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Hear the readings from the Victoria Book Launch

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Wayde Compton (WC)

That was interesting hearing my own voice from that interview. I’d forgotten that you had recorded that.

Paul Watkins (PW)

Yes. Well, part of it I think was from the interview. And the other part was you reading from the Outer Harbour, which I think was 2013? It was pretty new then, right?

WC

Yes. So, that’s what I was thinking, because that’s before the book came out.

PW

I think it might have been. And I think I just asked, ‘do you want to read something, anything’ and you said, ‘I’ve got this story that’s pretty musical.’ So it fit really well.

WC

That came flooding back to me. I had just written it. And I remember that I had a different title for it and everything. So when I heard that, I thought, ‘oh, is it going to be the same as the final version?’ And it wasn’t. So it’s interesting that it catches it in an early draft.

So I have a few question that I prepared beforehand. And then maybe some other things will come up. One thing that I didn’t think to prepare, and that I realize now having listened to you do that, was that one of the inspirations for the turntable project that Jason De Couto and I did—and it’s funny, I’ve forgotten about this until I saw you do that—was seeing, DJ Spooky, AKA Paul D. Miller do a lecture at SFU, and I guess it would have been the late 90s, early 2000s, something around there. And the School of Communications brought him in to do a lecture. So he did a critical lecture about literature, postmodern art, and stuff like that, but with a set of turntables there too. And so it was sort of doing what you’re doing. He was lecturing for a bit and then playing something, and then talking over it, and then playing something else, so he was sort of illustrating his examples. But what you just did was like DJing and lecturing at the same time. It was really fascinating.

PW

Yeah, his book Rhythm Science.  You know, I wanted to do something somewhat innovative with form in Soundin’ Canaan, but it’s difficult when you’re limited by the page. But that’s a good example, where Miller and I are using a sort of pastiche, and it is a kind of DJ methodology, right?

WC

And that’s my question. As someone who—I think—manages to blend both DJ aesthetics and literary criticism, first of all, why do you take that approach? And then second, what types of insights does it reveal that might be different from a more traditional style of literary criticism?

PW

Yeah, so when you’re in grad school they tell you to choose your methodology, like are you using a feminist lens? Marxism? And for me, that didn’t quite work to just adhere to one particular focus. And so I don’t think it was a cop out, but, the DJ methodology is one way where I can bring different things into the mix. So even just in terms of what I do in the book, I bring in a lot of music, but it also mixes a fair bit of close reading. I feel like now that we’re in the age of AI, close reading has gotten even more important. To show there’s a person. To show that you’re actually engaging, and modeling a kind of readership, a kind of citizenship. And then I also integrate cultural, literary history, and interviews with the poets as part of the mix as well. So, the DJ methodology was one way to also sort of de-center my own subject position to a degree, so I’m less of an absolute authority in the book. I want it to be a negotiation between my understandings of the text, what the text is saying, the social issues that connect to it, and also what the poets think.

So I asked a lot of the poets I was working with quite directly: What do you think of this interpretation of your work? At one point I found myself asking M. NourbeSe Philip if she thought Zong! was an improvised dub poem, or dub chant, and I’m thinking, ‘she’s not going to think that.’ But she was quite enthusiastic about that interpretation. So that encouraged me down that path that I might not have taken.

I think some would say this kind of sampling causes a kind of abstraction, but I actually think sometimes the opposite is true. It brings things into focus. It’s got that power of recontextualization. And, I think it allows for the reader of the book, to—hopefully—also become a kind of DJ themselves. I want the book to feel a little bit more active than a typical academic book. There’s playlists; there are QR codes for each chapter; the artist names appear in the margins; there’s conversations happening in the endnotes, and the footnotes that try to also deepen that understanding. So the reader is kind of a DJ.

I wanted to do that a little bit more in the performance of the book as well. Trying to take what Houston A. Baker Jr. says, ‘for critics to try to be engage with the material that they’re actually working with’—to have some investment in it. The easy thing would be to get up here and just read some of the prelude or something like that. This is much more difficult. I have a lot more decisions to make. And—hopefully—it can evolve in different ways.

