When I think of gritty, punk filmmaking, the first few movies that come to mind are Martin Scorcese and Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver (1976), Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), James Merendino’s SLC Punk! (1998), and, of course, Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979). References to the latter have popped up in everything from Wu-Tang Clan songs and Tarantino movies to Simpsons and Community episodes, but the punk-rock aesthetic and street-light ambiance of the gangland narrative linger as well. The film critic Pauline Kael described the movie as “visual rock.”
New York City gangs and their territories (Daily News, June 15, 1954).
In 1954, long before he was a science-fiction legend, Harlan Ellison set out to write a novel about the street gangs of New York City. As research, he joined the Brooklyn gang The Barons in Red Hook, considered to be one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Web of the City—originally published under the title Rumble—was Ellison’s first novel, and his nonfiction account of that time and the book’s writing was published in 1961 as Memos from Purgatory. We tend to think of the 1950s in this country as quaint and innocent. Ellison’s early work illustrates otherwise.
The gangs of New York were plentiful in the decades leading up to the release of The Warriors in 1979. During its second weekend in theaters, the lines between the screen and the street blurred as lines of gang members came out to play. Two hundred theaters hired extra security and many others pulled the movie for fears of public safety. A lot of those rowdy youths wanted to see this movie.
In addition to playing a Baseball Fury in The Warriors, Rob Ryder started on the film as a production assistant but was quickly promoted to location scout. As he writes in his book, Purple Fury: Rumbling with the Warriors (Ryder, 2023), “So, the scene where they blow up the car,” came one of his tasks. “You need to find that street.” Ryder’s book is a candid look at the chaos behind the scenes, revealing some of the lesser known tasks of filmmaking, illuminating its dark alleys like a streetlamp.
“The streets were silent. How strange for this early in the evening. As though the being that was the neighborhood—and it was a thing with life and sentience—knew something was about to happen. The silence made the sweat return. It was too quiet.” — Harlan Ellison, Web of the City
It takes a rare filmmaker to build a legacy like Walter Hill’s, but The Warriors wasn’t his first, and he hasn’t stopped bringing similarly unique stories to the big screen. Quentin Tarantino credits Hill’s script for Hard Times (1975) for showing him what a screenplay could be—that it could be more than just the instructions for making a movie, that the script could be an end in itself. In his book,A Walter Hill Film (MZS, 2023), Walter Chaw takes a long look at Hill’s legacy.
A Walter Hill Film (MZS, 2023) by Walter Chaw. Cover illustration by Ganzeer.
Hill produced all of the Alien movies and wrote a couple of them,1 as well as The Long Riders (1980), 48 Hrs (1982), Streets of Fire (1984), and Red Heat (1988), among many others. He’s produced and directed an even longer list. Fellow writer and director Edgar Wright cites Hill’s The Driver (1978) as a major influence on his own movie Baby Driver (2017). Hill even cameos in that movie as a courtroom interpreter, and the numbers on Baby’s prison jumpsuit at the end refer to the release date of The Driver: 28071978. Walter Hill is one of our great filmmakers—a filmmaker’s filmmaker—and Walter Chaw has written a comprehensive account of his work.
Chaw also wrote a great little book about Steve de Jarnatt’s 1988 movie, Miracle Mile (Lulu, 2012), a movie he rented and watched so often that the lady at his local video store eventually just gave him the VHS tape. Little did she know, she helped saved his life.
Steve de Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile (1988).
Chaw had a rough 1989, ultimately attempting to kill himself that summer. He gives partial credit to Miracle Mile for keeping him alive and figuring out why as the impetus for this book. He digs deep into every aspect of it, enlisting writer/director de Jarnatt’s participation. It’s a thoughtful meditation on life, death, youth, writing, film in general, and this one in particular.
We’re toast. Landa checks her CliffNotes a.k.a. “The Key.“
I would be remiss not to mention Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) here. Years ago, William Gibson posted a picture of the CliffsNotes for Pynchon’s sprawling novel online with the caption “The Key.” This sent me on a search. I dug in thrift stores, looked in bookstores, asked proprietors. No one seemed to know whether this particular volume of CliffsNotes existed. A couple of years later, I found out that the CliffsNotes volume on Pynchon’s most famous and confounding work was a prop for Miracle Mile. Chaw even reprinted one of Zak Smith’s illustrations (#738) from his book, Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (2006; archived here), in this book on the movie.
Steve de Jarnatt’s having written and directed Miracle Mile and written a great collection of short stories—Grace After Grace (Acre, 2020)—reminds me of one of my other favorite screenwriters, Hampton Fancher. Fancher wrote the screenplay for both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, and he wrote and directed the wildly underrated film, The Minus Man (1999). Like de Jarnatt, he has a fabulous short story collection out called The Shape of the Final Dog (Blue Rider Press, 2012), as well as a profound and pithy little book about screenwriting called The Wall Will Tell You (Melville House, 2019).
Film is still our most powerful medium for storytelling. Television is more prevalent and novels are deeper, but the movie is easily accessible and quickly consumed, giving us glimpses of gangs in faraway city streets or totally alternate timelines, taking us places other forms, platforms, and formats cannot. At the very least, it decorates our lives, but sometimes it reaches out and saves them.
Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future by Roy Christopher: We started making Dead Channel Sky because we’d made the song “Run It” for a video game that didn’t end up using it. But it wasn’t until I read Roy’s book about the parallel evolutions of hip-hop and cyberpunk fiction that I could wrap my head around creating a whole cyberpunk project. In the book, he draws connections between the two forms’ repurposing of technology, and making art out of the scraps of industrial capitalism (think: computer hacking and turntablism) as two potential visions for the future. I asked Roy to summarize his argument in the press release for the album, so I’d ask you to read it there, rather than have me stumble through it myself.
My friend Dave Allen passed away the other day. Like most people who knew him, Dave was not only a friend but also a mentor to me. Through his music and his thinking, it’s difficult to take measure of the influence he’s had on us. I last saw Dave in 2022 when I spent a week at his and Paddy’s house in Portland, collaborating with them on a book idea.
Me and Dave goofing and laughing in Portland in 2022.
In tribute, I’m sharing a piece I wrote about Dave and Gang of Four a few years ago and an interview I did with him in 2008. There’s really no way to do his influence justice, but this is all I have.
Rest in peace, Dave. You’re already sorely missed.
Return the Gift: Gang of Four
To create a spike of novelty high enough to be seen by history depends on a lot of things aligning: an open-armed zeitgeist, an interested public, a little bit of chaos, and a lot of charisma. Sometimes they become folklore, affecting only those who were there, like Woodstock, Altamont, or the June 4, 1976 Sex Pistols show in Manchester: Supposedly everyone there left that show dead-set on starting a band. There’s even a book about it. Other times these events are recorded, as great performances, works of art, books, or records.
Once the smoke cleared after the detonation of punk, there was still so much work to be done. Gang of Four’s original line-up tapped into a tectonic shift in the times. As Mark Fisher writes in The Ghosts of My Life, “It has become increasingly clear that 1979-80… was a threshold moment—the time when a whole world (social democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete, and the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to show themselves.” It was also the dawn of post-punk. In tangents like tentacles, Joy Division, Wire, The Fall, PiL, Talking Heads, Television, and Gang of Four, among others, were stretching punk in ever new directions.
Gang of Four Entertainment! (Warner Bros, 1979)
One of the more significant of these, Gang of Four combined the lean muscle of punk with the bare bones of funk. Lyrically social and political, their lanky limbs swung hard and wide against the “middle-class malaise” of the 1970s. The first time I heard Gang of Four’s Entertainment!, suddenly much of what I was already listening to made much more sense. Fugazi had a lineage. Naked Raygun had context. Wire had contemporaries. During the post-Lollapalooza package tour phase, I finally saw them live in 1991. It was a woefully crippled line-up that only included Andy Gill from the original Four, sharing the stage at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre with a motley mess of bands: Young Black Teenagers, Warrior Soul, Public Enemy, and The Sisters of Mercy. The fact that Gang of Four was considered viable in that line-up ten years past their prime is significant though.
