DJ Hero

Gameinformer have recently conducted an exclusive DJ Shadow interview regarding the upcoming DJ Hero Release.  You can visit the site directly for the interview or click more to read it right here.

Game Informer: Can you tell us how you got involved in the production of DJ Hero? How did you first hear about the project, and what were the lines of connection that got you a part of that?

DJ Shadow: I’m trying to remember back—I think the first time I heard about it was in my twice-weekly calls with my manager. He usually is just kind of, “OK, so and so got in touch with me about this, so and so got in touch with me about that, do you want to license music to this documentary, do you want to do this?” And sometimes in the calls it ends up being just this kind of laundry list and I have to be really careful to catch things that sound intriguing to me before they just kind of roll on by. Because he often doesn’t really know what my true interests are, or what I would get excited about, and he’ll just present them to me all kind of deadpan, without his opinion, like, “There’s this, there’s that,” and when it came up, by the end of the call I kind of went, “Wait a minute, go back to that, that sounds kind of important and interesting.”

And what’s funny is that this kid that I met on tour about a year and a half ago had presented me with this kind of homemade videogame concept, and it had been kind of bubbling in the back of my mind, but basically what I ended up concluding was that there’s no way you can make a game on your own and have any chance of competing or developing, in the [market]… videogames have obviously come a long way since I was in the arcades. So it was just kind of serendipitous to me, it was good timing, because I had all but given up on that other concept, and just kind of thought to myself, “Well, I’d love to get involved, and there’s got to be a DJ game coming,” and then of course they reached out. So that was how I first heard about it, and then I basically said to my manager, “We’ve got to find out more about this, let’s move this one up to the top of the list.”

And then the next thing that happened is I went to L.A. and met with the team and got to see a little bit of the game, and from there it was kind of like, “OK, well as a DJ here’s what I think should be included, here’s the songs that I think should be included. Are you guys open to me feeding you this kind of information or do you already…”—you know, because I didn’t want to be sitting there going, “Here’s what I think you should do,” and having them say to me, “We got it, thanks.” So it was nice that it wasn’t just like, “We’re just going to borrow your name and likeness,” it was more like, “We want your help and your opinions in terms of from a DJ having a bulls***-proof radar out there.”  I don’t know, does that answer your question?

GI: For sure. How long ago was that, that you first sat down at the table with Activision and kind of had that conversation and saw the game for the first time?

DJ: It was back in either late November or early December. Though obviously at that point the game had already been in production for at least a year at that point.

GI: Sure, sure. Well what about your music in particular? Are you planning on including any of your old tracks in the game?

DJ: I didn’t really have any overwhelming and burning desire to revisit my own stuff for the ten trillionth time [laughing]. So in the mixes that I did at least thus far, I haven’t used any of my own stuff. I think that anybody they’ve drawn into the game they want to have a couple of their songs somewhere in the game. So I think a couple of my songs are being used, but at least not at the moment, I haven’t done them. Because there’s only a certain number of times—like every time I go on tour I have to come up with new ways of incorporating certain songs that I know the audience is going to want to hear, and after you’ve done that the tenth or fifteenth or thirtieth time, it’s not—I mean I’m much more excited about opening up the master sessions of some other tracks that I’ve been inspired by and messing around with those.

GI: Are you thinking about trying to contribute a lot of new content that hasn’t been heard before from you?

DJ: No… You know, if I was on a different internal working schedule that might have been possible, but I’m basically at a point in my own recording career where I toured for about two and a half years and now I’m just generating new ideas to go back into the studio. So the part of the cycle that they hit me on wasn’t a time when I had a lot of new material sitting around. So there isn’t going to be any of my new stuff in the game, at least not in the first version, maybe in a subsequent version or in download form or something like that. Maybe six months from now I’ll be in a position where I’ve got loads of tracks just sitting around. But that’s kind of unusual for me because it takes me a long time to do every song that I do and I’m not the type of artist—you know a lot of times you’ll hear people say—especially in hip-hop—like, “Oh, I did 300 demos and I’m just choosing the best 20 for the album.” That never happens with me. I mean if there’s 15 songs on my album, chances are I made about 15 or 16. And if I don’t feel like this song is going to be contributing to the album, I don’t even bother finishing it usually.

