DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid aka Paul D. Miller makes you, me, and 99% of critics look lazy. He looked slightly sheepish as Jess Atwood-Gibson, co-organizer of the "See Hear Symposium on Sound Art & Modernity" introduces his keynote address with a long list of accomplishments: B.A.s in both Philosophy and French literature, writings ranging from abstruse po-mo literary theory to sci-fi novels, a slew LP releases in the past decade, art shows at MoMA and the Venice Bienniale inter alia, and more collaborations (Thurston Moore, Matthew Shipp, Arto Lindsay, Lee "Scratch" Perry) than I have friends. With such a list, however, comes a backlash. The envious instinct to believe that the emperor has no clothes.

Following his nimbly scattershot keynote address, in which Miller jumped between Derrida and Fela Kuti and spun Pete Rock against a recording of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, an assorted set of disgruntled guest lecturers, professors, and art students launched a verbal assault whose ferocity bordered on aesthetic rioting. Though he responded calmly and intelligently, I felt the urge to draw out the underlying meanness of spirit in the attacks. Searching online, I discovered that Paul D. Miller's own writings responded better than my own, so I have taken his cue. What follows is a remix/rewording of assorted interviews, criticisms, and reviews; his quotations of others and others' quotations of him, all thrown together to form a single narrative, in the spirit of a remix. This introduction alone contains "my" words, the rest is cut & paste.

With respect to the personal, sit-down, "what's he really like" details that readers tend to look for in interviews, my only report is that he was beatifically calm in the passenger seat while parking in the Chapel Street area sent me to new heights of road rage, he offered to buy me an coffee before I could play over-polite sycophantic interviewer and buy him one. And when I asked for an espresso he got me a double.

I'm trying to express the view of thought as a collage narrative.¹ So I guess you could say the entire planet is my mixing board. I just don't have enough memory to hold it all in my brain so I have to flip into the sampler.² These days, I'm now beginning to think of my mind as an interlocking series of archives, just fragments of piles of snippets of CDs and records and movie clips, and even this conversation will be just another digital clip.³ I get dizzy with all the voices and potential mixes that I could make. It's infinite, and it's heady...there's no sound that I can't think of, and in a sense all the technology that I use to make my art is corporate.² Nothing happens in a vacuum: This fact is expressed and externalized through DJing. Making music, you're never located in a vacuum, but you are part of an intertwinedness of influences.⁴ To me, music is ALWAYS a metaphor. It's an open signifier. It's something that can be molded and shaped. It's invisible material that is utterly malleable. It's not fixed or cast in stone.⁵

Well, would you play [the Pete Rock vs. Joyce mix] in a nightclub?⁶

Concerning the philosophical or theoretical component in my music, I do know that the average kid from the street probably is not interested in Derrida's idea of deconstruction while he operates his turntables - but the approach is obviously there, using musical techniques.⁴ Most of the time, it's an unconscious thing. You don't have someone standing in a room saying, "Oh, my sensory perceptions are being changed."⁵

I find your lecture very frustrating.⁶

It's subconscious or beneath the average threshold of perception. If it was made conscious and formal, it would be really boring.⁵ Worst of all, Spooky (gasp) has the audacity to pretend to be an intellectual.⁷ [passing out records] I always find that people tend to relate to things better when they hold them in their hands.¹

It's disempowering: recognizing the samples in your mix becomes a kind of insiderism.⁶

You have a kind of "literacy" in the musical area, too: The more you have heard, the easier it is to find links and to recognize quotations. But the difference is, that people find a much more emotional approach towards music. If you don't like a book, you put it aside after the first few pages. Everybody can use my songs for his or her own samples of course I won't sue anybody!⁴ I think that little by little everyone's gonna start creating one's own instrument.⁸

You're treating this humorously and using it as a commercial for yourself.⁶

It's nice to have a sense of humor about origin, since there is no real beginning, middle or end.³ I'm interested in the Duchampian spirit of irreverence towards the found objects around us.¹

This doesn't promote any real political or social change.⁶

As an artist my role is to be ahead of political ideas and spread them among a generation that is not interested in politics.⁸ My mom used to say that the difference between a fool and someone who is foolish is that the foolish can learn Amiri Baraka, as with me, was constantly at war with conventional, conservative viewpoints on how African American culture could, would and should unfold.⁹

I find this offensive.⁶

Read: Spooky is not doing what a black male behind two turntables ought to be doing.⁷ When you start talking about a medium's "purity" you know there's a lot of fracture points. There is never any purity.³ We no longer have roots, we have aerials.¹⁰ You're picking people who represent traditionally perceived roles for black people Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, the servants, the black athlete, using the role people are comfortable seeing blacks in to help sell a product, but don't use blacks in roles that are expanding the parameters, that are putting blacks in new and in different settings.¹¹ Baraka's take on a lot of the crap that passed for criticism then could just as easily be used to describe what's going on today.⁹ The accompanying illustration [of critic Adam Heimlich's polemic in the New York Press] renames Spooky "DJ Stoopit" and depicts him looking baffled and dumbfounded by the turntable technology in front of him, reduced to a late-capitalist version of the innocent primitive bewildered by the colonial magic of mechanical reproduction.⁷ Yea, he hath no bananas.¹² Heimlich might as well have cited British critic Clive Bell, who (as Simon Frith notes in his new book Performing Rites) wrote in 1921, "Niggers can be advanced artists without any gift more singular than high spirits: so why drag in intellect?"⁷ Given the length and breadth of Adam Heimlich's unreality quotient, where would you rather be? Reading some bullshit, or checking out the world outside of the conventional constraints of how people like him function?⁹

At the end of the day, the music speaks louder than any individual voice, and basically the music is saying: the old boundaries are no longer existent. The present moment has been deleted. Any sound can be you.² These days, there are no rules about how to make a mix.⁷ Everything is permitted.¹³ There is no precise definition of the American identity...such a definition would be useless.¹¹ DJs are all people who are alienated from the conventional hip hop situation, and we've each tried to create our own world.³ It's for someone who doesn't relate to the world as it currently stands.⁵ It's hybridity made into science.³

Art as we know it is dead and has been replaced by science.^l4