You have a term in After Canaan that I really, really like—Schizophonophilia. So, you know us literary nerds really like these neologisms. When you take words, you combine them, and you mash them together. Especially for someone like me—who likes audio—when I heard that term: Schizo—so, split or multiple; Phono—audio; Philia—Love. The love of multiple sounds, of audio interplay. I just think that’s such a great term. And in some ways, I think you were modeling that kind of practice as well. So that’s what I’m trying to do too.

WC

That’s funny. That’s a neologism that’s building upon another one. So it’s like a compound neologism, because I built on R. Murray Schafer’s term, which is schizophonia, which he writes about as ‘the enemy of natural audition and the soundscape.’ I was writing an essay that was saying the opposite, saying that there is a love of splitting the sound from the original source. So he was basically saying that, ‘it’s a jarring and inhuman kind of thing to hear sounds that are not coming from the original source,’ like recordings, and kind of disorienting for civilization. And I wanted to use a quote from The Tuning of the World, where R. Murray Schaefer is basically saying that ‘schizophonia is a dangerous kind of thing.’  And I was saying, no, it’s actually freeing and potentially democratic and liberatory. But he signed off, and gave us permission to use the quote. And it was a lengthy quote, so he wanted to read the essay. To his credit, it was critical of him, and he was like, ‘yeah, you can use it.’

PW

That’s good. I think if you’re a critic and you’re a writer, then you should be open to criticism as well, right? But I think criticism, particularly not just of literature, but of our world and the constant challenges we face is actually an act of love. That’s sort of how you achieve justice. It’s something you have to wrangle with. Same with ideas. 

WC

Exactly. And I think this idea is interesting. His ideas about the negative position of schizophonia, helped me think about the positive position that I was taking with schizophonophilia. I think that’s how academic inquiry should work.

So did you interview all five of the subjects feature in Soundin’ Canaan?

PW

I didn’t interview everyone. I interviewed most. There’s six interviews in the book, but a few of the interviews aren’t of direct poets that are featured in a chapter. For example, I did an interview with Cecil Foster, who’s written a lot about multiculturalism, particularly in relation to the comedy and the tragedy of multiculturalism in Canada. That interview helped some of the framing for Soundin’ Canaan really early on. He was on my thesis committee too, so it made sense. So I did a public interview with him. And then I also did a public interview with d’bi.young anitafrika. I actually did an opening DJ set for that interview, mostly like reggae dub stuff. And then she did a performance, and then we did an on-stage interview.

WC

And she’s here in Victoria now. 

PW

Yeah, yeah, I saw that. Yeah. I brought her up to VIU to perform. She wasn’t on the island yet though. I think she might have been in the UK at the time. And she did come in and gave a riveting performance. Sonnet was there, I think [gestures to Sonnet L’Abbé in the audience]. Every time I see her, I’m just blown away by her talent.

I couldn’t do an interview with K’naan, just because he, you know, he didn’t return any of my emails. But at the time he was a pretty big megastar. He was also sort of getting out of music at the time. I talk about this a little bit in the book on the chapter on his music, where he sort of didn’t feel that it was an authentic form for him anymore. He’d told the stories that he wanted to tell in song.

And, there’s no interview with, Dionne Brand. Although, Dionne Brand was also advising the trajectory of the work at the time. And I have the chapter on dub in part because of my meeting with Dionne Brand. We met in Kensington Market. We had green tea. We talked a little bit about Coltrane’s album Interstellar Space, which I’d bought in Toronto that same week at Kops Records. It was serendipitous in that way. But one of the things that Dionne told me is, ‘you need to have something on Dub in the book because it’s just criminally neglected in Canadian literature.’ That sort of provided some of that framing for the book.

I’ve been lucky that I’ve gotten to do multiple interviews with some of the poets too. I think I did two or three with George Elliott Clarke. 

It was really useful training because the genesis of this book started in grad school. It’s become something different since then. But recently I’ve done a few interviews with Nisga’a poet, Jordan Abel; Haisla writer, Eden Robinson; and I did one with Haida manga artist, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. But, I’m not sure what to do with these other interviews yet. Maybe collect them and do something with them at some point.