Woven as an influence and wielded as an instrument, Entertainment! remains a relevant strand of modern music. Frank Ocean sampled “Anthrax” for the song “Futura Free” on his 2016 record, Blond, and El-P sampled “Ether” for “The Ground Below” from Run the Jewels’ 2020 record, RTJ4. It was #81 on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2013 “100 Best Debut Albums of All Time” list, and in 2012, when they updated their 2003 list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” Entertainment! moved up from 490 to 483, a seven-spot jump in a decade, over 40 years after the record was released. It stands at number 8 on Pitchfork’s “Top 100 Albums of the 1970s” list for 2004.
So, when the original four reformed in 2004, as if to prove how strident those early records were, they rerecorded those classic songs. The result was Return the Gift, which features predominantly tracks from Entertainment! And its follow-up, Solid Gold, performed live on a soundstage. Even 2021’s retrospective boxset represents their earliest era: Gang of Four 77-81.
The Gang of Four box set (Matador Records, 2021)
By the time they released Return the Gift in 2005, there were bands that had drawn direct influences from the original Gang of Four. People were comparing Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party to them. “Those bands helped us get back into the limelight with a whole new generation of music fans,” says Dave Allen, “who came along thinking they were going hear Bloc Party or Franz Ferdinand and then got their minds shattered.” Though they are often considered overtly political, Dave bristles at the connotation. “People would say, ‘Rage Against the Machine is just like Gang of Four.’ As much as I respect those guys and what they do, our aims were very different. We weren’t revolutionaries. We were dissecting everyday life.”
After touring with the original line-up, Jon King and Andy Gill had set their sights on a new record, but Hugo Burnham and Dave didn’t think the world needed a new Gang of Four album. Dave, having spent many intervening years consulting bands on negotiating the music industry’s new digital landscape, wanted to do something new, something different. He told me at the time, “If we don’t own the idea, there’s no point in doing it.” He continues,
What I’d wanted to do instead was set up cameras in our rehearsal room in London and do what Radiohead did. This would have been a perfect Gang of Four moment: You can check in on our working methods, you can check in on the arguments that take place. You’d get the chemistry of the band, and then I just felt like, let the crowd decide: What do you think is worth following up on? We’d still never make an album, just complete these songs and leave them up on YouTube so millions of people could stream them forever, and you don’t have to pay a thing. Meanwhile, our cachet goes up in the world for touring, and we can go out again. That’s what the Web’s for. In music, I think the Web gives you this massive distribution system out of the hands of radio, out of the hands of distributors, out of the hands of record labels. What could be better for rock ‘n’ roll than that?
This sense of independence, the lingering influence of punk, runs through Dave’s many endeavors. The novelist Rick Moody writes of him,
In calling Dave Allen an Internet strategist, or a pundit of the digital realm, or a high-tech agit-prop genius, you would be leaving out the job he had before that, when he was Dave Allen the bass player, first in Gang of Four (on their first two albums, and then for a couple of years during their reunion victory lap), and later in Shriekback. As such, he has experienced all of the vagaries of the music business as a player, producer, label owner, and now as a copyright owner of a great number of great songs from the seventies and eighties that are routinely streamed online. Few people of my acquaintance are better situated to talk about distribution and the difficulties thereof without romanticizing the story.
Dave in a Willamette Week cover story, “Pentium Punk“ by Zach Dundas, 2001.
If you know Dave Allen, you probably know him from his time in Gang of Four, but from post-punk and the music business to the post-internet, Dave has been ahead of every curve. A life and lessons from over four decades traversing the interstices of not just music and technology but also art and culture, Dave Allen is one of our most outspoken innovators and advocates.
Every Force Evolves a Form An Interview with Dave Allen, 2008
I can’t remember the first time I heard Gang of Four, but I do distinctly remember a lot of things making sense once I did. Their jagged and angular bursts of guitar, funky rhythms, deadpan vocals, and overtly personal-as-political lyrics predated so many other bands I’d been listening to. Dave Allen was the man behind the bass, and now he’s the man behind Pampelmoose, a Portland-based music and media blog.
I sat down with Dave in May 2008 for a lengthy beer-soaked session over Mexican food, and I managed to glean the following dialogue from it. We talked about Gang of Four, Dave’s personal history from forming that band to running Pampelmoose, the questionable state of the music industry, and why Portland is the place to be.
An update was planned, but now that Dave has parted ways with Gang of Four (along with drummer Hugo Burnham) again, I figured I’d go ahead and run this interview as-is. Dave’s ideas about the state of the record industry (about which he’s written extensively on Pampelmoose) and how Gang of Four should release their music clash with the band’s more traditional leanings. The seeds of his departure can be seen germinating in the talk below.
Dave Allen portrait by Laura Persat.
Roy Christopher: Seeing all of the sound-alike bands around, you guys originally got back together and did your old material.
Dave Allen: Yeah, the point that that was really validated was when we played in the West of England at the All Tomorrow’s Parties “Nightmare Before Christmas” show, curated by Thurston Moore, and we were the co-headliners. We’d already played with them the previous summer at the Prima Vera festival in Barcelona. We actually followed them that night, and I was really concerned, but what I realized was, although that band puts out new albums every now and again — Nurse, Rather Ripped… They make great records. They never stopped. Now, you might argue that nothing changes with Sonic Youth, so their style is the same: You just get a new batch of songs from Sonic Youth. And there’s something remarkably comforting about that, but at the same time, the moment when they launch into something from Daydream Nation, and they expand on it because they’re a jam-band at times, but the most interesting jam-band ever to be seen live. They are such a superb band. Forget everyone else. But it dawned on me, we and they are legacy bands. People don’t necessarily come to hear the new material. So, you better be sure to pack your set with a lot of old material. They’ve got twenty albums to draw on, right? We’ve only got two. Really. It limits the amount of time we can be on stage, but at the same time, we’re not ones to overstay our welcome. Live, those songs are more intense than ever before. They have a new vibe that I really like.
Anyway, point being, once you realize that people are coming to see you to hear the old songs — including the new crowd that turns up, by the way — then you’re okay.
If we do record twelve new songs, six of which are really good, then how do we put that out? My argument would be that we’re Gang of Four, and we’re supposed to do things a bit differently. So, do we do it through a cell-phone provider? Something different. Or should we give it away digitally and just press some heavy-gram vinyl to sell at shows? The days of doing a CD are over. That’s my argument. Now, I don’t know if Jon and Andy would agree, but the point being that the material can be used in many different ways. One idea that we’ve been kicking around with this new song that I really like. Jon’s got this thing about caffeine culture and it’s a really cool direction we’re going in, and it’s good, old-fashioned Gang of Four. I’m really enjoying it. Now, what if we perversely actually went to Red Bull or whoever and see if they want to release it? It’s not available anywhere else except in their ad. Then make it viral online where you can download the Red Bull/Gang of Four video, and so on. That way it gets spread around the globe in different ways. And the point being not to sell anything, but Red Bull would pay us for the campaign, and we get back on the road, which is where we do best. We play live, we get paid well, we can sell t-shirts and vinyl, so the concept of signing to a label, putting something out, and touring on it is so ridiculous to me. If we don’t own the idea, there’s no point in doing it.
RC:Right, it’s just like the legacy idea. You used the Rolling Stones as an example. The new records are just an excuse to get out on the road and play the old songs live.
DA: That’s all it is.
RC:Do they really realize that? You say they do, but I think it’s that you realize that. I don’t think the Rolling Stones think of themselves as a legacy band. I think they’re still trying to make another “great” Rolling Stones record.
DA: I think you’re right. That’s the counterpoint, right? They may not have realized it and I think all bands want to keep creating, and what I’m saying is—
RC: “We’ve done our good stuff. Let’s just keep doing it.”
