Interview with N.A.S.A. (Squeak E. Clean & DJ Zegon)
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The phone rings once and an impossibly high-pitched voice comes through: “Bueno?” Confused, I ask to speak to Sam. “Yes, dis ees heem.” I’m still thinking there must be some crossed wires in our overseas Skype-to-mobile connection, and then he drops the act. “I’m just kidding, sorry. I was just being stupid.” He’s kind of high on chocolate, he explains, having just been to the “finest chocolatier in all of Antwerp.” Sam Spiegel, a.k.a. Squeak E. Clean, and his partner Ze Gonzales, a.k.a. DJ Zegon, form the hip hop collaboration N.A.S.A. They’re in Belgium for the European leg of a tour supporting their debut album, The Spirit of Apollo.

This is Spiegel’s first time touring the world, though he’s done one-off shows here and there. But he’s definitely no stranger to travel. As anyone familiar with this record knows, it was six years in the making, taking the duo all over the U.S. (from New York, Miami, Atlanta and Houston to Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Hawaii, and some town in middle-of-nowhere Northern California where Tom Waits has a studio) — then across borders to cities like Kingston, Stockholm, San Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. This was necessary to catch all 39 guest artists on The Spirit of Apollo’s 17 tracks. Of course, travel also plays a big role in the album’s sound, which Spiegel describes as “a big mish mosh of everything, whether it’s Brazilian music, Tom Waits, hip hop, [or] baile funk.”

Mixing different musical worlds is something Spiegel has personally lived, having grown up in ‘90s New York and later moving to Los Angeles, where he started out working in production and ended up doing music full time. He was student of “the golden age of hip hop,” and cites two major influences: the Native Tongues crew (A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Black Sheep, Jungle Brothers, Leaders of the New School, Busta Rhymes), who “were, like, the shit…It was all about fun”; and Wu-Tang Clan (“It was like, wow, this shit has some power behind it, and it was inspiring and exciting”). A handful from the latter group, including the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard, actually appear on the Spirit.
“I’ve always had a very eclectic taste, but I was obsessed with hip hop for a while,” he says. “There was this great UHF channel that had like a hip hop music video show at like 4:30 or at like 5 everyday. I would watch that every single day.”

That obsession got him into funk, soul and jazz samples as well as requisite hip hop instruments like the MPC, which was used heavily on the album. “Some of the producers and production from that era definitely is reflected on the record and how we would chop stuff,” Spiegel says. He adds that it wasn’t just New York-spun hip hop that inspired him at the time, but music from Texas, the Bay Area and Los Angeles as well.

Today, he calls L.A. home, where he scores for films, TV and commercials, and produces and remixes for a pretty diverse list of names in pop, rock and hip hop (like Kylie Minogue, The Eels, Iggy Pop, to name a few) out of Crack Alley Studios in Hollywood. And, of course, he DJs. Spiegel calls Los Angeles one of two“epicenters of electro-culture” (the other being Paris), a place that’s helped spawn a new generation of club DJs whose Twitter following is directly proportional to their skyrocketing popularity. “A lot of people like to hate on Steve Aoki,” he says, “but he was a big force in shaping this really fun new electro scene, through his DJing, but more so through Dim Mak and through his events. He was always just bringing all the best electro acts to LA all the time and really building the scene at Cinespace and at Banana Split. He’s great.” He also lists Banana Split co-host DJ AM and the DJ/production duo LA Riots, who did an electro house remix of one of album’s tracks, as big scene makers.

And the kids in LA go “apeshit” for it. “They’ll be fuckin’ moshing at a DJ show at a club. Like, that generally doesn’t happen anywhere else and in LA it happens a lot.” There’s been an infusion of new energy at the clubs too. “All the Latino kids from the east side [who] didn’t used to go out to the parties and stuff in Hollywood are now coming out. There’s just a really good scene there now. The crowds and the kids at the shows are crazy and so fuckin’ fun,” he says. “I’d say that’s had an influence on me too, you know? My style of DJing has changed a lot in the past few years, influenced by that.” Now he spins much more uptempo, Baltimore club, funk, freestyle, and “shit that’s on the blogs that’s not even for sale.”