WC

And Jordan Abel does sound poetry as well. I don’t know if he still does, but he did for a while.

PW

Yeah. When we brought him in for a performance at VIU. Were you there at that one performance that Jordan did Sonnet? I can’t remember.

Sonnet L’Abbé

I feel like I’ve seen him perform so many times, but was it in Shq’apthut (A Gathering Place)?

PW

Yeah! He did one performance where someone actually tried to turn his music down, because part of his performance art is that discomfort. And someone was discomforted, right? You know, you never do that. Like, if you’re if you’re at a John Zorn concert or something, it’s supposed to be loud. That’s part of the praxis.

WC

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw Jordan Abel perform—maybe it was that piece—at UBC, and he had a lit-up mask. It was really mesmerizing.

Maybe to backtrack a second there. We were talking about, platforms and different types of music and dub as well. You use QR codes in the book for the Spotify playlists, right? I was listening to them and, you were bringing up samples that I hadn’t thought of for a while. Which was great! But there is that problem, like I was talking about with my book, Performance Bond, where there’s a CD in the cover that connects the music to the book. Now, I don’t even have a CD player. I can’t play the CD in my own book! Have you thought about how in—15 years say—are the QRs, or the playlists going to be obsolete?

PW

I mean, if someone’s still reading the book in 10 or 15 years and they’re emailing me about that problem, that’s a good thing. But to answer the question, I’ve created a website, soundincanaan.com—like I mentioned—and we’ve got a Spotify playlist, but now I also have YouTube playlist. So maybe that’s more stable? I don’t know.

Or if someone doesn’t want to use Spotify, then they’ve got an alternative at least. It’s already an academic book, and it’s long—almost 500 pages—so I don’t want to say which I think it is more about: but I want it to be more about the music and the poets, than anything about me.

It would be cool to have some sort of little record or something—like Performance Bond—but then how many songs could I put on there? And a 45 RPM, that’s only two songs. So what are those two songs? It might have to be, ‘What’s Going On’ by Marvin Gaye, because I did have to pay the Marvin Gaye estate. I have a grant from the university that paid for it. But to quote that one line was $300 US. I think Canadian copyright law would technically protect me. But a publisher doesn’t want a book like this to be the case study.

WC

Yeah. Everyone who writes a book of criticism has their story of the one quote they couldn’t get because somebody wouldn’t grant it. Mine was Lester Bangs. I had a long quote from Lester Bangs that I really, really wanted to use to make a particular point that essay about Schizophonophilia. And, the estate of Lester Bangs was unreachable, because he had no heirs. It’s like his buddy or something is his literary executor, and we couldn’t get hold of him. So we had to do a shorter version of it.

PW

You made an attempt. That might fall under fair use. With a lot of the hip hop stuff, I emailed a couple times, like ‘is it okay to quote from this album?’ But Sony wasn’t getting back to us about this book that I was printing a thousand copies of. So. 

WC

What made me think about that was that you brought up dub poetry, ‘cause I’ve thought that’s partly why that poetry has gotten lost. I think there’s many reasons, but that maybe one of the reasons is that those folks are often doing live performances. Lillian Allen has that record that you have the right there, Revolutionary Tea Party, that’s on vinyl. I have that that one too. But I think that was unusual for the dub poets. I don’t think a lot of them pressed onto vinyl.

PW

Yeah, there’s not much. I know Lillian Allen has a few. I know Clifton Joseph, has an album pressed to vinyl, Oral Transmissions. I did find that one in a record shop. It was still sealed.

WC

Wow, wow. But that’s it, right? Just makes you aware of how quickly these forms can become ephemeral. At least for print based poets, if your stuff is in books or chapbooks, it can sit in a library and it can be accessed 40, 50 years later. But if something is made for performance, sometimes it’s just not even recorded, right? It gets lost in that way. Like a lot of the performances Jason De Couto and I did, we stupidly didn’t really do a good quality performance of it because we just thought, ‘oh, we’ll do another performance next month, and next month,’ and then one day we just stopped doing it. I think that’s true with a lot of the dub poets as well. We have some of the documentation of what it was. But otherwise, you sort of had to be in the audience.