DA: Right. There are other ways to be creative, so I would argue that doing my label, trying to find new bands is creative, and now I’ve got my heavily trafficked blog.
RC:Right. You have an outlet, and you get to play live.
DA: Yeah, why would we kill ourselves to do a new record when no one wants to buy it anyway?
RC:There’s no good way to say it.
DA: It’s all downhill. It’s retreat.
RC:Yeah, when you first mentioned the legacy band idea, it really resonated with me, but I finally got around to watching the Metallica documentary, and wow. Those guys are just so obviously past their prime and just killing themselves trying to make a new record. It just ends up being a parody of what they once were, and I think that really speaks to your idea of being a legacy band –- and realizing it.
DA: I would argue that who’s to blame here are the labels. The labels are to blame. It’s like when Coldplay decided not to make an album because Apple was about to be born, and Chris couldn’t write songs or whatever, EMI’s shares dropped 15%, because it was all about the biggest band on the label. Well, Metallica are huge, so it’s the same thing. All the heads of Warner Brothers will be pushing them, “Look at the share price! We need an album from you guys!”
RC:It was totally like that in the film! When James left for rehab, the label freaked, like “Oh my god, our cash cow is falling apart!”
DA: Well, didn’t Geffen pretty much go away after Kurt killed himself? Nirvana was Geffen’s cash cow.
RC: Not like they lost any when he died… In 1995, Sub-Pop’s second biggest seller was Sebadoh’s Bakesale. Their first? Nirvana’s Bleach! In 1995, Sub-Pop could’ve not released anything, just kept Bleach on the market, and made money.
DA: So, my point about these legacy bands making records is, the Rolling Stones will be given a million dollars every time they want to make a record. The label can recoup that money. They’re not going to get rich off of the record, but it revitalizes the back catalog, and puts the band on the road. Otherwise, why would they bother to get out of bed to record? They’re past their prime as songwriters. I’m sorry, there’s not anything redeeming about it.
I think it’s interesting that Sting got The Police back together but didn’t bother to make a record with those guys. And Sting is the consummate songwriter. Meanwhile, the cheapest ticket on the Police tour is a hundred dollars.
RC:You know how much the good ones are? Nine-hundred…
DA: Are they?! Let’s go back to that one-hundred dollars: There goes the music industry! The live side of it is growing, but there goes the recording industry. The back catalog is the only money to be made.
RC:What about Mötley Crüe? They had to prop Mick Marrs up, and Vince Neil is huffing and puffing and barely making it through one of those tours. They made millions of dollars and didn’t even do a new record!
DA: You don’t need to.
RC:Kiss did what, three reunion tours? And all three of those years, those were the biggest tours of the year.
DA: People don’t want to hear the new material.
RC:They want to hear “Rock and Roll All Nite.”
DA: It’s a reminder of your youth.
RC:It’s nostalgia marketing.
DA: Absolutely.
RC:It’s one of the strongest things out there.
DA: It’s what we did on our holidays, twenty years ago.
RC:Right.
Dave playing bass at a Weiden + Kennedy party in 2002.
RC:So, why Portland?
DA: In late 1999, I was living in Lookout Mountain with my kids, all computer kids, and I went to a friend of mine Nigel Phelps who’s one of the top art directors in the movies, he did Titanic and all sorts of big movies, English guy, — his eldest daughter, I saw that she was on the computer, on AOL, and she was talking to herself saying, “You’re on dial-up, you’re not on broadband,” and I asked her if she was arguing with someone about who was on dial-up and who was on broadband. She said, “No.” On Napster, when you selected a song it tells you the bandwidth availability. So, when it was really slow, she would IM the person and say, “You liar. You’re on a 28K dial-up. You’re not on broadband.” That was my first exposure to Napster, and I was like “What the heck is this?” I look and she’s got all of this free music. Now, I was at eMusic, where we charged 99 cents per song, and the next morning, I went into the office and emailed the head guys and said, “Guys, you’re done. Everybody is getting free music from Napster.” Their attitude was that it was illegal and that they’d soon be put out of business. And I was saying, “Not before we go out of business.” And that’s exactly what happened.
Then around 2000, when the market sank and the whole dotcom thing fell in the toilet, I got the call that they were closing the LA office. I got a call from a headhunter that some guys in Portland wanted to fly me up and talk to me and would like to hire me for a similar position. I liked Portland, I’d been here a lot, I had friends here already, but I wasn’t ready to leave the big city just yet. Anyway, it turned out to be Intel, and on the campus here right outside Portland, they had this thing called New Business Investments, or NBI, and I was asked to join the Consumer Digital Audio Services or something like that. It sounded interesting, so I joined up. They were looking at internet connected devices, an MP3 player—pre-iPod—and different ways to get your music, Home Entertainment servers, and the thing we were building that you see now was this bridging system that transmitted music files from your computer to your legacy Hi-Fi. 802.11b had just arrived, so we were working to get the music from there to there, wirelessly. My job was to go to Yahoo music and these other content providers and license them for our service. It was a great idea. The problem was, Intel is known for developing amazing stuff and then getting cold feet at the last minute and not bringing it to market. At home I’ve got five MP3 players that are better than the iPod. There’s a soundcard in them, engineered to perfection. They’re amazing. The only problem was it’s just a flash device, it only had a 128Kb flash card for memory, and no one had thought of a adding slot where you could upgrade the memory. Never came to market. That was that.
They’d paid for me and my family to move up, I’d bought a great house, and I think it’s a great city. I don’t feel the urge to move back. I’m a booster for this town. I love it.
RC:I’ve only been here for two months, but every other day there’s someone else here that I didn’t know was here, or some event that I didn’t realize happened here. I never thought about moving here because Seattle has been my adopted home for so many years, so I never thought about dropping down here, but since I did… It’s an amazing town.
DA: Anthony Keidis just moved here.
RC:Really?
DA: Ironic, huh? Now I can ask him about my royalties. [Laughter] “You can come to my barbecue. Please bring blank check.” [Laughter] Everyone’s here. The Shins, Johnny Marr…
RC:His being in Modest Mouse…
DA: You can say it, Roy.
RC:Okay, I hate Modest Mouse. [Laughter] I love Johnny Marr, but I hate Modest Mouse. It’s funny that the Mouse House is right over there.
DA: Yeah, I ran into Isaac Brock’s girlfriend, and he came by the office to get some stuff, and he said I should come over, that there’s someone there I’d probably like to meet. So, I went over there and I walk upstairs and there’s Johnny Marr. He sees me walk in and he’s like, “What the fucking hell are you doing in Portland?” And I said, “Well, what the fucking hell are you doing in Portland?” [Laughter]
They’re an interesting band to watch because they were a multi-platinum band, and now they’re not. You have to make money on the road.
RC:That’s another area that hip-hop is missing out on. Hip-hop is not known for big live shows – and it should be. The lyrical element of hip-hop is one of the most exciting things to see live, but the acts that excel at that part of it are not the acts that are selling the records and doing those tours.
DA: The underground aspect is interesting, like The Roots do well touring, Blackalicious… But the bigger it gets, the more it slows down. I mean, is T.I. going to do a big arena tour?
RC:No, but T.I. is one of the guys who’s still selling records.
DA: Yeah, he’s fine, but the minute it drops off, what can he fall back on?
RC:Right. Then he can go be Jay-Z.
DA: That may be one of the things that hurt live hip-hop: It was so easy to sell records, it was like why bother going on the road?
RC:Well, for a long time hip-hop had a hard time getting security for shows because it had been tainted with this “violence” tag.
DA: And it was never as bad really as your average big rock show. It’s just racism.
RC:Yeah, it’s a race thing and something the press loves to play up, and it’s completely untrue, but it keeps you from getting insurance for a hip-hop show. The reality is, the insurance company is like, “Ice Cube? Oh, hell no!”
