Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 89

The Sound of “Synthetic Fury”

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demonstrates in the context of the rest of the track is a lack of human agency: the
sounds of the equipment are present as are the sounds of machines, but the only
human agents to be heard are either distanced and cut up (the drum’n ’bass MC) or
synthetic (the American television-advertising voice with which the track starts).
Other elements in the texture direct the listener how to hear this absence: the filmic
string sounds signify fear, alienation; it is the most unstable and frightening place
in the track.
What this seems to signify is an undermining of any sense of a single subject
or authorial identity, and indeed this interpretation is indicated by DJ Spooky
himself. In an interview in The Wire, DJ Spooky recently referred to his work as
“cultural entropy” and “post-rational art”, referring to the way in which sampling
practices have deracinated cultural signifiers resulting in art which lacks narrative
or meaning and instead is immersive and a flux of sensations (Reynolds, 1995).
This characterisation of DJ Spooky’s music aligns itself with post-modern
conceptions of society in which the consumption of signs and signifying practices
becomes a pastiche, a play on signs with no reference beyond the commodity; it is
the logical endpoint of the sociology of culture thesis that identity is a construction
forged through consumption rather than a fixed identity which cultural products
are then used by individuals to “represent”. This conclusion is partly upheld by
Spooky’s numerous personae: DJ Spooky, real name Paul D. Miller, works under
a variety of names and in a variety of contexts (hip-hop, raves, ambient, Artforum
magazine and ICA conferences), which ultimately points to a greater fluidity of
identity to that previously outlined by hip-hop. As DJ Spooky remarks: “I pass
through so many different scenes, each with their different uniforms and dialects.
I think people need to be comfortable with difference. Hip-hop isn’t: it says ‘You
gotta be down with us’” (Sinker, 1990, 3).
As others have argued, however, despite the postmodern potential of sampling
technology, this music and its new textual practices are easily subsumed back within
traditional ideologies of authorship (Goodwin, 1990, 261). Hip-hop and jungle
have been reconstituted around figures such as “the producer”, “mixer” and
“scratcher” (all normatively male), and by new ways of demonstrating mastery of
technology in live performance (Goodwin, 1990; Bradby 1993). One of the primary
ways in which technical mastery has conventionally been displayed is through
visual aspects of live performance, and the musical display of virtuosity. However,
the performance mode of hip-hop, jungle and electronica is more often studio based,
and even when performed live there is much less performative activity (usually
confined to button pushing and scratching vinyl in a physical context which limits
the amount an audience can see). One of the ways in which hip-hop and jungle
compensate for the absence of live visual performance is through aural displays of
technical mastery through virtuosic scratching and sampling techniques. In his