PW

And maybe there’s something special about that. To acknowledge that the ephemeral quality gives meaning. That how we gather is important. That it’s important that we celebrate these kinds of moments. That we have ideas that push against our own ideas. That’s kind of like remix. That’s a mash-up. Where we have different ideas pushing against one another. And being able to do that live, I think is important. But at least you’ve got the CD. I know it’s not the same performance aspect. I can’t remember their name, but you had somebody else doing the instrumental on that recording in Performance Bond, right?

WC

Yeah. It’s Trevor Thompson. And it’s very different from the live performance.

So, maybe it’s an unfair question, but if you were to do another poet as a subject in Soundin’ Canaan, who else would you have?

PW

The nice thing is there’s just so many fantastic poets working in Canada. Kaie Kellough might be a good one because he does so much around sound and music. Another would be perhaps to ground the work of Lillian Allen more. I was actually thinking about that when I was initially working on that chapter, but I’d already done so much work on Zong! and—perhaps—made it fit the chapter. But I think I would spend some critical time looking at Lillian Allen’s work, cause it really deserves that critical attention. I had a chance to introduce Lillian Allen a few years ago when she was at VIU, she was really kind to let me quote from pretty much all of her work. She just asked that I send her a copy of the book. So that would be another one. 

Even my colleague, Sonnet L’Abbé, who’s a truly incredible poet. They do a lot of really wonderful stuff with music. If you haven’t read Sonnet’s Shakespeare, it’s there [points at merchandize table]. It’s a pretty mind-blowing text when you realize what Sonnet’s actually doing in terms of avant-garde poetry. There’s a rhetorical reason that Sonnet is playing with form in the way that they are.

WC

Just thinking about genres. So these are all poets that you’re looking at and you’re specifically looking at poetry. It’s funny, that recording that you had of me was of me reading a short story. But do you think the same theory that you’re using here applies? Could DJ Methodology be applied to prose? Or to a different set of writers? Or maybe the same writers talking about their prose work?

PW

A number of the writers that I look at in the book also do prose and other forms of writing, like essay writing. So some of that does get brought into the work. It was one of the things when I was in grad school as well, that my committee was saying only like 5% of grad students’ work in poetry for their literary focus.

WC

Oh my God!

PW

So part of it, I think, is poetry’s almost critical neglect, at least within English departments. Fiction tends to have a kind of primacy. Also music and poetry, they’re really immediate. I think they’re really closely tied art forms. I think everybody should be reading more poetry. William Carlos Williams wrote: “It’s difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” So I think just making it a daily practice, even just to look at a little bit of poetry, to challenge yourself that way, is really important. 

I think we see this in fiction too. In certain fiction, like David Chariandy’s Brother for example, there’s an actual DJ character in there. So there’s those aspects. Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, I’ve taught before. I don’t know if anybody knows that novel, Half-Blood Blues, but it’s about Jews, Afro Germans, Germans, and African Americans playing jazz together under the Third Reich. It’s a really fantastic novel. And of course, works like The Outer Harbor. I guess you’re in a unique position where you started off doing an anthology and then poetry and then have moved more into fiction.

WC

And back into poetry. But now narrative poetry. I’m now writing a long narrative poem.

Is anybody else in Canada doing this kind of literary critical work around hip hop and/or Black poetry?

PW

Yes and no. With hip hop, again we’re talking a lot of critical neglect. There’s a bit of a theme around academia still being a pretty white space. It’s particularly suspect with things like hip hop, or with analysis of hip hop. An early book I read that was really influential was Tricia Rose’s book, Black Noise from 1994. And in the book, she has to make the argument that this is a subject worth writing about—that people should engage with hip hop—and she had to convince her thesis committee that it was something valuable.