GI: Well jumping from the music itself to the features of the game, are there ideas or features that you think are central or essential to have in a DJ simulator, like what DJ Hero is going to be?

DJ: Yeah—it’s an interesting question and it’s something that I think internally the developers kicked back and forth a lot, and I think even within the last few months there’s been some debate about all of the different—and that was actually one of the first things that I wanted to know when I got down to L.A. to meet with everybody and look at the game and look at the actual hardware, was, “OK well…”—DJ’ing is similar to Guitar Hero: there’s 500 different styles of playing guitar, and which style is going to be emphasized? If it’s going to be rock, is going to be a modern kind of post-heavy metal approach to playing guitar? Or is it going to be—I mean what if there’s an acoustic—you know what I mean? [Laughing] On a musical level, it presents a lot of challenges because to me there’s a lot of styles of DJ’ing that I respect a lot that don’t have anything to do with actual showmanship. I mean some of the best DJs I’ve ever seen play do nothing on a technical level that would blow any turntablist’s mind, but they can read the crowd really well and it’s all about their song selection and the progression of the music that they play over the night. You know, house DJs will do like a four hour set and play like maybe a dozen and a half songs within that four hours, but then there’s a set like what I did at the Hollywood Bowl, where we used all 45s and we played a couple hundred 45s in the span of an hour. So there’s so many styles of DJ’ing and there’s so many different disciplines, and so many different techniques and styles, and not all of it involves what I think a lot of people think of when they think of DJs in this era, which is kind of the battle DJ, the more hip-hop oriented scratching and doing crazy body tricks on the turntables.

So to answer your question, I think that a lot of the major elements that are important to DJ’ing, such as scratching—which really, scratching was created by disco DJs just queuing up parts of the records that they wanted to play. I mean, any disc jockey from the 40s on up is familiar with the sound of scratching, it was just not anything that anybody chose to emphasize. So hip-hop, which is based on the aesthetic of, you know, using whatever’s around you—that somebody decided, “Well, OK that sound is actually kind of cool, I’m going to let people hear it rather than hiding it from people.”

So again to make a long story short, obviously scratching, beat matching, using the crossfader in a way that is conducive to what people are actually hearing musically… And in terms of when I sat down to start doing the mixes, there was a very specific technical regiment that was involved in the sense that, “Well, OK, the songs have to be on a set BPM,” which when you’re mixing songs that were played by a live band, that’s a whole process in itself to get everything locked without sounding—to me I don’t like hearing the digital artifacts of getting things restricted to a certain grid or a certain beat map. So I take a really long time to do that, so that there isn’t anything audible, I don’t want to hear any edits—it’s sort of like… if you work at a special effects house, and you’re working on a film, you try really hard to cover up anything that feels digital or that feels touched up, you know what I mean? You want it to look normal, and that’s the way I approach music. I know I’m sort of going all over the place right now, but… feel free to stop me if you want to rein me back in. But basically it was like, “OK, you have one song and that’s going to represent the left turntable, and you’re mixing it with another song that’s going to represent the right turntable, and then there’s going to be a sample track”—sort of—some mixers starting in the 90s would have a little button where you could load samples in—and obviously then in PCs, SP-1200 era, drum machine era—lots of people would incorporate samples into their DJ’ing. So there’s a sample track. So that’s basically in a nutshell what you’re working with when you’re playing the game, is you have two records playing, and you have a sample track, and you have to basically simulate what you’re hearing.

GI: One of the criticisms that sometimes is leveled at Guitar Hero games is that in some ways beat matching is almost the opposite of musicality; there’s a lack of real creative work that’s going on there. Is that something that DJ Hero is trying to move past? Do you have a creative element to the game? Or is that still something that’s kind of beyond what they’re able to do within the threshold of games?

