The Raw Uncut
Ari Marcopolous and the Beastie Boys or how friends can catch
some of the weirdest stuff you never really thought anybody would
remember, and then show it to you 10 years later…
“I hold the mic like a grudge…”
Rakim
….It was another one of those days in the early 21st Century
– I was on another continent, dj’ing another event in
another country. Flip coordinates, repeat circumstances, reconnect
the line of thought with the sounds of the scenario. Transition
and exit, convergence and departure. Flip the moment, fold it
in on itself. Cut. Repeat. Another tour, another situation. Look
at the people and hear the sounds. Repeat…Cut.
….But anyway, this time, after a long set, I got back to
the hotel and couldn’t sleep. I sat trying to figure out
some different angles for this essay: Ari Marcopoulos and the
Beastie Boys are all pretty distinct figures and basically, they’re
ciphers – real personalities with real viewpoints –
something that’s all too rare these days. You have to think
of these two variables and how they interact: one, the band, the
other the photographer. You’ve got to look at the images
in this book as the kind of photographs a friend would take. Rare
moments of sentiment, flashes of lucidity in front of thousands
of people, reflective fragments of thought splayed out on a mixing
board after hours and hours of getting the track just right…
the studio, the audience, the action; it’s all what you wouldn’t
really think about, and Ari’s a master of getting those kinds
of portraits out of his subjects. In the pages of this book, you’ll
see how friends interact and create portraits of one another.
I guess that’s what visual music is about. Mirror and reflection,
sound and selection…To make a long story short, it’s
not easy to encapsulate the photographer or the band. As with
any medium, there’s a literal chorus of precedents: James
van Der Zee’s documentation of the Harlem jazz scene of the
1920’s, Gordon Parks real time liquid flow capturing the
mood and intensity of the civil rights movement, Walker Evans
invocations of the radical pluralism of America in the midst of
intense industrial change, Ernie Paniccioli’s flash of the
spirit prints of the electricity that animates so much of hip-hop
in the pages of magazines like “Word Up!”, and the athletic
prowess that seems to be the ouevre’s raison d’etre
in magazines like “The Source.” But there’s also
that weird sense of timelessness too: I think of Edward S. Curtis’s
monumental prints of the Native People’s of North America
one hundred years ago, Dawoud Bey’s urban still lifes of
neighborhood scenarios or Barron Claiborne’s black and white
photos - fashionably cosmopolitan pan-African portraits of contemporary
r &b stars and hip-hop moguls… But of course, this is
the Beastie Boys, and yeah, class, social hierarchy, and of course,
there’s that basic sense of ‘yo! this is the crew just
hanging out’ type vibe that pervade the images… but
maybe that’s the point. The reality of how bands become dj’s
and m.c.’s – and migrate back and back again - is something
that has yet to really be documented, although, I think that with
this book, we’re off to a good start. Think of “Pass
the Mic” as a kind of action portrait of a crew that was
caught at the crossroads of America in the late 20th century –
a radically changing landscape made of just about everything we
can think about at the moment, and you’ll get an idea of
the lives lived in these images. It’s a movie that’s
yet to be released, although I’m sure someone somewhere is
working on it as I write… Whiteboys, brothers with what in
hip-hop some like to call the ‘ice grill’ melts, becomes
what others call the ‘gas face’ and then just morphs
and becomes…. Real. From one state of existence to another,
the face and the eyes and the movements that hold it all together
are what makes these portraits so poignant. The Beastie Boys album
titles say it all: “License to Ill,” “Pass the
Mic” “Check your Head,” “Scientists of Sound,”
“Ill Communication” – these are titles of philosophers
and psycho-analysts of America’s patchwork mind at work,
and the photos of these gents as they do their thing bring to
mind some of the strangest ways that America has changed in the
last two decades – it’s the ease of flow, the utterly
natural mayhem that young folks in the U.S. of A just take for
granted. That’s the ‘modern primitive’ sound-image,
just go to any major concert these days, and your eyes will tell
you the same thing….
Back at the hotel the t.v.’s glow told the usual story: There’s
the usual debates over whether or not genetically modified foods
would affect consumers, riots at a G-8 meeting in Genoa, Italy,
the attempted impeachment of the Indonesian President, financial
shennanigans amongst the wealthiest countries about the Kyoto
Accord’s attempts (at least on paper) to reduce various emissions
that are destroying the atmosphere, shark attacks off the coast
of Florida etc etc The usual litany… Anyway, I channel surfed
for a little bit (it was after all, something like 5 a.m. I had
just walked into the hotel room…) and, of course, it’s
mostly American titles – funny how stuff like “Bugs
Bunny” over dubbed into Spanish always makes you feel so
utterly surreal etc etc
Anyway, feel a million flurries of now, a million intangibles
of the present moment, an infinite permutation of what could be…
the thought gets caught… You get the picture. In the data
cloud of collective consciousness, it’s one of those issues
that just seems to keep popping up. Where did I start? Where did
I end? First and foremost, it’s that flash of insight, a
way of looking at the fragments of time. Check it: visual mode
– open source, a kinematoscope of the unconscious: a bullet
that cuts through everything like a Doc Edgerton, E.J. Maret or
Muybridge flash frozen frame. You look for the elements of the
experience, and if you think about it, even the word “analysis”
means to break down something into its component parts. Stop motion:
weapons drawn, flip the situation into a new kind of dawn….
