By Eric Solomon | November 15, 1999
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| Q-Bert rips it up at the 1999 Coachella Festival. |
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DJ Q-Bert, for those who don’t know, leads the attack for his crew collective known as the Invisibl Skratch Piklz. They talk to the aliens and battle Klamz uv Deth, all using sounds eked out on the turntable. For the master of the decks, tweaking a sound’s pitch, whipping it up into helicopter blade frenzy, or fading it in and out of existence like a sonic strobe light becomes second nature. Q-Bert, though lacking the high-profile Beastie Boys gig that fellow Pikl Mix Master Mike grabbed, may possess skills even beyond those of his better-known peers.
The Piklz’ many underground practice tapes highlight Q-Bert’s techno-speed scratching, but his solo debut, Wave Twisters, showed his all-around mastery. On Wave Twisters, Q-Bert assembles a running storyline involving scratch dentists and giant teeth into, well, the only and greatest turntable Anime ever made. Its running narrative practically begs for translation into a visual medium, and sure enough, as revealed in the interview, it will soon be made into a movie. (When has the soundtrack ever come before the film?) For those not fortunate enough to catch A-Trak, Mix Master Mike and Q-Bert’s freestyle session at the Coachella Festival, a continuing series -- called the Shiggar Fraggar Show -- hosted by the super-underground Radio Free Berkeley, recounts the ISP’s legendary performances on Pirate Fucking Radio. I spoke to Q-Bert about this and other aspects of his adventurous career prior to his performance at the Coachella Festival.
Eric Solomon: You guys are, well, I guess you’re down to Volume 3 on the Shiggar Fraggar Show (the series started with Volume 5 and has worked on down)?
Q-Bert (interrupting): Okay, that’s some old, old, old, very old outdated stuff.
Right, but I wanted to talk about it, ’cause it was on Hip-Hop Slam, which was on Radio Free Berkeley, which isn’t around anymore. And I wanted to talk about BAM Magazine, which isn’t around, where Billy Jam [ed note: Billy Jam hosted Hip-Hop Slam] did a hip-hop column. So how do you think the music scene in the Bay is, after those two things shut down, and just in general?
Um, I don’t really know . . . I guess right now I’m on the Internet a lot, there’s a lot of info there, and there’s also the Bay Guardian and the SF Weekly . . .
So you think eventually Internet broadcasts are eventually going to take over the hip-hop realm, maybe even take the place of college radio?
That’s a possibility, yeah. I’m sure there’s people that look to the SF Weekly and things like that . . . I think both worlds will be there.
OK . . . I wanted to talk about some of other people in the Skratch Piklz. You have Mix Master Mike, touring with the Beasties, and DJ Disk doing his El Stew thing, and I know that Buckethead played on a track on your Wave Twisters album . . . so do you ever see yourself forming some sort of turntable jazz, Q-Bert Quartet, performing with other people with instruments?
Right now there’s a lot of people doing that already, and for me, my whole thing is the whole search and quest for what can be done just on turntables, so my whole world is just revolving around working with the crew, D-Styles, Mix Master Mike, Flare, and Shortkut and Yoga Frog, and that’s about it. ’Cause of all the infinite possibilities that haven’t been discovered yet, why go into something that other people are doing?
Or why play an instrument, when you can play any instrument with the turntable.
(sounds of scratching, like Jiffy Pop shaking on the stove, in the background)
Yeah, there’s so much stuff to discover that I’d rather just concentrate on that area for the rest of my life . . . or at least for right now.
Okay . . . I kind of wanted to get back to the band thing . . . every band and rock group has a DJ out now—you got your Limp Bizkit, or Sugar Ray with the DJ who kind of stands there ’til it gets to the break and they scratch a little bit. How do you feel about people appropriating the DJ for their own uses? Do you think it devalues what you and other hip-hop DJs have built?
Well, it’s good and bad. It’s good that people are at least considering a DJ and that people get to see it a little bit more and expose it a little bit more, but it sucks that they just don’t do anything . . . that really sucks. C’mon, just do something. But that’s what our job is for, to be the ones to just excel the art and when they finally discover what we do, it’ll be like, “Oh, wow.” So that’s really what we’re for, just working really hard to some day, when our time comes, we’ll represent in the right way. We’re not worried ... our day will come.
It’s already coming ... you see all the record stores with the turntablist section or the DJ section or whatever in the past couple years. Now I know you did a video game soundtrack . . . what game was that?
March Madness.
Right. Looking at that, and I know that there’s a cartoon that’s being made out of Wave Twisters . . .
Oh yeah, that’s really coming along, super dynamically cool.
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