DJ: There are a lot of different ways to answer that, but I guess I could just say that, to me it depends—there’s different levels of purity. If you’re a purist, it’s sort of like, are you more pure than the next critic, or are you—it’s something that I’m really familiar with in terms of growing up in hip-hop, because it’s like—it basically gets down to, “OK if you weren’t in the South Bronx in 1975, then who are you to criticize this song or that song?” And that’s when you just go, “OK, but that’s just silly now.” You know, everybody got into hip-hop at a different time, everybody got into rock and roll at a different time. I mean it’s sort of like, we can’t all be Jimmy Page, we can’t all be—and so everybody has a different level of what’s real music, what’s not, and I think—I do expect that because hip-hop and DJ’ing is not looked at by the elder critics and magazines like Rolling Stone—I mean I grew up, again, listening to rap—all those magazines hated hip-hop. You couldn’t find a positive word about rap until Run DMC hooked up with Aerosmith in ‘86, and suddenly rap was selling records and making a lot of money for people, and then people started kind of going, “Oh, OK well maybe it’s not so bad.”

But growing up, remembering how much the mainstream media hated hip-hop, I definitely expect there will be some residues of that, and it won’t be given necessarily the kind of instant acceptance that Guitar Hero got. I mean that’s just a natural expectation of somebody who has constantly heard from the beginning that what I’m doing and the music that I love is not real music. So I don’t know to what extent people are going to say, “Well, is this…”—to me, it’s a rhythm based videogame that happens to utilize the disciplines that I’ve spent most of my life appreciating and trying to master. And I think for that reason and that reason alone—or that would be reason enough for me to be involved, just so that I wasn’t sitting on the sidelines going, “Damn I wish they thought of this,” or “why didn’t they think of this?” It’s nice to be able to contribute.

GI: Sure. Do you get a sense from what you’ve seen of the game that there is something more to it than the sort of beat matching that you see in games like Guitar Hero? Is it a broader experience than that? Or is it really kind of transferring that beat matching experience from Guitar Hero and putting it in another setting with different genres of music and a different peripheral?

DJ: To me it’s different, because—for one thing, conceptually it’s almost—I think it’s going to kind of break down certain doors. I mean for one thing, just the fact that I’m able to obtain a David Bowie multi-track of “Let’s Dance” and mix it with KRS-One “Jack of Spades” for example—that’s one of the mixes I did—I don’t think that a lot of the people that made some of the music that we’re involved with have ever allowed their music to be so freely messed with, you know what I mean? And, I think that this game—I definitely think it will raise some eyebrows on that level, and again that’s part of—the game is not just about hip-hop obviously, there’s a lot different styles of DJ’ing and I think that’s reflected in the game.

But I do think that, as somebody who grew up in hip-hop and listening to it, it’s nice that it—it does have that kind of thumbing the nose at traditional music aesthetics quality to it that I like a lot. But in terms of how much it differs from Guitar Hero, I know the thing I’d say is with Guitar Hero in a lot of cases, people are playing along to guitar solos that they’ve basically grew up with, and in some cases people grew up trying to master in the process of learning how to play the guitar, whether that’s—you know, there are certain riffs that everybody tries when they first start to play guitar. It was actually the same for me—when I started to try and learn how to scratch, I was basically trying to imitate the scratch patterns of people like Grandmaster Flash, or any of the other DJs that I was—or Jam Master Jay  or Mix Master Ice from UTFO, I mean more and more obscure from there but—it’s interesting how—I don’t know if people will fully understand that, I don’t know, since DJ’ing and hip-hop have always been kind of more of an underground art form, I’m not sure to the extent that a lot of the people who play it will really understand some of the inside jokes and some of the referential aspects of the mixes and the song choices—they might just assume, “Well OK, well maybe they just thought these went together well.” But in a lot of cases it goes a little bit deeper than that.

GI: I’m curious on a sort of more specific level what you’re hoping to see as far as the mix of music that you’d like to see in the final version of the game. Are there indispensable artists that you’d like to see involved in a project like this?

DJ: Definitely, and in some cases they were able to get them and clear them and include them, in some cases I understand that they weren’t, and then in other cases I’m not sure [laughing]. Because the update is always changing. But yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that if this was a—off the top of my head—if this was a Rockabilly videogame, there’d be some key people you’d want to see in there. If this was a jazz videogame—you kind of just start at the top and work your way down. I mean for me, Grandmaster Flash is probably the reason that I became a DJ, and so that would be pretty much the top as far as I was concerned. And for a lot of reasons, but also because he recorded—there’s songs, there’s identifiable songs from him, and that certainly helps as well. I mean there were DJs around before him, but if we said, “Well, let’s get Cool Herk involved,” it becomes a little bit of an issue in the sense that, well you know he didn’t actually make any records and outside of a hardcore DJ hip-hop community, not too many people know who he is. So it’s a balance, I’m certainly—I’m well aware of what the hopes for the game are, so I’m not going to sit there and hold the line on a bunch of DJ heroes that I have that wouldn’t necessarily translate to a broader understanding of what DJ’ing is.

For example, there’s a DJ named Tlo Tough, who recorded with a group called the Tuff Crew—and I mean a massively influential DJ to me, but outside of the couple of records they made in the late 80s, I’m not really aware that he’s sustained his career beyond that. So it also has to ideally be people that are still active, still—and in terms of the music, I think—me personally when I make a DJ set and just in terms of the music that I enjoy and the music that hip-hop has exposed me to, it’s pretty much limitless. And I really learned that from Afrika Bambaataa, who I used to read in interviews a lot, talk about how you should try and listen to music that isn’t meant for you to broaden your own horizons. And for him he listened to Kraftwerk a lot, and Kraftwerk in 1980 wasn’t necessarily intended for a young black kid in the Bronx, but it was like that’s what he wanted to listen to, and he took that and married it with funk music, and the result was Planet Rock, which is one of the most influential songs of the last 30 years. So I think that the concept of mixing like a 50’s rock standard with a Miami Bass song, or a Lil Wayne song, is not—to me it’s all fair game.

And it isn’t necessarily—my personal goal with my contributions to the game wasn’t to try and be regimented about, “Well, OK this isn’t true hip-hop,” or “This isn’t really a true DJ game that would be spun nowadays.” It really wasn’t about that, it was just about, “OK let’s try and use songs from a lot of different places, and let’s try to include—yeah, let’s have some underground stuff, some more mainstream stuff, OK, let’s get some stuff from this era, wouldn’t it be fun to grab some stuff from that era?” And then, you know, definitely like, “We absolutely have to license this, this and this, because in my opinion any DJ game without them would be kind of silly.” So it was a combination of all of the above.

GI: Have you had a chance to mess around with the new peripheral for the game, the turntable device that they’ve got going on for the game?

DJ: Only the one time that I was down there in December, so I don’t know if it’s changed since then, but I did get to play with it then.

GI: There’s always that balance that people have to make when they’re making a videogame peripheral between the authenticity to the actual experience and the fun and ease of use to be able to give it to some eight year old kid that’s going to get it at Christmas time—Do you get a sense of where they are on that scale as they’re putting that device together?

DJ: Well to me the best way to answer that would be, “Would this make some eight year old kid who got it for Christmas want to try the real thing?” And I think in that respect the answer is yes. Because—you know, it’s not the real thing, obviously, but to me when I played it [laughing], the first couple of times I was kind of like sensory overload trying to figure out, “Wuw, OK so this does this and that does that.” I mean I’ve heard people say that with Guitar Hero it’s the same thing, like just because you’re virtuoso, just because you’re Joe Satriani doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to kick right into Guitar Hero and be an incredible game player. It’s the same with DJ Hero, it takes practice to kind of not look like an idiot [laughing]. But I do think that it’s the ultimate goal, and—for me it is—is that it would inspire some kids to pick up DJ’ing, and I think it will.

GI: You’ve been pretty well known as an artist who explores a lot of different directions and genres in your music—is that range of musical genres something you expect to see in DJ Hero? Or do you see being a little bit more specific focus in terms of the sound and the feel of the music that they’re going for?

DJ: I haven’t heard all of the different mixes that have been made for the game, but I’ve seen various lists of songs that have been cleared for use, and usually in the context of like, “OK, here’s the list where we’re at, at the moment: pick some stuff that you think you might want to get the multi-tracks on and mess with.” So there are certain things that I’ve seen on the list that frankly I’m not that interested in, and then there’s other things that I’m like, “OK, I’d love to try this, and try that,” and “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could do that but I don’t have time,”. So in the end with all the other people making the mixes for the game, I’m not totally sure of all the songs that have been used, but the basic vibe is—you know, when I first saw the list in December, I was like, “OK, we should try to get a little more of this, a little more of that, vary it up a little bit,” and I think that’s been the M.O. ever since then, you know, “Yeah, it’s OK to have this in there, that in there,” and it certainly isn’t just going to be a bunch of hits, it’s also music that’s a little more underground in certain cases… But again it’s about the balance between… I don’t think anybody would want to get the game—your basic game player—and not recognize any of the music that’s being thrown at them. Though I think it’s going to be down to the player, to decide—to have an option of X amount of mixes to choose from the beginning, and I expect that people will gravitate towards like, “Oh, OK it’s Nirvana and this—that sounds crazy, let’s see what that sounds like, that might be fun to play.” As opposed to like, it’s [laughing] you know, two hip-hop instrumentals, or something.