What else is there to do but just check the pictures and see what
people do in the process of making culture. Behind the scenes
it’s all about friends and time spent with people that are
part of your tribe, your situation, your scenario. Think of Jack
Kerouac behind some turntables cuttin’ up a storm, think
of James Van Der Zee skiing with Lauryn Hill, think of King Tubby
just chilling out after a session with Gordon Parks – see?
The mixes get more and more diverse, and time seems to just become
more and more fragments to mix. If there’s anything the 20th
century taught us, it’s that there are so many cultures out
there that are mixed beyond anything we can possibly really contain
in one image, one thought, one word. Acceptance of the pluralism
and being open to diversity all starts with your crew. And I think
that that’s what you’ll find in these images: an America
that exists just at the edge of convention, photographed by someone
who was and is part of the dynamic backdrop of a pop culture made
all the more resilient and powerful because it can absorb. If
you can deal with that, then these photos are something that can
highlight just how much the world has changed in such a short
amount of time. When this crew started out, hip-hop was the image
of uncertainty after reconstruction – a faint echo of the
South Bronx demolitions drawn across a map of New York City that
urban planner and architect, Robert Moses simply imposed, like
the European powers did to Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Cross Bronx Expressway created a sound track to dispersion.
It was a highway of imminent domain – but whose culture was
erased, and whose culture thrived and survived? That’s the
question of the early 21st century. Can America really deal with
all the accumulated fragments of dispossessed culture? Can the
music of America (it’s all fragments at this point anyway…)
honestly be open to just about anything under the sun? One culture’s
Diaspora becomes another culture’s soundtrack. In the here
and now that Ari’s photos capture, the Diaspora just acts
as a reflection site, a way to reach across bridges made by class,
social hierarchy and all the bullshit that normally accompanies
that stuff – and make music. That’s what “Pass
the Mic” is about. If you can’t deal with that, well,
like the Beasties said so long ago you might just have to check
your head.
But anyway, it was another one of those days in the early 21st
Century – I was on another continent, dj’ing another
event in another country. Flip coordinates, repeat circumstances,
reconnect the line of thought with the sounds of the scenario.
Transition and exit, convergence and departure. Flip the moment,
fold it in on itself. Cut. Repeat. Another tour, another situation.
Look at the people and hear the sounds. Repeat…Un-Cut.
In one of my favorite recent essays to accompany a museum show
of contemporary photography, The Brooklyn Museum’s 2001 controversial
survey of contemporary African American photographers “Commited
To the Image,” Clyde Taylor wrote: “one of the exclusive
entitlements of the propertied class was the gaze. The disenfranchised
were fixed at the receiving end of the right to scrutinize. Come
the mid-twentieth century, a shift takes place. A recurrent academic
joke tells of a European anthropologist looking through his telescope
to research “primitive” customs when he discovers an
African anthropologist peering through his own telescope and taking
notes on him. “Today,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, introducing
a volume of poems from the Negritude movement of the 1930’s
and 1940’s, “these black men have fixed their gaze upon
us and our gaze is thrown back in our eyes…” What you’re
seeing here is what folks like Levi Strauss might have written
about if the “Raw and The Cooked” had been written in
an uptown situation – the modern visual jazz of a crew that
came to catch wreck. White on white, and with a whole lot of Others
thrown in to the mix - it all just changes and becomes something
else. Maybe that’s what dj culture and it’s spin-off
the M.C. are all about. Involution and cultural evolution sometimes
go hand and hand and make for a deeper vision of the way things
work. And from b-boys to Buddhists, dusty 45’s to MP3 files,
the sounds of science are what make this collection of images
so compelling a document. “Pass the Mic” shows how behind
the stages and scenes, the people that make the sounds are just
exactly that: people. The music and the images are reflections
of one another, and at the end of the day, it’s friends and
people that make it all go that way. Anyway, feel a million flurries
of now, a million intangibles of the present moment, an infinite
permutation of what could be… the thought gets caught…
You get the picture. In the data cloud of collective consciousness,
it’s one of those issues that just seems to keep popping
up. Where did I start? Where did I end? That’s the message
that I think these images send.
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal
Kid
July 21, Santiago, Chile 2001
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DJ Spooky has participated in two new book projects.
DJ Spooky also has participated in renowned photographer Lyle Owerko's new book "The Boombox Project" on the history of boomboxes. 
Copyright Criminals - a Documentary by Ben Frantzen and Kembrew Mcleod
ORDER NOW!!! 
OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"
CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records
DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.
RHYTHM SCIENCE:
