remains optimistic: “The right wing lost the culture wars. There’s no one who wants to live in a right wing lunatic stream. But the problem is that there’s a lot of layers of non-linearity, so people are presented with ideas of a consumer lifestyle. And there’s a lot of things implicit in that where yeah, you can have a TV and a car and 2.5 kids in the suburbs, but the whole planet is dying.”
The equation is two-sided, though. No matter how much Miller puts out there, as Spooky or otherwise, engagement is ultimately up to the observer. Cultural liberation becomes a choice that each potential audience member needs to make. “It depends on how deep you feel like getting into the mirage, and most people are in a media trance. I don’t say that as a negative or positive. It’s just the way things are. I firmly believe, though, that things can change. It just depends on how you frame it. If you put it in plain reason, I think people will respond.”
So, we know we’re at a crossroads, as we have been for over a century. But what plane does Miller see our current political landscape inhabiting in the grand scheme?
“The whole planet needs to hit the reset button, but they’re not going to,” Miller laments. “So this careening merry-go-round of madness and wars. It’s just crazy loops. It’s worse than fiction. I remember when I was a kid, Bill Clinton won after the first Bush. Now you have Jeb Bush and Hilary Clinton running. It’s really hard to let the future leap through, because people can’t let go of certain aspects of the past. There’s brand name recall. People are just on autopilot. I’m worried we’re going to see another cycle of disappointing political circumstances.”
For Miller, progress is best represented as a Hydra. While Rebirth focuses greatly on unpacking the racial politics of American culture, he is wary of the intense hold that race has over our psych:
“There’s gotta be a better way. Our society is this huge maze to keep people in hyper-consumer, hyper-capitalist psychology. So they’re not able to see better paths or narratives. […] I wonder how art and media can create a counterpoint to create better awareness. That’s what I hope Rebirth of a Nation is about, because racial politics in the US is deep and people aren’t willing to let go of it. It’s toxic. Genetically speaking, we’re all very similar, but we have these delusions of difference and they’re very marketable. At the end of the day, though, it’s just an illusion. Birth of a Nation was meant to capitalize on that because they knew fear is a big market. To sell people on scary shit, to have enough violence or explosions, you’ll have a big movie. Birth of a Nation set the tone for that. So by applying DJ technique to it, I wanted to break it into components to say, ‘Look at these LEGO blocks. Is this the structure you want to build?’ I edited every scene, took slivers and bits and pieces, and left a reasonable coherent sense narrative. But it’s still a grim indictment of racial politics. It’s important to remember that racial politics are deeply embedded in the DNA of America’s imagination. And I want to dig into why we think of racial politics as the template of all contemporary politics.”
“You have to think,” he concludes, “there’s no set definition of how we engage history and memory. We’re always revising history and moving through it. That’s what DJ culture is: it’s playing with samples and moments.”