GI: Sure. Do you see that that’s kind of the direction that the game’s going? You’d be mixing two tracks together? Or is there less choice than that involved?

DJ: Well, in answer to your first question, yeah I do think that would be the logical step,—because as it is now unless something has changed that I don’t know about, you’re basically choosing mixes. So you’re choosing this mash-up or that mash-up, which includes these two or three songs. And I do think that it would be a logical step that like, “OK, on this…”—but in order to pull something like that off, there’d have to be a basic—they’d have to approximate each other in tempo. Otherwise it would be—I don’t think there’s a program that exists that would make that work.

GI: I mean they would have to do a lot of the groundwork first, right?

DJ: Exactly, yeah. And that’s a lot of what’s involved in the—I mean when I would make my mixes, I would do what I would call a dry version, which was like a basic mash-up, and without any scratching, without a lot of fancy stuff going on, and then I’d kind of turn that in, and go, “OK, everybody cool with this? OK now I’m going to do the wet version,” which is the gameplay version, which has all the tricks and basically the marks that the gamer has to hit when they play.

GI: Games like Rock Band and Guitar Her have gone a long way towards reigniting interest in bands and artists that some folks had either never heard or they hadn’t listened to for years—do you have any hopes or perceptions for the way a game like DJ Hero might be received by folks less familiar with those styles of music in which you write, and which you produce?

DJ: Sure. Yeah—pretty much all I’m interested in is music. Music is what—basically is my religion. I know it sounds corny, but if it wasn’t for hop-hop, basically—when you grow up and there’s a vital form of music, like if you were listening to punk in the late 70s or early 80s, or if you were listening to—well for me, hip-hop in the early 80s to all the way up to the early present, and you’re at an impressionable age—I mean, hip-hop and rap basically gave me my world view, you know what I mean? It gave me political ideas, it gave me social ideas, it gave me—in certain cases how to act, how not to act, what to say, what not to say—it basically was my education outside of school. And for that reason, music—and you know since hip-hop—since growing up on hip-hop and exposing myself to other types of music since then, it’s a passion, and there’s something satisfying about being able to share that passion with people. And I think when you can do it, and you can do it in a way that feels right and feels authentic, it’s kind of like an infection, it spreads and I certainly—yeah, I love for people to go, “I’m sixteen, I wasn’t even born when KRS-One was really kind of putting out his pivotal work 20 years ago, 22 years ago, and I had always heard he was really good, and maybe I should check it out now.” Yeah, certainly that would be satisfying on any number of levels.

So in answer to your question, yeah—I’ve always been aware, and I’ve always been fascinated by what hits from the 60s and 70s still resonate to this day, and it is a lot about exposure—it also comes down to really boring stuff like which publishing houses still have a vested interest in pushing their catalog and that sort of stuff—because there are a lot of number one hits from the late 60s that… It’s interesting to me that there’s songs that were number one on the Billboard chart in 1970, let’s say, and yet the groups have totally faded and the song is never heard on the radio—like not even oldie stations, not classic R&B stations, not any kind of station, and it’s fascinating to me when that happens. And I think that in the same sense of Metallica trying to put a group like Samhain in their game—which is not a household name, but maybe the Misfits possibly are, but it’s kind of an approximation, so we’re going to put that in, so you know—and yeah, I think that when you have a chance to expose people to music, I have a personal wish to try and expose people to music that I think is quality and has some passion to it and has some soul to it, rather than kind of like the same old thing or something that I just don’t think is that good. So when and where you can expose people to good music, to me it’s kind of like I have a sense of duty to do that; to me it’s a privilege to do that.

GI: Thank you so much for taking time out of your day and out of your week to help us out.

DJ: Sure, thanks. Take Care.

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