DA: Right. Every black person is packing, and there are 50,000 of them in an arena, we’re not covering that. And then Guns N’ Roses comes to town and there are two stabbing deaths—
RC:And all of the seats in the arena are ripped out and thrown on stage.
DA: Yeah, but those are all white guys from the suburbs.
Me and Dave clowning in Chicago in 2017.
RC:So, what are your goals with Pampelmoose?
DA: It started it off like it did with my label World Domination, maybe a little too starry-eyed. I feel I’ve done really well in music, and I’m generally a very positive person.
RC:That’s one of the things I love about you, Dave.
DA: Aw, thanks [Laughs]. I look at bands and at the scene, and I feel like I’ve gotta give back. I volunteer a lot and I try and help, probably to my detriment, too much sometimes. So, I worry that I start off with great ambitions and sometimes let people down, because you get over-burdened and everybody wants a piece of it. You back up and think, “I can’t do everyone, so I shouldn’t do anyone.”
RC:It’s hard to find a balance there.
DA: It is. It’s so difficult, but I think we’ve found some kind of balance with Pampelmoose, and a group of friends and I were able to apply ourselves to a website that became a company that can help artists to sell some of their stuff, come on by anytime for free advice, bring their contracts -– I have a lawyer friend who charges very little to look over that stuff. Pampelmoose is also an extension of my social life. I’m very active socially. I can’t be at home. I’ve got to be out. I like being with people, and that’s no offense to my family. I like being with them, too. So, Pampelmoose has become an extension of my personality. I’ve tried things like this in the past with fanzines and writing, but it’s so difficult. You have to get them printed, get them out there.
RC:It wasn’t a fanzine, Dave. It was an art project. [Laughter]
DA: That’s true, and that’s my problem too, I get too deep into the project and it gets too ambitious and takes on a life of its own, then after the fall, I realize I over did it again. With Pampelmoose, the safety net was the blog. Because once the blog took off, and I believe it was January 2006 was the first post, and I have no idea where it’s going to go, but I did have the idea that I could open the doors to a community. That’s the thing I love about blogging, with the comments, people can call bullshit on me. The interesting thing for me was, six months go by, and no one’s calling bullshit, and then you get confident. And it wasn’t a lot at first, I think in the early days if we got a thousand visitors in a month, that was a lot, but it did pick up and start attracting visitors. Then I began to take it as seriously as everything else I was doing. I’m the editor. I’m the public voice. I’m the journalist. I’m the copy editor. I’m the layout guy. And at first, I thought I might be building something that I couldn’t maintain, so I hired a bit of a support team. Then I learned to fly. I learned some basic HTML code, I learned to crop photos… Every post has an image, any image. It doesn’t have to go with the rest of the story. So, it has a little art aspect to it, if you will. In the past eighteen months it’s morphed totally into this blog. Pampelmoose is the blog, and as a side note, we still sell CDs, T-shirts, and give advice to local bands. So, getting up every day and having an opinion and having people comment on it drives the whole thing, and now that the traffic is up, it’s like, “Oh, shit.”
RC:Yeah, but it validates everything you’re doing there.
DA: Right, but just having explained it, it’s still weird. It’s not like we’re Wal-Mart, and we do this.
RC:Right, but with Wal-Mart, there’s a precedent. “Remember K-Mart? Like that, but better.” When you’re doing something like this, it’s more ambiguous. People ask me what my book is about, and I say it’s a collection of interviews. “Well, what’s the theme?” You have to read it. So, it’s frustrating, but if you read it, you get it. Even if you only read one interview per section, a theme emerges. I think Pampelmoose is the same way. If you go there and dig around, read, and become a part of it, it fits, but there’s no one-line explanation for what’s going on there.
DA: It is intriguing. It’s not Pitchfork, where they get a million hits a month, and it’s like, “What’s the point?” At the same time, I can’t deny their success. They’ve done it well, but now you’ve got this unfettered fan-boy day out where you can kill something before it even has a chance.
Dave’s old iPod.
These are excerpts from two upcoming books that Dave had a hefty hand in. The first bit is from The Medium Picture, a book heavily influenced by Dave and his thinking. That one comes out October 15th from the University of Georgia Press. The second is an interview I managed to record in 2008, when we both worked at Nemo Design in Portland. That one is in my second interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2.
I’ve been teaching college off and on since 2002. Every semester in every class, I open with the same joke: “Hi, my name is Roy Christopher, but you can call me Roy, or if you’re slightly more daring, ‘Oh Captain, My Captain’.” This is an adaptation of the opening lines of Mr. Keating, played famously by Robin Williams, in his English class at Wellton Academy in the 1989 Peter Weir movie Dead Poets Society. Over the years I have noticed how differently this line has landed. Some semesters the movie would be replaying on some cable channel, and I’d get a bigger laugh. Other semesters, not so much. Getting the joke requires connecting the line to the movie. It requires a familiarity with the film or at least the scene. What’s more, Keating’s borrowed joke is an allusion itself! It’s a line from a poem by Walt Whitman. Though it has happened a few times, I am not actually asking my students to call me Captain. What we have here is a failure to communicate.
There’s an odd Star Wars allusion in Frank Herbert’s Heretics of Dune, the fifth book of his Dune series of novels:
“He’s a three P-O,” they said, meaning that such a person surrounded himself with cheap copies made from déclassé substances. Even when the supremely rich were forced to employ one of the distressful three P-Os, they disguised it where possible.”
Heretics of Dune was released in 1984, well after the original Star Wars trilogy had taken over the imaginations of everyone in the galaxy. “Three P-O” is a not-so-subtle dig at George Lucas’s C-3PO, the golden if persnickety protocol droid who serves the main characters of Star Wars. Herbert goes quite a distance to set up the gag, clumsily describing a rare and expensive wood used exclusively by the “supremely rich,” whereas lower-class families use the synthetic materials “polastine, polaz, and pormabat.” “Three P-O” was the pejorative reserved for such people.
While Star Wars predates Heretics of Dune, the original Dune novel and two of its sequels were released before the first Star Wars movie. The original novel came out over a decade prior, and the similarities are undeniable. Dune’s hero, Paul Atreides, comes to power on Arrakis, a desert planet also known as “Dune.” There’s a barren area of the wasteland on Tatooine called “the Dune Sea,” a vast desert that was once a large inland sea. This inhospitable area suffers from extreme temperature variations and a lack of water, like the southern hemisphere of Arrakis. The hero of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, is from the desert planet Tatooine. Paul has a very close spiritual relationship with his sister, Princess Alia. Luke’s sister, with whom he also quite close, is Princess Leia. Paul battles the Imperium. Luke battles the Empire. Paul finds out his sworn enemy, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, is his grandfather. Luke finds out his enemy, Darth Vader, is his father. The Bene Gesserit Sisterhood of Dune use the Voice of the Weirding Way to manipulate others. The Jedi use the Force to do the same. And what is the eel-like, saber-toothed Sarlacc in the Great Pit of Carkoon on Tatooine if not a giant, buried sandworm?
The Daily News, Port Townsend, Washington, August 19,1977.
Not long after the release of the first Star Wars movie in 1977, in a newspaper article from his hometown of Port Townsend, Washington, titled “Is ‘Star Wars’ a ‘Dune’ spin-off?” Herbert said he’d “try very hard not to sue.” Though he has never been shy about his liberal borrowing from existing stories, Lucas claims the only similarity that Star Wars shares with Dune is that “they both have deserts.” Speaking of stories that have deserts, some have compared Dune to 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia, which tells the story of the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, who helped lead the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the first World War. So, even Herbert may have borrowed a bit.
As the film historian Peter Biskind puts it, “We are the children of Lucas, not Coppola.” Or Herbert, for that matter.
Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin, will be presenting a colloquium on Wednesday, March 12 at noon EST at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center. harbanger is the turntablist septet formed by Harry Allen at MIT in 2020. He is currently working with them as his research project at the center. During the colloquium, He will discuss how the idea for harbanger came together, why he did it, his challenges, his objectives, and his vision of the future. In addition, he will play some videos they’ve shot and some music they’ve made. The whole lecture will last about 90 minutes, including a Q&A session. Join us!
You don’t know the name Angela Britt, but if you were familiar with the deepest details her story—from runaway to ranch hand—you might recognize her as a dozen or so characters in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. She was the model for both the bumbly bum Gene Harrogate and the young and doomed Wanda from Suttree for instance. As I read Vincenzo Barney’s article in Vanity Fair, not only was I surprised that McCarthy didn’t have all of that horse knowledge firsthand—like all of his writing, the bits about ranching are very convincing, rife with expert detail—but also how many times the number 47 kept popping up.
Forty-Seven
I was interested in the story because of how frequently and thoroughly McCarthy had alluded to Britt in so many characters in so many of his novels. I thought the allusions to a living yet unknown person was an interesting angle on the figurative phenomenon. Britt knew McCarthy for 47 years. Coincidentally, she has 47 extant letters from him. McCarthy didn’t send her one letter a year, but she managed to keep the same number of letters.
Sometime last century students at Pamona College in California noticed the number 47 popping up around campus. For one, the college is just off exit 47 of I-10. In her article, “The Mystery of 47,” from the October 1, 2000 issue of Pomona College Magazine, Sarah Dolinar writes,
Depending on your point of view, you might call it a tradition built around trivia, or you might call it Pomona’s link to the deep structure of the universe. For instance, were you aware that the organ case in Lyman Hall has exactly 47 pipes? Or that Pomona’s traditional motto, “Pomona College: Our Tribute to Christian Civilization,” has 47 characters? Did you know that at the time of Pomona’s first graduating class in 1894 there were 47 students enrolled? And if you want to go deeper into the mystery, did you notice that the last two digits in that year equal 47 times two?
Many Pomona alumni have deliberately inserted 47 references into their work. Joe Menosky, class of 1979, a writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation, inserted 47 mentions into nearly every episode of the show. Starting on Star Trek, continuing with Menosky on TNG, and through all of J.J. Abrams’s work (e.g., Alias, Lost, Fringe, the Star Trek reboots, etc.), the number 47 has a long history on the screen. Wherever there’s a stray number in the dialog of one of these shows—a time-stamp, an evidence tag at a crime scene, an apartment number—47 does its numerical duty, threading through and connecting the pieces to a larger whole.
David Lynch’s last feature film, Inland Empire from 2006, partially takes place during the filming of a movie. The movie within the movie is called On High in Blue Tomorrows. After an unnerving disturbance during a table read on set, producer Freddie Howard (Harry Dean Stanton) and director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) confess to the two leads — Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) — that they are shooting a remake of an unfinished German production called Vier Sieben — 47, which was itself based on a cursed Polish folktale. The previous project was abandoned after the two leads were found murdered “inside the story.”
Before that revelation, we are treated to a surrealist sitcom featuring a rabbit family going about their day in their living room. Later on in the movie, after an altercation with a some sort of phantom, Nikki flees into Room 47, which, unbeknownst to her, is the living room of the rabbits from television. These allusions start out unbeknownst, but soon they seem ubiquitous. For instance, after the earth’s human population reached 2 billion people in 1928, it took 47 years for it to reach 4 billion in 1975, and another 47 years to double again in 2023.
Let’s look at another one.
Forty-Three
It started as an amount of change.
Once upon a time in the early 1980s, the father of one of the Curb Dogs—a loose-knit crew of skateboarders and BMXers in the Bay Area scene that included Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, Marc Babus, and future Bones Brigade member Tommy Guerrero—walked from the local convenience store into a house party with 43 cents jingling in his pocket: a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and 3 pennies. In a wacky accent, he said to those assembled, “How come every time I come home from the store, I always have 43 cents in my pocket?!” Everyone laughed it off, but the idea was incepted.1 For this group of skateboarders and BMXers, the number 43 was suddenly very important, and they started seeing it everywhere.
BMX nostalgia. Illustration by Roy Christopher.
Maurice “Drob” Meyer, the NorCal BMX local some call the Godfather of 43, says it was Rob “Orb” Fladen’s dad who started the 43 phenomenon. In 1986 (which Drob points out is two times 43), a bunch of those NorCal guys visited Wizard Publications in Los Angeles, the home of BMX Action, Freestylin’, and later Homeboy and Go magazines. These publications were our news networks, and they were all helmed by three hyper-creative dudes known as the Master Cluster: Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jonze. If skateboarding was a relatively small subculture in the mid-1980s, then BMX freestyle was even smaller. These guys documented it with an energetic blend of wisdom and whimsy that included not only the adjacent action of skateboarding but also street art, underground music, and BMX mythology.
Soon the lore spread, and the numerology followed. Forty-three started showing up in the magazines, zines, and videos. It was known as the coincidence number. We saw it in receipts and change, bank signs and temperatures, longitudes and latitudes, mile markers and measurements. In the late 1980s, skateboard pro-cum-photographer Bryce Kanights had a warehouse ramp in the Bay Area called Studio 43. Ron Wilkerson’s legendary Enchanted Ramp was just off the 5 interstate at exit 43. Though the letters D and C in DC Shoes stand for Droors Clothing, Drob points out that D and C are the fourth and third letters of the alphabet. In Eddie Roman’s 1991 video Headfirst, Mat Hoffman, who is widely considered the Michael Jordan of BMX, mentions the number, exposing a new decade of riders to the cult of 43.
By the early 1990s, the Master Cluster had moved on from BMX, into magazines for young men (Dirt) and the Beastie Boys (Grand Royal). Soon, they moved into other areas entirely. Jenkins went into skateboard art (for Girl and Chocolate Skateboards), Lewman went into advertising (for companies like Lambesis and Nemo Design), and Jonze, as a music video director (for the Beastie Boys, Weezer, Björk, and many others), was already on his way to fame and acclaim in Hollywood. In 1995 they were the subject of a one-page profile in Wired Magazine. The page number? 43.
Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? This is what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Burke would say that the word was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, only then did you start seeing it. Forty-three is a prime number. As an angel number, 43 is highly positive and gives you hope anything is possible if you believe and pursue it. Says a popular angel number website, “People who regularly see number 43 should trust their own inner voice in all things they do.” Everyone knows you can do this with any number, but when you share that number with a group of like-minded people, the power is undeniable.
“Today, you can see and hear references to 43 in movies by Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, and TV shows by Dave Chapelle,” the flatland BMX professional Dave Nourie writes. In Spike Jonze’s 1999 feature film, BeingJohn Malkovich, Malkovich’s apartment number is 43, a nod to Jonze’s BMX roots. Nourie calls these planted 43s “acts of agriculture,” intentional allusions to an inside joke held by a few practitioners of a niche action sport, but the number has leaked into the larger world. Growing up, the novelist Rachel Kushner ran with Tommy Guerrero and others in the NorCal skateboard and BMX scene. As she writes in her essay, “The Hard Crowd,” “Forty-three was our magic number. I see it and remember that I’m in a cult for life.”
When the French philosopher Jacques Derrida defined the lingering Marxism of late-Capitalist society as hauntological, mashing together the words “haunting” and “ontology,” he couldn’t have imagined what the era might sound like. Bay Area beat maestra Mars Kumari captures the grit and grief of loss we all feel now, haunted as we are by what was here and is now missing.
I met Mars Kumari at Oblivion Access in Austin in the summer of 2023, where she gave me a demo CD of her record, I Thought I Lost You (Bruiser Brigade, 2023). I already had her record for deadverse, Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021), so I was stoked for the preview. She’s moved on and on since then with collaborations in the works with legends like Del the Funky Homosapien and Dose One and a new solo record for Handsmade Collective.