There’s another theorist who is pretty influential who I quote in the book, his name is Alexander G. Weheliye, and he’s got a book called Phonographies. Really interesting. He coined the term, ‘sonic Afro modernity.’ In the book he talks about how modernity involves cultural and sonic confluences between sound, sight, and text. And he looks at W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk as this moment where Du Bois is like a DJ bringing in sight, sound, and text, and actually modeling this practice. It’s something that I’m trying to emulate to a degree in the book.

We also see it in lots of literature. Jean Toomer’s Cane is a good example. There is one critic in Canada, Mark V. Campbell, who’s a scholar, DJ, and archivist. Often the work involves these many layers of archiving. To create an archive is pretty important, so there’s something that other people can find. Mark Campbell’s Northside Hip Hop Archive is really focused on Canadian hip hop.

The Rascalz won a Juno in 1998 and they refused it because at that time the category for rap wasn’t broadcast on TV. It was a special ceremony before the official ceremony. So they protested that and said, ‘well, this is bullshit.’ And then the following year they actually got to perform in 1999, and ever since then that’s an official category. So sometimes you have to push back in different ways.

WC

Right. That’s interesting. Yeah. So, current events. So in this time of…

PW

In the last hour?

WC

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah.

PW

No one check your phone.

[Audience laughter]

WC

So I wanted to ask, in this time of American imperialism and explicit threats of U.S. annexation, and because part of the subtitle is about citizenship. In this time, our citizenship, our national sovereignty is being challenged right now by fascism in the United States. So you’ve written this book partly about constructing this argument of citizenship. How does that torque? What’s the thinking that you’ve built here?

PW

In the book I talk about this term, ‘sonic citizenship.’ And it comes from a theorist, Vincent Andrisani, who explores the role of sound in Havana. He particularly looks at how the city’s spaces are connected by sound. In particular, he’s looking at ice cream vendors as a constant, even with political regime changes. Arguing that there is this constant, this sound from below—and I make a similar kind of contention in Soundin’ Canaan—that listening to the poets in the book, closely listening to the poems, the sounds, the text, the musical samples, that’s an engaged act between the reader, the book, and the poet. And that models a kind of sonic citizenship. Citizenship is sounded. It’s more than a passport. Just as multiculturalism is more an idealism than a policy. 

I think there’s some importance to talking and thinking through multiculturalism. Canada is the only country in the world with a multicultural policy. Of course, often it’s a policy that’s sort of like snake oil. It’s peddled to newcomers in the country. But it’s also up against all this rhetoric where you’ve got Britain, France, Germany, and the United States decrying that ‘multiculturalism is dead and we need to return to’—French or English values. And that’s really, I think, coded language.

And of course, we see that happening in the United States, but also in Canada. So I forced myself to listen to the interview between Pierre Poilievre and Jordan Peterson. And in that interview they critique multiculturalism. They also critique the hyphenated identity. And at one point, they even said that ‘wokeness imported racism into Canada,’ which is like, I mean—read a history book!

But annexation, it’s a real threat. It’s something that we need to take seriously. If Trump had said it one time, then it would be a really bad joke. And it’s still inappropriate for the president of the U.S. to say. But I don’t think nationalism is the correct response.

There are more important things that we need right now. We need climate action. We need funding for health care and schools. We need deeper communal connections. And that’s [Nationalism] different than sovereignty. We need to be able to determine our own futures. There’s a lot at play. And hopefully Soundin’ Canaan contributes in a meaningful way by at least being engaged and encouraging readers to be engaged citizens. It’s a process. It’s something that we have to do every day.

WC

Interesting. Yeah. And it’s not new, right?

PW

It’s manifest destiny.

WC

Since moving from Vancouver to Victoria, I’ve written a libretto about the life of James Douglas, and if you look at that period in the 1850s—during the Gold Rush era—the threat here was American annexation. That was the fear. And so, in a way it’s not new to this region at all. Unfortunately, it’s come back around. Also, I was thinking that’s somewhat compatible with what R. Murray Schaefer’s talking about, sonic citizenship, because he talks about the idea of the soundscape and you’re distance from hearing certain things is the unifier of who you are. The measure of the times.

Last question, then maybe we’ll see if anybody in the audience has any questions. What are you working on now?

PW

So I’m actually on a one semester sabbatical. But I’ve been keeping myself really busy—surprisingly. Interviews, book launches, the website, as I mentioned, soundincannan.com. So, in the immediate future, probably after tonight my plan it to take some time just to be human. To listen. To be present with my kids. To continue to protest. To show up to events. To show up to events like this! I think that’s really, really important. That’s a modeling of sonic citizenship.

But truth be told, I’ve got a bunch of things that are always at the side of my desk. Probably the next thing I’ll turn my attention to is trying to embody this DJ methodology a little bit more. Tentatively, I’m working on something called, A Remixed Life: Mash Up, Close Listening, and Creative Praxis. I’m thinking of it like turntables, where you’ve got something on the left platter, something on the right platter, and the mixer in the middle. So on one side of the page there’s an image or there’s a sample, and then on the right side is an interpretation of that. I don’t know, maybe there’ll be QR codes or some way to sound it.

WC

Oh that’s interesting.

Well, maybe we can open it up to questions from the audience. If anybody has any questions for Paul, now’s the time.

Audience Member A

I just love what you said about grad school and trying to advocate for your own vision of methodology, instead of just ‘find the slot you’re supposed to go into.’ Did you try to defend that with any kind of theoretical stance, or did you just say, ‘because it would be better?’ And then did you end up at the end with the same idea of why you did it as before?

PW

I think I wanted to have the freedom for the particular. So even just the terminology, like Black Canadian. Some poets, like George Elliott Clarke, use African Canadian. Some poets completely reject the label. M. NourbeSe Phillips uses Afrosporic. And so I don’t think there’s a one size fits all methodology of how to read these texts. Rather there’s two ways to approach the material. I have a short coda section after the overture, which goes on for quite a while, and then I get to the coda section, and I try to give a bit of a map—a way of engaging with any work in two kinds of ways.

Too often—particularly with white scholars looking at Black writers—there’s this focus on the social function and utility of the work. But I also really wanted to focus on the aesthetic aspects. The beauty, the sound, deep engagement with close listening to the works, and the praxis. So I try to do both of those things, and make the claim that we get a much more fruitful and meaningful engagement with the work when we look at multiple registers. At times I move between both aesthetic and utility. It’s a difficult thing to try to navigate. There is perhaps a bit of disjuncture in the book, but I think that fits DJ methodology. You move between ideas.

And then there’s the key themes that ground the book. In particular, the poetry itself, and music, and citizenship. So those kinds of threads weave throughout the text.

Audience Member B

This is my first engagement with the work and I really enjoyed it. I was wondering if you’re doing music festivals or putting work out in different venues?

PW

So, I’m based in Nanaimo. I’m a full-time faculty member at VIU with two young children. I did a similar thing to this at the Vault that was actually a bit longer. I had a couple extra pieces. Occasionally, I’ll do DJ sets. And I also go by DJ Techné, which is a project focused on remixing poetry with jazz and hip hop. So sometimes I do that as a creative practice. This is how I think through the work. So it makes sense that this is how I present the work too, even if imperfect at times. It’s just felt like an honest way to approach it. And I’m hoping this summer I’ll be doing a DJ set at Sound Heritage in Nanaimo, where I’ll take the playlist—as much as I can with as many records as possible—and in an hour do a live performance of the sonic aspects of the book. I was thinking it would be cool if I had the turntable set up here tonight, but I didn’t really know what the venue would be, so I kept it simple with just the sampler here.

Audience Member C

This is also my first interaction with music and audio like this. But yeah, the aesthetic of your mixed media style kind of reminds me of the MF Doom’s Mm…Food album. Maybe it’s your green jacket, but I was wondering if you pulled anything from there? Or if he influenced you somehow.

PW

There might be some MF Doom in the hip hop chapter of Soundin’ Canaan. Chapter four is focused on hip hop.

I love MF Doom—rest in peace—because there’s an abstraction to his work. I think, Mm…Food, but also Madvillainy are incredible albums, where there’s so many different samples, and ideas, and sounds coalescing. He’s a fantastic artist who I did try to see live, but he didn’t show up, unfortunately. Which if you know MF Doom, that’s just par for the course. Sometimes he would send impostor Doom’s in his place, which I think is pretty fun in a way. I don’t think I’d be that upset if I’d gotten to see an imposter Doom.

