DJ QBert Is No Ordinary Fellow: An Interview

It's a rare and beautiful thing to come across an artist willing to delve into deeply personal spiritual questioning in the course of a 20-minute interview. But then again DJ QBert is no ordinary fellow. Since 1985, when little Richard Quitevis starting pushing needle across vinyl, the art of the skratch has been transformed, in large part due to his efforts, into a respected musical genre. Anyone who has doubts that the turntable is a true musical instrument need only witness QBert in action. Nimble-fingered and blessed with an active imagination and a refined sense of rhythm, QBert cajoles the tables into producing sounds not of this Earth.

After too long on the sidelines of stardom, QBert burst into mainstream view at this year's Sundance Film Festival, as both a main subject for Doug Pray's documentary Scratch and the mastermind behind Wave Twisters, the animated accompaniment to his 1998 album of the same name, having its New York premiere at Void on April 6. Directed by San Francisco-based filmmakers Eric Henry and Syd Garon, the film is a hallucinogenic rocket ride through an "inner space" galaxy where skratching is the only form of communication.

At the festival, after waiting nearly an hour amid a swarm of reporters, photographers and tv crews, I was finally granted an interview. Smiling benignly and answering me with a calm reminiscent of Yoda, QBert gives the impression of existing in some tranquil alternate dimension. For one of the greatest skratch DJs in the world, reality is a happy combination of the halcyon days of 1980 and the great and gleaming Buckminster future, a place where the graffiti sprays, the B-boys break and the turntables speak the language of the universe.

So here you are, suddenly the center of attention. You've got two films at Sundance that are getting raves. I love the films, but let's talk a little about a rumor I heard that you've got something called the Temple Warplex, a hideout in Hawaii where you're studying some sort of top-secret skratching technique.

[Laughs] Yeah, that's right. It's sort of a training grounds. Right now we're working with an old Grandmaster there. We've been deejaying for 16 years, but this guy has been skratching since day one, since like '75. We thought we'd heard it all, but this guy is like 10 years ahead of us. This whole style that we're learning right now is so far ahead of us that we have to learn a whole basic system before we can get to his level. We're just like at kindergarten level right now. I mean the man is amazing. It's like you watch him and you think, "How does he do all this stuff?" So right now we're in training with him in this Hawaiian-paradise kind of atmosphere. He's been there on his own for a long time, focusing on this technique. He's got a very cool lifestyle, where he's able to live and do what he loves more or less forever.

It sounds almost as if you're studying under some ancient Zen master.

Oh, it is. His whole philosophy on spirituality, it encompasses so many things. There's a thing called the Akashic Records, which are the records of everyone's life and past lives. Say you've been here for a thousand lives, they're all stored in the Akashic Records and there are ways of accessing that information. But I don't want to say any more. I think I'm giving away too much. The stuff we're doing in Hawaii is top secret, because we really want to surprise people with it. But I can tell you that we really have to learn a system before we can get to what he's doing, and it's very complex. We want to make sure we perfect it. When we do learn it, we then have to interpret it in our individual way. Everyone has their own way of manipulating the style to make it their own. I can say that it's a whole new system of techniques... It's reliant on the oneness of your mind and hand. It's really amazing.

So in your training you're working to achieve that mind-hand connection in what ways?

You challenge yourself all the time. It's like anything. You practice. You create your songs the same way you would with any musical instrument. You find sounds that express what you're trying to say. There's one style of deejaying, where you can only use this one skratch, this one sound. You can't use all these other weird sounds. It's like, if you're really good, let's see you use this one sound. That's the standard skratch sound. If you can mess with that sound and manipulate it in a unique way, then that gauges your skill. Then there's the other style, where you can use any sound you want. But there's also that whole mastery of working with that one basic sound. It's like jazz standard, what can you do with a clump of clay. How many people can look at the same clump of clay and come up with infinite variations?

When you play to an audience, you tend to react to them, to communicate with them. I love in the documentary Scratch, where you admit that you feel at times like you're channeling some sort of cosmic transmission, speaking some sort of new alien language through the turntables. How do you think this music differs from traditional rock music in that way, in the way you communicate with an audience?

Well, with any musical instrument, I forget what it's called in Japanese, but there's this innate understanding. With almost any kind of Western music, most of the audiences in Japan aren't understanding the words. But they can feel the energy, they don't know what the hell the guy's saying, but they feel it. They know it through the energy. With any kind of musical instrument or any kind of art form, you can convey a kind of energy that anyone can understand. It's like painting, dancing or sculpture.

Tell me a little about the spiritual base you've formulated from your experiences and where you think we're headed in the future.

We are in the age of Aquarius right now, where people who are very spiritually inclined will meet those same kind of people, will run into happy accidents?a book, or they'll change a channel and see a program which is reiterating their thoughts. When you're looking for something, there's energy that helps you find it. Negative people will veer toward the negative, and positive people like yourself will find the positive people. I think we're heading toward the spiritual. Everyone is going to be more connected, we'll discover and learn that we have to help each other. Not have to, we'll want to because we'll know that we are all part of each other. And the more negative people will separate from the positive people and the world will split. The consciousness of the positive people will rise and we'll be separated, there'll be two Earths, one with positivity, one still more negative and primitive.

Does there have to be that dichotomy, the yin and the yang? Can't it just be all good love?

I think the more positive people will go back and help the more negative people.

And music will help pave the path to utopia.