Mars Kumari. Illustration by Eleanor Purcell.
Roy Christopher: How’d you get into making music in the first place?
Mars Kumari: I first started learning music theory through piano lessons from age 6 onward, but didn’t start making my own music until around age 15/16 when my older brother gave me a pirated copy of Ableton. It was on version 8 at the time but 10 years later it’s still my weapon of choice. It took a lot of trial and error to learn (also YouTube tutorials). Throughout that period of time I’d absorb the music my brother listened to via these mix CDs he’d make, which is how I discovered MF DOOM, Del the Funky Homosapien, Crystal Castles, Flying Lotus, Nujabes, and Earl Sweatshirt, among so many others that ended up being core influences of mine.
I spent a year or so making beats by myself until I met my lifelong friends Keyvon and Shishan around 2015, and we all learned to produce and rap alongside one another. In 2019 and early 2020 when I was in university I performed alongside my good friends Nina Spheres and Parish as part of a dark ambient drone trio (collectively titled Nina Spheres). I learned much of what I know about sound design, layering and harmonics from that experience.
RC: More than any era of hip-hop, I hear the second wave of industrial acts (e.g, Scorn, Skinny Puppy, Justin Broadrick, Kevin Martin, the more ambient moments of Meat Beat Manifesto, Wax Trax Records output, et al.) in your work. Is that me just superimposing my own listening history, or do you find kindred sounds in there?
MK: I’ve been getting into the work of Justin Broadrick (specifically JK Flesh) since I saw him at Oblivion Access! I’m familiar with Skinny Puppy and Meat Beat Manifesto, but I need to get into their catalogs more. There are too many artists that influence me to name in one sentence, but Boards of Canada, dälek, Clams Casino, and Burial are some big ones for sure.
RC: What do you call it?
MK: My music?
RC:Yeah.
MK: I usually just say I make beats, even if that’s sort of oversimplifying it. My foundations have always been in industrial hip-hop, drone and shoegaze, but over the last 3 years that I’ve been performing for raves and nightclubs in the Bay, I’ve been listening to a lot more jungle, hard techno, dubstep, digital hardcore, things like that. I had listened to these kinds of music before but being around so much of it the last few years has had a major influence on my sound.
The context and emotions I associate with these kinds of music are consistently integral to the concepts behind my albums. For example, a lot of what I incorporated into Daybreak reminds me of some of my favorite memories of being surrounded by other trans people I love at parties and raves (places I’d be hearing the sort of music that inspired this) coupled with the comparative isolation of waking up the following morning alone in a world that hates people like us. It’s both of those feelings in equal measure behind the sound.
Given how important to the music the memories are, I guess I’d call it hauntology, but to me that feels more like a guiding philosophy and spirituality than a useful descriptor of the way it objectively sounds. There are many different sounds that the word hauntology describes; I think what unites them is more abstract.
Me and Mars at Oblivion Access in Austin in 2023. Selfie by Mars.
RC: What does hauntology mean to you?
MK: Mark Fisher defined it far better than I ever could, but in the context of music I would say it refers to sounds that evoke the distance between yourself and something you remember. The core memory is important, yes, but all music evokes memory on some level. Hauntology centers that temporal distance between you and your memories along with the feelings that may summon (usually nostalgia or a nonspecific feeling of loss). To me it’s more of a guiding set of principles.
However, as a broader philosophy of ghost-like things and temporal disjunction, it strongly informs my relationship to identity (especially gender identity). My own experience of transition has been one of constant tension between past and future selves. Early on, I felt as if the future I had chosen to seal away by transitioning was still haunting me; these days what I feel is more of a sense of having the past selves live on as revenants in my body alongside who I am now. Even the phrase “who I am now” feels relatively meaningless when the present self is never without past or future iterations.
RC: How would you chart the progression of your sound over your last five records?
MK: I put together my first album Anhedonic Mirages (2020) using beats I had made across the previous 5 years which I resampled and reshaped using a lot of distortion, reverb, and grain delay. It serves twofold as an exploration of a new sound and a reflection of where I felt I existed spiritually and temporally in my transition (and by extension the way in which past and future selves behave like revenants). It’s very washed out and bathed in noise and the song structures across this project follow a sort of dream logic. The whole thing is pretty “lo-fi” so to speak; from here I’ve tried to achieve clearer and clearer mixes with each album.
Mars Kumari Type Beat (deadverse, 2021).
I released my next project Elysian Mourning(2021) the following February. This album is a bit more sparse and dreamlike; there’s less percussion than in the last album and what is there is subdued. The drones were the focus here. I used my SP-404 extensively for this one; something I like about the original model is the way that electrical noise stacks and multiplies the more you resample something.
Mars Kumari Type Beat (2021) once again re-centers the drums. Some of the oldest beats I’ve ever put out are on here; as such it’s much more varied in its sonic pallet. There are alternative versions of tracks from the previous two albums, beats I started in 2015, and lots of samples from tape reels. I originally released it for Bandcamp Friday that August, and dälek took a liking to it and offered to put that out on deadverse. I’m endlessly grateful that he took a chance on me.
I Thought I Lost You (Bruiser Brigade, 2023).
My next album I Thought I Lost You (2023) took two years to complete and release. There were often field recordings and found sound in the backgrounds of previous albums but they’re much more in focus here, serving as leitmotifs. For example, the ambient passage at the beginning of the final track is lifted from a cassette I found with a recording of someone’s funeral. The atmosphere of that room comes through even in the absence of the eulogy. Even when these kinds of recordings aren’t so closely tied to death, the nature of them is inherently ghost-like in their detachment from any identifiable source. All you have is the recorder’s voice, the room they were in, and to a subtler extent what they were feeling. All with no semblance of an idea of who this was, what they were like, or if they’re even still alive. A voice with no name or body is a ghost in my eyes.
Anyways, I Thought I Lost You is stylistically similar to Anhedonic Mirages, but much more refined, versatile, and massive. There are elements of jungle, noise, industrial hip-hop, and plunderphonics, all texturally united with a dense veil of dark ambience. I wanted to instill a sense of immersion into a new world. Conceptually, it’s grief as a dimension. This was released via Bruiser Brigade Records and mastered by Raphy.
Daybreak (Handsmade Collective, 2024).
My latest album Daybreak (2024) is my attempt at deconstructed club, fusing hard techno and drum and bass and house with industrial hip-hop and gossamer layers of ambience. I wanted to make something that felt really crystalline and pretty that would sound great on a live soundsystem. Most of the songs here were designed for live performances, and many times I’d audition my mixes by playing them at shows and seeing how it sounded and how people responded. I try to wear my influences on my sleeve less these days, but it is very much inspired by artists like Burial, Arca, and Eartheater. I used a lot more synths and software drums here than in earlier albums (which were mostly or entirely sample-based, it’s more of a 50/50 ratio here). I’m really proud of the mix on this one. This is my first record with Handsmade Collective.
In summary, my sound has always had industrial trip-hop and dark ambient at its core, but over time has incorporated elements of deconstructed club and IDM with an increasingly glossy finish. Improving my mixing from one project to the next has always been a priority, and the results of working toward that are showing more and more in the increased clarity and scale of the sound.
RC: What’s coming up next?
MK: A full-length album with Del the Funky Homosapien has been in the works for most of the year. It’s about halfway recorded, and I’m aiming to have it out sometime midway next year. It’s tricky for me to say how it will sound given that it’s still in the works, but in a way it unites the grit of I Thought I Lost You with the gloss of Daybreak. I just started work on an LP with Dose One as well. There are other LPs and EPs planned as well, including one with my friend Q3, one with Uboa and Hook Operator, a noise EP with Lucas Abela and another solo record. Besides that, hopefully I can get a pet rabbit soon.