Audience Member D

I have a softball question. What are you listening to right now? What’s something that you’ve been engaging with?

PW

One album I was listening to last week. Have you heard of the Sun Ra Arkestra? So, Sun Ra—let’s say—left the planet a while ago, and one musician who then took over the Arkestra was Marshall Allen. I got a chance to see the Sun Ra Arkestra in Toronto. Marshall Allen was leading it. And he’s on like hundreds and hundreds of recordings, but he just released his debut album at the age of 100. So, he’s still leading the Arkestra, and he just released his debut album. It’s called New Dawn, and he’s 100 years old, and he’s touring it. I hear that and I’m like, ‘it’s never too late to do the thing you want to do.’ There’s no excuse. In fact, it will probably keep you young to actually do the thing that makes you feel good in your body and to share that with other people.

WC

That’s got to be a record.

PW

It actually is. Yeah. Guinness book. He’s the ‘oldest person to ever release a debut album.’

WC

That’s amazing.

PW

Another really, really fantastic album I’m listening to is, Meshell Ndegeocello’s, album, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin. It’s just so joyful. And then at other times it’s full of righteous anger. If you haven’t read James Baldwin, read The Fire Next Time. Baldwin is just an incredible, essayist as well. I don’t think—or at least I hope—that AI can’t mimic that style of writing. It’s a good example of how to use your voice. To articulate your ideas. 

Also, I think the playlist we made for the car was five hours or something? So we’ll get through some of the other half on the way back up to Nanaimo. But, yeah, I’m just constantly trying to listen and take in new music.

WC

I’m fascinated by the way platforms change the way we listen to things. When I grew up, it was all vinyl and eight track—there’s a lost platform. And then it was CDs, and we changed everything over for CDs. There was a brief MP3 period, and then iTunes. I had this big catalog on iTunes. That all just disappeared one day, and now it’s streaming. There’s a big difference between, you know, crate digging for actual albums and going to Spotify, where you can find almost anything—but then some stuff you can’t find. So, does it change the way you understand music? And how you find music too?

PW

I think streaming has a function. It’s really useful that you can take music with you. But I’m a big vinyl collector. #thevinylprofessor is my, Instagram page. So I’ve got a whole record wall that’s about 2500 records now. I find a lot of joy going into a record shop, digging in the crates, finding something. It’s a more meditative act to me to actually sit down, make my oolong tea, and put a record on. It’s harder to skip songs too. You have to engage with it in a different kind of way.

And streaming also brings up questions around ethics. It’s unethical in a lot of ways. In terms of the AI in those platforms, even just how much energy they use. Also, artists are being paid—I want to say pennies, but it’s not even pennies, right? It’s fractions of pennies per listen. So unless you’re a huge artist, you aren’t making much from that.

At the same time, it’s something I use because of its use value. But if there’s an artist I really like, then I’ll go and I’ll still buy that physical medium. I think it’s the same for books. Maybe it’s just the generation I’m from, but I enjoy reading a physical book. Whereas a PDF document, or on Kindle—although I also see the function of that—I’m not knocking on anybody who does that and is fine with it. You can carry hundreds of books with you in your pocket. That’s pretty amazing. But there’s just something about the tactility of the record or the page that I prefer.

Audience Member A

Are you teaching DJ methodology, and if not, why not?

PW

Yeah, so I teach in an English department. Jack—who’s a work-op student [Jack recorded the audio for this interview]—was in a class of mine last semester, before I was on sabbatical. I did that course on sound and remix. So, all the students actually went out to do their own field recordings. They had to do remix projects and audio essays. So that was a lot of fun. I would bring in a little portable turntable and I would open every class with a listening. So even if we’re looking at a literary work, I’m usually interested in work that’s sort of interstitial—at the intersection of music and literature. And so that’s just one way that I think no matter what I’m teaching, I can bring students into a text.