What makes the L.A. party scene unique, in Spiegel’s opinion, is that it’s cool to be excited and enthusiastic. Being “into stuff, not over stuff” is a spirit reminiscent of the days heavy rave culture and that golden age of hip hop. “It’s just a fun positive energy to be around,” he says. “I don’t think that all cultural movements are built out of that kind of optimism—like, obviously punk rock isn’t—but I think that this kind of movement or scene really is built out of that optimistic enthusiasm and it makes it thrive.”

And when it comes to bringing to people together, it seems Spiegel and Gonzales have a special gift. The album’s list of guest artists includes (deep breath): Fatlip, David Byrne, Kanye West, Karen O, Lykke Li, Seu Jorge, MIA, over two dozen more top friends on their Myspace. “It was a very communal record, you know… even though Ze and I were kind of the masterminds behind it, everyone that was involved with the record contributed in their influence, and their feeling, and their heart that went into it,” he says. Still, critical reception of the album was lukewarm at best; the main complaint was that it lacks originality: Blender called it “blandly anthropological” while the L.A. Times suggested that N.A.S.A. “forgo some of the crate-digging for more mind-digging.” Critics and listeners debated whether any of these bold names really shined, whether the integration of different world rhythms produced something compelling, whether the album is cohesive as a whole. Despite all that, there’s an inarguable, transcendent significance in the album’s larger concept: Simply stated in the opening track, it’s a promotion of peace and unity. “Music and art have the tremendous power of bringing people together…[Our aim is] to show through these media that we are all one race.”

“It’s just something that I really believe in,” he says. “And I think that there’s a lot of shit that separates us that’s all totally meaningless shit, like different beliefs, religious beliefs, races, politics, whatever. Really everyone has a different opinion and we can respect everyone else’s opinion and still live together in a happy place. I know it sounds kind of hippie-ish, but I do believe that.”

This may explain why, when asked if he ever doubted the project would all come together, Spiegel was quick to say no. “We were just really patient and never gave up and never settled. I mean, we could have put it out long ago, but we wanted to make sure that it was right and we felt good about it.” Getting it right meant coming up with names of artists to go along with preliminary instrumental tracks, in combinations that seemed haphazard but “somehow make sense in a weird, fucked-up way.” It meant writing a letter to each musician, explaining the project and his/her imagined role on the tune, and then waiting for a yes or no. And, of course, it also meant meeting up with those artists—finding them on tour, if they couldn’t come to L.A., or hopping on a plane to their cities. Like the time they went down to Sizzla Kalonji’s Kingston Rasta compound, Judgment Yard. “It was just like 50 Rasta dudes hanging out and smokin’ spliffs and cooking Rasta food and feeding it to us. It was really just a really fun experience and the way that we got to see Jamaica…people don’t really get to see it. A very authentic way.”

Toking up and getting to visit Stone Love, Jamaica’s biggest sound system, was no huge sacrifice, and Spiegel admits that. But he wanted to capture that spirit of exploration, comparing the project to [the real] NASA’s Apollo missions. “Basically they went from having a man in space to, like, committing to, ten years later, landing a man on an alien planet and, you know, that’s really crazy! So I related that to how I wanted the N.A.S.A. record to be. I mean, obviously it’s not as vast an accomplishment as that, or as brave an exploration, but I wanted it to be about people exploring and people venturing out of what they’re comfortable with and not being scared of the unknown.” He adds that there’s another meaning for him too: the message of peace. “If you hear any astronauts from that era or even the presidents around there, it was like, ‘We venture forth from this planet as one race of human beings, maybe this shows that we can all get along in peace.’ You know? Everyone involved had a very unified feeling about, like, being just human beings and not being separated by all these boundaries and borders that we have.”

And so they go, two humans beings crossing boundaries all over the globe with their four-turntable set-up and computers full of remixes and edits — if in fact, as it’s been anecdotally reported, all the kids in Europe already know the words to every song on the record is any indication of their future journeys.

“I’m so happy to go tour the world this year, you know? And I want to go to really weird places, too. I’m hoping to play in like Israel, and I think we want to hit China and Thailand, just see the world.”

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Published on 21 June 2009 | 3 |