Like many people, I was introduced to the work of Jace Clayton through a 2001 DJ mix called Gold Teeth Thief released under Clayton’s musical moniker, DJ Rupture. Clayton posted the unruly and wildly varied mix online so his friends could listen, it went viral, and overnight Clayton became an international tastemaker and sought-after performer. At the time, in my life, Gold Teeth Thief and the mixes that soon followed served as meeting points between the stripped-down music I leaned toward and the busy electronic music my roommates favored. Clayton was something we could all agree on: an aficionado of both digital maximalism and sparse minimalism who brought punk sensibilities to DJ culture.
Even after I no longer had to worry about finding daily musical middle ground, I kept following Clayton’s work. I listened to his WFMU radio show, kept track of the selections for his Mudd Up book club, and read his essays as they began to pop up on Fader, Frieze, and n+1. His writing, to my pleasant surprise, was filled with the same passion and curiosity he brought to his DJing. His essays were carefully sculpted and expansive, looking at how music influenced culture and culture influenced music; where music had been and where it was headed. For years I’d been awaiting a book that would gather these insightful blends of music journalism, travelogue, and digital era commentary. I imagined it would be a straightforward essay collection. What’s come out instead is a unified whole.
Early in Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture, Clayton writes, “As a process, DJing is inevitable and necessary for our times, an elegant way to deal with data overload.” Uproot, in many ways, is an extension of this elegant response. It’s a 270 page DJ set where recognizable bits of essays blend into a larger story, as Clayton’s many threads slip in and out of the picture, linking back up in unexpected ways.
The book’s scope is one that few writers would be brave enough to take on. There are short histories of—among many other things—the mp3, the Berber people of Morocco, punk legends Fugazi, and Auto-Tune. Clayton explores the notes from the 1986 meeting where the term “World Music” won out over “Hot” and “Tropical” for a mildly offensive catchall term. He travels from a sovereign Mediterranean island for the rich to a pre-Columbian-inspired teen club night in Mexico to a back-alley shop in Palestine where acquiring local recordings requires community debate. And beyond.
The sheer expanse of Uproot won’t surprise anyone who’s listened to even just one of Clayton’s genre-hopping, roller coaster ride DJ mixes. But for an artist who’s made a career out of being ahead of the curve with digital music and a champion for the accessibility of musichis critiques of the changes brought on by digital technologies and Internet culture are a bit surprising. While in general Clayton’s outlook is positive and hopeful and his focus is largely on the innovative sounds that have merged over the last fifteen yearsthe book—more so than the essays it originated from—spends a lot of time looking at what we’ve lost along the way.
Having grown up in the DIY ethos of the ’80s and ’90s, Clayton sees how many approaches to art have been flattened and commodified by digital technologies. Cut and paste has lost the “trickster spirit” that enlivened everything from Hannah Höch’s Dadaist collage art to Public Enemy’s politically charged walls of sound, and become synonymous with office work tedium. The remix has gone from focused re-imagining to user-friendly drag-and-drop. Allen Kaprow’s idea of a “happening,” where art and life blur together, has been adopted by the corporate world, financially backed by Red Bull, and streamed live. As a whole, Clayton seems—like many of us—to see Internet and digital technologies as incredible tools that each day live up to part of their potential while also wreaking havoc in ways we never could have imagined.
Obviously, money gets in the way of the potential. Money’s role in music is especially interesting to Clayton when first-world interests mine third-world creations—a situation that’s even more common in the digital age than it was during the post-Graceland World Music craze. Music producers imitate global genres without shining the spotlight on the artists who pioneered the scenes. DJs search out the newest sounds and use them in their sets with little or no knowledge of the group or culture producing the music. Non-Western artists are sold to Western audiences based on how marketable their story is—whether real or slightly fabricated. “World Music festivals will pay good cash for groups from ‘remote’ places,” he writes, “whose presence reinforces the idea that our planet is still filled with the kind of mystery that allows indigenous traditions to continue without interference from cell phones or multinational corporations.”So much of the book is about learning how to engage more respectfully with music cultures outside of your own. “If you can’t go there, then you’ll need to keep quiet and humble and listen to learn what you can from those who have,” he writes. “The guesstimate is always trumped by the reality, and the reality is always messier than our varied descriptions of it.”
While Clayton is one of the most incisive commentators on the social politics of music today, he’s also a perpetually wide-eyed kid with headphones on; filled with the wonder and respect he hopes others will have for sound. Music is cultural history and political response, yes, but also first kisses and all-night dance parties. “The big labels want music to equal money,” he writes, “but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory.”
The histories Clayton tells revolve around recorded music and its beautiful messes. In a section about holding on to cultural history and musical traditions, he takes us back to the beginning. “[Edison’s] 1877 invention was as much a metaphysical innovation as a mechanical one,” he writes. “Suddenly music could travel without musicians. Voices left their bodies and began to outlive their speakers. Performance spun into playback. Pandora’s jukebox opened up.” And the jukebox continues to grow, to become more complicated and vast, bringing with it unforeseen joys and unforeseen problems. We’re still learning how to listen.
At its core, Uproot is the memoir of a DJ who accidentally found himself an underground icon at the beginning of the digital future. The rest is a record of what’s he’s seen and learned along the way. All he asks his readers to do is to pay more attention, to be a little more conscious of what they’re hearing. “To remember the world is to remember the sound of the world. To listen carelessly is to forget.”
