Records: DJ Spooky's Riddim Warfare

By Sam Frank

"Fuck art. Let's dance!" For once, DJ Spooky must have been listening to his critics with at least one ear. Riddim Warfare isn't the art soup of his past efforts. Instead, on his major label debut, he makes a new attempt to recreate the energy and creativity of his live DJing show in the studio.

Spooky wants desperately to be unclassifiable--in his words, to "paint with fragments of memory." But in this attempt, he gives himself away as a bit of a fraud. Spooky wants to be avant-garde, so he recruits Thurston Moore to play guitar fuzz. He wants to be jazz, so he plays some nondescript walking bass with a live band. He wants to be pop, so he samples Puff Daddy and Sublime without a hint of irony. He tries to paint a postmodern, dystopic world, filled with "ethnic digestion tabernacles" and smart bombs from Space Invaders, but he winds up coming off as an inane retro-futurist.

Spooky's attempt to create such a world is all well and good, except that it seems like he's paying lip service to his influences--even when the experiment succeeds, as with Thurston Moore. No matter how much Spooky talks, one track each of limp jazz, dub, and Muzak just isn't very convincing. In fact, it seems like Spooky only cares about three things: hip-hop, art, and drum 'n' bass. He works the hardest at hip-hop, recruiting various underground rappers to rhyme about space, technology, and futuristic spirituality. However, with the notable exception of Kool Keith, their lyrics amount to little more than big words and hot air. Spooky's production doesn't help matters any, replacing the tight minimalism of DJ Premier with an overload of distracting sounds and subpar beats.

Spooky also takes his art seriously, and in doing so, he threatens to kill the album. He talks a lot between songs, and most of these interludes are completely insufferable. One would hope he realize that the listener doesn't really care too much about the politics of "the mix," or that this is "cassette as theater piece."

What redeems Riddim Warfare is the way Spooky creates a new urban dance music by layering insane noise breakbeats with scratches, sirens, and other dark signifiers of decay. It shows that when he cuts away the bullshit, Spooky can really rock a party. His collaboration with Kool Keith on the title track is stunning, a signpost pointing toward a new fusion of drum 'n' bass and hip-hop. But ultimately, there just isn't enough of this unpretentious side of Spooky to justify his ever-present self-indulgence. (Outpost)

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