Because of their mix of hellified gangster shit and progressive compositions, I once jokingly called clipping. “Deathrow Tull.” Well, it’s not a joke anymore. While their last few projects have been record-long concepts like the classic prog rock of old, Dead Channel Sky is mixtape-like, a carefully curated collection of songs in which every track is a love letter to a possible present. Like a mashup of distinct elements, the overall concept is there, but the result is brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it. It sounds crisp and classic at the same time. When something strikes us as retrospective and futuristic at the same time, it’s a reminder of how slipshod our present moment truly is.
In my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019), I draw what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences between early hip-hop culture and cyberpunk literature, the binary stars of the solar system at the end of the millennium. I exploit their similarities to illustrate how the cultural practices of hip-hop have informed the cultural practices of the now. Hip-hop was borne of the post-apocalyptic scene in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. Its repurposing of outmoded technology, the hand-styled hieroglyphic screennames on every colorfast surface, and the gyrating dance moves—an entire culture forged from the freshest of what was available at hand—mirrors the post-apocalyptic techno-scrounge of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Rudy Rucker’s Software, and other early works by the contributors to Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology (Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Sterling himself, among others). Add the leather-clad mohawks of Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force or Rammellzee’s B-boy battle armor and a blend of the two comes further into focus.
Juxtaposing high-tech, corporate command-and-control systems (the “cyber”) with the lo-fi, D.I.Y. underground (the “punk”), cyberpunk proper starts in 1982 and ends in 1999, from Blade Runner to The Matrix. There are works before and works since that embody the visions and values of cyberpunk, but these dates act as rough parameters for their assimilation into the larger social sphere, for the time it took cyberpunk to become cyberculture. In the meantime, hip-hop matured, went through its Golden Era, then melted into further forms. Over the same decades, it went from “Planet Rock” to “Bring da Ruckus” to “Hard Knock Life,” from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to Missy Elliott, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. While other genres flirted with it, hip-hop was fickle and fey. Any tryst with the odd bedfellow was a one-night stand at best. Rap and rock birthed mutant offspring maligned by most, and hip-hop’s relations with electronica rarely fared any better.
Those twin suns—hip-hop and cyberpunk—both rose in the 1970s and warmed the wider world during the 1980s and 1990s. What if someone explicitly merged them into one set and sound? Afterall, both movements are the result of hacking the haunted leftovers of a war-torn culture that’s long since moved on.
On Dead Channel Sky, clipping. texture-map the twin histories of hip-hop and cyberpunk onto an alternate present where Rammellzee and Bambaataa are the superheroes of old; where Cybotron and Mantronix are the reigning legends; where Egyptian Lover and Freestyle are debated endlessly, and Ultramag and Public Enemy are the undeniable forefathers; where the lost movements of 1980s and the 1990s are still happening: rave, trip-hop, hip-house, acid house, drum & bass, big beat—the detritus of a different timeline, the survivors of armed audio warfare. That war at thirty-three and a third, its atrocities imprinted upon yet another generation, what someone once called, “the presence of the significance of things” without a hint of ambiguity.
clipping. is very story oriented. They deal in ontology and narrative as much as beats and rhymes. They’ve been approaching making music like writing science fiction since their conception. Two of their records have been nominated for Hugo Awards. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes both compose film scores, and Daveed Diggs is an actor, writer, and producer. As clipping., they’ve collaborated with as many of their fellow experimental noise artists (e.g., Pedestrian Deposit, Michael Esposito, Jeff Parker, et al.) as they have fellow rappers (e.g., Ed Balloon, King Tee, Gangsta Boo, Benny the Butcher, et al.). Here those co-conspirators include everyone from the guitarist Nels Cline on the outro to “Dodger” (titled “Malleus”) to their labelmates Cartel Madras on “Mirrorshades, pt. 2,” rapper/actor Tia Nomore on “Scams,” and the wordy wordsmith Aesop Rock on “Welcome Home Warrior,” among others.
Diggs is known for intricate lyrics and rapid-fire rapping, and the tracks that Snipes and Hutson build in the background are no less complex. On “Knocking in the Back,” they employ Pulsar Generator, a 1990s-era sound-particle software program developed by Alberto de Campo and Curtis Roads; on “Code,” they sample narrated memories from the Afrofuturist documentary The Last Angel of History; and on “Dominator,” they repurpose the classic Dutch track “Dominator” by Human Resource. All of the above serves to give us a glimpse of an adjacent possible present, where hip-hop and cyberpunk are one culture.
Binary stars are often perceived as one object when viewed with the naked eye. Like those twin sun systems, it’ll take some special equipment and some discerning attention to pull the stars apart on this record. As Diggs barks on the fire-starting “Change the Channel”: Listen up! Everything is very important!
My favorite actors tend to play minor characters. There’s something truly special about the MVPs on the sidelines who score wins for the team without much notice. They get bonus points if they’re also writers behind the scenes. DC Pierson has haunted the edges of my psyche for years. He’s popped up on Community, 2 Broke Girls, Key and Peele, Weeds, and a few Verizon commercials, among other places. Somewhere along the way, I started following his social media antics, subscribed to his newsletter, and found his books. A creator in the true Renaissance style, Pierson can do anything — and make it funny.
DC Pierson. Photo by Ari Scott.
I first saw Pierson in 2009’s Mystery Team, a collaboration between him Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, Donald Glover, and the inimitable Meggie McFadden, that also features Aubrey Plaza, Ellie Kemper, Bobby Moynihan, John Daly, Neil Casey, Kay Cannon, and Matt Walsh, among others. It’s a juvenile adventure that feels like hanging out with your friends, causing mischief during a summer in middle school.
Pierson has also written for the VMAs and MTV Movie Awards. A veteran of improv comedy, his latest creations, “The Architect Who Built New York” video series and an adaptation of his first novel, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To(Vintage, 2010), are no less silly than his first— and no less serious.
Roy Christopher:I first saw you in Mystery Team (2009), which you co-wrote. In the meantime, the cast and crew of that movie has become a who’s who of modern comedy. How did that project come about?
DC Pierson: That project was the (probably? We’ll see) culminating effort of DERRICK comedy, a sketch group I was in with Donald Glover, Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, and Meggie McFadden. We’d made a lot of videos that got popular at the dawn of the YouTube era and pooled any money we made from touring, merchandising, and the barest beginnings of monetization, and along with some money from friends and family were able to shoot a feature. Prior to that we’d written a feature we wanted to try and get made the traditional way, and when it became clear that wasn’t gonna happen we wrote something we could conceivably make on an indie budget, including using Meggie’s parents’ house or Dan’s uncles’ hardware store / warehouse in Manchester, NH as shooting locations.
Dominic Dierkes, D.C. Pierson, and Donald Glover in Mystery Team (2009).
Production scrappiness aside the most important part of that process was the writing. Time being money and all we knew we weren’t going to have the chance to improvise a bunch on set and do a bunch of takes. There were a few opportunities to do a little of that i.e., Matt Walsh’s scene with Jon Lutz at the office party late in the movie or Bobby Moynihan’s scenes in the supermarket, but at that point it’s not like you’re rolling for ten minutes hoping somebody will find what’s funny about the scene. You already have something serviceable written and are just watching a couple genius actor-improvisers make it even better like five times in a row and then you get to pick the best one. Going into it with a script where the story, characters, and especially jokes were all solid on the page was key. A lot of that was down to Dan and Meggie’s sense of what was feasible and achievable on a production level — and it deserves to be said, Dan’s ambition and visual sense really kind of made the videos and movie what they were in many ways, and Meggie figuring out how we could actually do stuff in a professional way really none of us were qualified to do in our late teens and early, early 20s — combined with Donald‘s experiences writing for 30 Rock that very much set the tone and the bar for the writing process.
And as for the casting, as you mentioned, we were really just pulling from people in the UCB community in New York that we were part of at that time. It was an incredibly cool scene to be a part of, and I’m still super grateful for it.
RC: That was right at the beginning of the social-media age, and you’ve leveraged several platforms for comedic purposes. Have you had a plan for those or do you just improvise as needed?
