We discovered that DJ Spooky was going to play a Friday night set at Birmingham’s best music venue, The Bottletree (try the veggie chili, but the entire menu is vegan-friendly, delicious and affordable.). It was the perfect cap to a week in which we had seen him screen a movie at the Civil Rights Institute and then, two days later, play with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. The Bottletree show promised to be a nice counterweight to the formal academic-style presentations of upper crust types and art gallery hipster stuff. Spooky promised that the Bottletree set would be “a dance party,” and we were looking forward to it.
Still, our expectations weren’t all booty-shaking and grinding. In fact, the event was promoted as a screening of the newest DJ Spooky project, The Secret Song. Here’s how it was described in the Bottletree advertising for the evening:
DJ Spooky’s new project “The Secret Song” isn’t really an album: it’s a manifesto about the place of history in our modern collaged, scrambled, sampla-delic to the core, mega info overloaded digital culture. With references stretching from Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” and John Maynard Keynes classic in the field of economics, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” over to hip hop’s relationship to psychoanalysis and a la Edward Bernays’ concept of the manufacture of consent– this new album is a groundbreaking meditation on hip hop and electronic musics relationship to philosophy, economics, and the science of sound in a world where the steady drumbeat of the financial meltdown has made music the last refuge of young people with less time and money. As DJ Spooky likes to say, “People – it’s ALL about economics.” Dig?
Interested? Us too! What’s more, according to Spooky’s site:
His new album ironically refers to a couple of things:
1) The “Secret Song” is made by failed ATM transactions, credit card fraud, and jazz motifs made into stock exchanges, and the futures market.
2) It is an album that says 2012 isnʼt the end of time, like the Mayan Calendar says – its just the end of the last Walmart.
3) The economics of music as the music industry as we know it goes through massive transformation – itʼs the new Stop and Shop of the Mind.
4) The Secret Song has tracks hidden in barcode throughout most of downtown Manhattan. Donʼt believe us? Swipe your Iphone anywhere you see the barcode…
AND
The title track is a story told in Mandarin by Jing Zhou, a young Chinese novelist and economist from Shanghai. DJ Spooky wrote the lyrics as a “free-style” based on remixing Adam Smith’s infamous concept of “the invisible hand” and asked Jing Zhou to translate the material into Mandarin.
AND there’s a DVD that goes along with the album:
As you might expect from an artist whose music was the orchestration was voted the “Best Political Video of 2007” on Youtube, thereʼs an extra twist in the situation. Following in the steps of The Cinematic Orchestraʼs rescore of Dziga Vertovʼs cinema classic “Man with A Camera” – DJ Spooky remixed and created new music for Vertovʼs rare first collage film “Kino-Glaz,” the “Cinema-Eye,” from 1921.
OK. So this wasn’t going to be your average club DJ set. We were thinking music, dancing, 1920s Russian cinema, global economics, Dirty South music, illbient, all of it.
It would be generous to say we got parts of that. Spooky took the stage after someone called DJ Coco tried (and failed) to get the crowd moving a bit. So Spooky came out and played some video segments on the screen behind him, only some of which seemed to have any relationship to the music at all. He played a video of Iranian street protests, weirdly, while some serious booty music was playing. You can forgive people for not exactly wanting to shake it to Ludacris while Iranian police bloody the heads of green-shirted teenagers. Sure, this created some dissonance. That might have been fine except that it didn’t seem like it was the desired effect.
In fact, it didn’t seem like the video material had been chosen intentionally at all. And lots of it was incomplete. One piece he showed that we loved was a John Sutherland 1957 cartoon made for the New York Stock Exchange. We’d embed it, but WordPress still has problems embedding Archive.org videos. Looking up this video led us to an earlier Sutherland toon. Twenty-three skiddoo! (and while we’re on the subject, here’s an amazing one I found when the above stuff got me looking around at the animation produced by the right wing Arkansas school, Harding College. Love that public domain!)
But if video of police beatdowns and black and white cartoons about the stock market aren’t going to get random Birmingham hipsters dancing, what will? How about turning off the rest of the crowd at the start of the set by saying in your introductory remarks that we are about to experience “New York City versus Alabama.” Um, OK. I guess we’re like, against you or something. Or how about playing some T-Pain that we could all hear at any of the downtown crappy dance clubs? At least DJ Coco played some Blackalicious. Or how about saying, “How many of ya’ll have been to India?” and then staring out into the sea of unraised hands. Nice. Way to make us feel cultured. Maybe we can’t all afford to go to India, so how about you fill us in and do more than just play a single (admittedly awesome) Bhangra trance song?
Once Spooky had run through all his video shorts, he started talking to us about his iphone app. We don’t have iphones, can’t afford them, and in any case are pretty skeptical about the reduction of DJ artwork to the iphone. On the other hand, we respect Spooky like crazy. So we were willing to listen to him DJ from his phone. We couldn’t tell what he was doing at all – just kind of poking at a screen, but it sounded okay until he decided to “scratch” on it during a Coup song that we love. (Sidebar: He incorrectly identified the song as something new from Street Sweeper Social Club, but it was in fact “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO” from 2001’s Party Music). He called this a “drum battle remix” or something like that, but really it sounded preposterous, and even amateurish, to be making wiki-wiki noises from his phone over the song.
Part of the problem was that the crowd was so weird. At the beginning of Spooky’s set it seemed like the place was pretty packed (although it never seemed to reach that full intensity that clubs can get when there’s great music animating everyone). By the time he was done (at only 1 in the morning), there were maybe 30 people there. The folks that were up front with us were a very strange lot. Some had no good sense of how to navigate appropriate personal space boundaries. There was a lady who seemed to have imported her dance moves from a Grateful Dead show. There were some dudes who were serious hip-hop heads bouncing up and down every time some track was played that they might have been in the know about. There was an intolerably loud and drunk woman who kept claiming that her boyfriend owned the club so she could do whatever she wanted. Overall the crowd was low energy, or possessing the same kind of studied, chin-stroking low energy that you might expect to see at a Modest Mouse show.
Look, DJ Spooky is awesome. He played some great tracks. A handful were hip-hop. A few more were electronic music of some sort. But there was no vibe and the whole thing felt somewhat half-assed, with the hallmark of it all some dicking around on the turntables. And while we must concede that the crowd was lame left something to be desired, it ultimately is the job of the DJ to move the crowd. Do I wish that more people came? Sure. Was this probably a one-off way to fill an evening between performances with the symphony? Sure. But I can’t imagine that a lot of people left that set saying that it’s worth it to drive to Atlanta or Nashville for the next Spooky gig, and, art school fetish object or not, I can’t say that he gave the kind of performance that I have seen countless others give — where you put your heart and soul into it no matter how many people paid to see you and no matter how small of a town or venue.
We were glad that we went. It was fun, but nothing to write a letter to Hakim Bey about. And after three nights with Spooky, we didn’t feel especially sad about missing Sunday’s MLK event. We will continue to love him and buy his records, but we’re left wondering what it might be like to see him play live in a context that he really cares about with a crowd that’s really into it.