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Q-Bert (interrupting): Okay, that's some old, old, old, very old outdated stuff.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.
I wanted to talk about how with your music, especially with Wave Twisters, it's music for a soundtrack. There's a definite visual element to that. So do you think you would ever extend that out, like if some Hollywood producer comes and asks you to score a movie soundtrack, you think you could rock that?
I would like to try, yeah, but I may not be good at it actually, I'll do my own style of course.
So you think it would have to be your own movie that you set up?
Pretty much, 'cause the music is kind of wacky and kind of weird, and I couldn't see it in any other world I guess, or our brains.
Okay, if I can back to the DJ, about if it's getting mainstream . . . do you think it's ever going to be something that's super mainstream, or just a subculture for the whole time?
I think it'll get popular. There'll be a lot of people fooled by a lot of things, but there will always be the true underground following of the actual true expanding of the art that knows what the real deal is. That'll always be there so I'm not worried about it, I'm not trying to sell out or anything, I'm just trying to excel the art.
So if the Gap came to you and asked you to do a commercial rocking the Gap khakis, and getting the turntables, you probably wouldn't do that?
I would if they let me do something real and not just stand there and act like a DJ, I wouldn't do that. If they let me get a real solo in there, I would, anything to represent the realness.
I read something on DJ Disk's website where he was doing some secret shit with you ...
Right now because of the movie, everything's been on hold, so if we do something, it'll be for the movie.
So when is that going to come out?
That comes out ... it previews at our first convention, it's called Scratchcon 2000. It's in July of 2000, and that's when we preview the movie for the first time.
OK, for my last question, with all the Y2K stuff, what do you think's going to happen? Are we going to have the aliens coming down, or is the world going to end?
Um, we'll see what happens. Anything could happen ... it may happen, it may not happen, but the universe knows when it's our time, so we'll just continue what we're doing, maybe we'll be scratching in space.