DCP: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, no. It’s more like just keep swimming and try to stay visible. I think I took to Twitter because for better or for worse, I like wordplay and obscure pop culture references, and those both happened to be things that were valuable in that medium. It’s been a slower time adjusting to things like Instagram and TikTok, but I think I’m getting there now especially since I’ve decided to embrace making essentially short short solo sketch videos. It’s a combination of where the technology’s at, that I can just make them and edit them on my phone and the computer and don’t have to be terrifically skilled, with the fact that I come from a sketch background. And even though I don’t think it will become as bigger universal as Twitter was in a day, I am having a lot of fun on Bluesky, which is largely a text based platform like Twitter. We’ll see how it plays out, but at the moment it has a good community vibe.
I also have to say I share a certain weariness. A lot of people who are freelancers of various stripes, be they visual artists or actors or journalists or Drag performers of constantly having to schlep our wares from platform to platform, most of which seem Paternally hostile to promotion of any kind, even though we’re told that’s what we have to do and to be honest it is what we have to do. I guess in my case, maybe it karmically balances out because what we were making in DERRICK really did come along exactly the right time for how small YouTube was but that it existed at all. Granted, none of these things were as developed or capricious or even pernicious as they are these days and maybe that’s part of what was so lucky.
RC:You’ve been very prolific, and your newsletter is especially erudite and hilarious. Do you publish or perform everything you come up with, or do you save some things for longer or larger releases?
DCP: Thank you! I have fun doing it, but haven’t done it as much in the last year for various scarcity of bandwidth reasons. I would say in all forms I probably execute like 10% of the ideas I come up with, but that might be a very generous definition of the word idea. I also think — and here I’m quoting Tom Scharpling, author and host of The Best Show who I think is quoting someone else from his life: The execution is really all that matters, ideas are cheap. Of things I actually execute, like write a draft or shoot some of, most of those get out there. I’m not sitting on like a giant archive of unpublished work, though weirdly network effects and internet attention spans being what they are, it’s kind of like anyone who makes things is sitting on a giant archive of unpublished work because it seems like if you’re not constantly surfacing your own stuff, the kind of attention span Eye of Sauron immediately moves off of them. That said, I do have a an essay about going to see the Postal Service and Death Cab like a year ago that I wrote around that time and just never sent out for whatever reason, so thanks for the reminder.
Oh also, even as I say that I have a rough draft of a new book completed, and I need to like lower myself into the whale carcass of that at some point and finish it. More than anything it’s just a debt of honor I owe myself at this point.
RC: “Execution over ideas.” Did you find that as hard to hear as I did?
DCP: Oh, for sure! And if you’re like me — which we all are, in this way — you’re getting older. So if you think about it for two seconds, or stop trying not to think about it, you realize that the horizon for doing all the ideas is getting smaller. That’s a panicky feeling but there’s also something freeing about it. Less time for doing things that seem like a generically good idea rather than the most You idea, the thing that you’re the most excited about.
RC:Your books were the next thing I was going to ask about. I don’t agree with them, but writers always seem to talk about how hard and thankless it is. Do you enjoy the practice of writing?
DCP: I do! I think I’ve even gotten quasi defensive of it in the post ChatGPT era — like, as long as we’ve been putting pen to paper or pushing the cursor forward writers have been complaining about the drudgery and the solitude of writing, and now all the sudden all these tech bros are coming out of the woodwork claiming to have “solved” it and it’s like, hold on — that’s our solitude and drudgery! It’s like the line from some 90s kids movie — “nobody hits my brother but me!”
There was a line in Top Gun: Maverick that resonated with me (a lot actually! I loved that movie!) about how even with all this modern war-fighting technology, success or failure in one of these insane dogfights those Top Gun rascals are always getting themselves into still comes down to “the man in the box,” i.e., the human being in the really expensive fighter plane. The movie is a really thinly veiled metaphor for Cruise’s own feelings about old-fashioned movie craftsmanship and exhibition vs. the new degraded and rapidly diminishing versions of those things, feelings I happen to strongly share, so that helped. But also, the phrase immediately resonated with me as a good way to explain that ineffable and sometimes frustrating feeling of being a writer who is actually sitting down and writing.
I also have done a fair amount of writing for award shows and things, and when I got to the point where I was head-writing the shows, I realized what a lot of people who’ve done something long enough to ascend into a quasi-management position learn: You get separated from the thing you love that got you there in the first place. I would spend 99% of my time delegating or fielding emails from other people in charge of other parts of the show or in meetings or on calls. I’d be desperate to have time to just sit down and bang out drafts of things we needed for the show but wouldn’t really be able to. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I think I’m pretty good at all that other stuff too, but it’s way less specialized. A gajillion people can type “circling back” in an email window. Not everybody can be (or wants to be) the proverbial Man in the Box. Also the world will intercede in infinite ways to keep you from being that (hu)Man. That line in the Top Gun sequel was a good reminder to try and maximize my time in the box.
RC:My parents were never into music and subsequently have never really understood my life-long love and interest in it. You had a very different experience. Can you tell me a little about that?
DCP: Dang!! Well I’m sorry it wasn’t something you grew up with in the house very much but it doesn’t seem to have stopped you getting immersed in it — maybe because it was something you had to actively seek out or used to define yourself as a separate entity. (That unsolicited uncredentialed faux-therapy will be $125, please). I didn’t grow up in a musical household the same way many friends of mine who themselves are way more “musical,” as in, playing instruments or singing, did — like, it wasn’t a thing where my mom played piano or my dad and uncle would get guitars out and jam at family gatherings. But my parents were both pretty typical boomers (complimentary, in this instance) in that they both had really close relationships to the music they grew up on (The Beatles in my mom’s case and 70s rock in my dad’s) and my dad maintained an active interest in new music his whole life (my mom probably would’ve as well but she died when I was 12 — you can actually just repay me in some therapy about that).
The times I’m most grateful for now, as I wrote about in this essay, are evenings when I’d be visiting home as an adult and some combination of me, my dad, and my brothers would hang out on the couch in the living room in front of my dad and stepmom’s state-of-the-art-at-the-time home entertainment system and switch off playing songs from our laptops. It was a lucky collision of where the technology was at — the peak iPod / iTunes era — and where we were at in our lives as father and adult / college / older teenage sons, and a lot of emotional conversations that might not have happened otherwise were had. Those are the times I most value and the thing I’d most like to have back, though my dad’s gone now too. ROY, MAKE WITH THE THERAPY, PLEASE!!
It’s funny, I’ve been realizing recently that some music has gone from “this reminds me of my dad” — like, folky, quasi-ambient Windham Hill records or cool jazz played by white dorks who looked like NASA engineers — to “this is just music I like and actively want to seek out.” They say you become your parents and if this a form it takes for me, great. I will be listening to some of the mellowest shit of all time.
RC:What else is coming up in the DC Universe?
DCP: So much, I hope! Continuing to work on a feature script adaptation of my first book The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep And Never Had To with my pals Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden. It’s a process that’s had various fits, starts, and tantalizing near-misses with fruition over the years — and along we made this proof of concept short that still rules imo — and it’s at a phase where it’s the most exciting it’s been a long time <knock on wood>.
I’m working on a live show with my very talented writer, actor friend Robbie Sublett that I’m also super excited about. It kind of ties in with exactly where we are in our lives and careers while also — hopefully — having a hook that gets people in the door. To be announced on that front.
I’ve also been posting a lot more short comedy videos to Instagram and TikTok and such, particularly a series where I play “The Architect Who Designed New York,” basically an excuse to walk around and make short, silly, one-liners I can then cut together based around stuff I see. Been really enjoying that. Every time I set out to shoot one I end up with enough material for almost two, so it keeps rolling.
Aidan Fridman and the Filmmaking Club at the University of North Florida sat me down for an interview about writing and teaching and put together this little video. Check it out!
