INTERVIEWING Derrick isn’t like sitting down with a tape recorder and asking questions. He can be larger than most people ever live, screaming mock-abuse (“come on, ask me a question, you fuck, you fuck, you fuck!”), deciding to engage in wrestling and spinning me round his apartment while we later sit at the computer and I write a love letter for him on E-mail to a girl in Japan. There are some pictures on the kitchen counter and he takes me through his recent photos.
“That’s Jay Denham, that’s Carl, that’s Honk Kong baby, that’s Juan on the turntables, that’s my ex-girlfriend with her kid, we used to live together for a few years, that’s Marshall, Jeff, Farley, Keith, Armando and Felix The Housecat. A picture with Armando. You know he’s got leukemia.
Look at the date on that picture, just a year ago.”There are pictures from Chile, where he DJed under a solar eclipse. “That’s when we finally reached the peak of the mountain in Chile. Can you believe that. I’ve seen some things man. I’ve been blessed.”
There are pictures from Amsterdam, where he lived for two years until he “got tired of some of the antics and petty bullshit.” And there’s a picture of the statue The Spirit Of Detroit, a huge classical figure out of Michaelangelo holding a planet-sized golden orb. “I like the angle I took that from, it shows his struggle, his stamina. It shows how long he’s been holding that damn thing.” It could almost be a self-portrait.
A picture of a producer who stopped making records after he got burned by an industry that wouldn’t accept him as an ‘artist’. And a picture of a producer who won’t release a record unless he feels it’s the best he could possibly make. Unless it’s finished.
“A lot of people make music,” he explains, “but not many of them are finishers. Most people don’t really understand what the finishing technique is but it’s when you honestly tell yourself that you believe you’ve done the best you can and this is the best it can be. I can’t finish a track knowing that somewhere along the line I don’t feel comfortable with it. I couldn’t do that. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t release much music.”
IT must be strange being Derrick May. No one will deny that he changed the music and started a movement. Yet the more we talk it becomes clear that the world he helped create isn’t one he’s particularly happy with.
Perhaps because the record industry waylaid him, perhaps because he wouldn’t make any of pop’s compromises, the image of the black man in techno was buried and with it the possibility of a black, techno dancefloor. I guess he feels lonely out there.
Especially as he’s not interested in drugs while his audience roll around in a sea of ecstasy. He shows me a picture of some crashed-out chicks obviously still burning on their chemicals. “That’s a bunch of stupid girls at a party in Belgium. I can’t get with these kind of girls. I don’t find the way they party reality. They’re gonna fuck themselves up and look like shit after a few years and they regret it. They really do regret it. It’s like people actually think youth is eternal. A lot of people believe it. I don’t understand it at all.”
And this makes him angry? “What does it say about the music that we have to do so many drugs to simulate the feeling of euphoria? I don’t need no damn drugs to put me out there. I’ve never taken drugs, never smoked a joint, never taken ecstasy, never snorted coke, never tried any drug in my life, not one time, never. I don’t have anything against drugs. I just don’t understand why people can’t be themselves. What’s wrong with that?”
What’s wrong, he explains, is that the drugs embody or promote a level of slackness that he finds hard to tolerate. “Unfortunately most of these kids will never understand what the music was all about or what it could be about. And unfortunately the DJs – not all of them – who play the music should be ashamed of themselves and they should realise that they are not contributing anything to anything. And, yeah, people dance at their parties but could they actually take one of those records they’re playing now and play it in five years time and somebody actually remember what it sounded like?
Este parrafo esta excelente para los djs q se creen productores.
And how many of the guys playing records now could actually say he loves the music that he plays with a sort of heart and soul so when he plays he’s bleeding inside? He’s feeling totally as if he just made love to the music?
Because Derrick never needed drugs to get to the point where he found enough spirit and funk and science and power to change and recreate the music.
And I think it hurts him to see what for him was a creative and spiritual act be continually reinterpreted as a chemical gesture. “We Hollywood DJs who are supposed to be the new leaders of the underground, we’re pitiful man. We’re pitiful. Only a few of us have any real heart, any real intention of making a chance or trying to make a difference. Only a few of us understand what it’s all about. The rest of these guys popped up out of the water and they’re taking the scene exactly nowhere.
And the drug culture is right along with it because most of the kids out there dancing to this music don’t understand why anybody else would like this music until they pop a pill and all of a sudden the music sounds funky.
“So the kids take a pill to feel the funk and the DJ takes a pill to feel the funk. I don’t take a pill to feel the funk. Carl don’t take a pill to feel the funk. Glenn Underground don’t take a pill to feel the funk. Derrick Carter might take a pill for fun, but not to feel the funk.”
WHEN Derrick May DJs you don’t know what you’re dancing to. You can’t say if the music is techno, samba, a train coming at you from a distance, beauty, funk, disco or Detroit because it’s all these things. A soundtrack for the rollerdisco in the sky. The last time I heard him play in London he worked the set up to a point of passion then dropped ‘Icon’, one of his own tracks. It might have been four years old but it still sounded breathlessly perfect.
Its strings came out of silence like ghosts having one last look at a world or lover they can no longer touch. The rhythms turned funk into poetry. People couldn’t look at each other while it was playing. If you heard ‘Icon’ on a dancefloor you wouldn’t know if you wanted to cry or die or dance. And I guess the question for us all, E-heads or not, is to wonder how Derrick caught such an intense fusion of spirit and funk without taking the pill. The answer goes back to when he met Kevin and Juan at school, when he was riding high on the naivet? and bursting passion of teenage youth.
“We’ve known each other since childhood and basically Juan taught me how to be a DJ and our philosophy of music and what we should play and how we should approach people in our DJ sets.
“After I’d met Juan I realised that there were so many things that people were not interested in and I couldn’t understand why… But people just sort of live their lives according to somebody else’s rules and never question it. We’ve all had family and friends that live like that and we don’t criticise them, we try to enlighten them. But if they don’t wanna know, they don’t wanna know. But I was young and we were rebels, And that sort of mentality flowed over into my everyday life as far as every aspect of what I saw as normality I found completely disgusting,” he says.
man. We were rebels.” So that’s the secret of techno. It didn’t really have all that much to do with George Clinton or Kraftwerk. It was about Derrick May’s head and the feelings he found on those long lost dancefloors that he couldn’t separate from his regular life.
It’s like Kurt Cobain’s teenage spirit, the pain of setting yourself impossibly high standards. But when he starts to make music again – he’s producing a track now for the PlayStation game Ghost In The Shell and promising to make more records in the future – we’ll find out if people still want to hear the spirit of Detroit sing. Or maybe he’ll be roller-skating on his own, after all people always said that heaven might be a kind of lonely place.
TEN DERRICK MAY CLASSICS
Rhythim Is Rhythim – ‘Strings of Life’ (with Mike James and Carl Craig) (Transmat)
Rhythim Is Rhythim – ‘Kaotic Harmony’ (with Carl Craig) (Transmat)
Rhythim Is Rhythim – ‘Icon’/’Montage’ (Transmat)
Rhythim Is Rhythim – ‘It It What It Is’ (Transmat)
Rhythim Is Rhythim – ‘Nude Photo’ (with Thomas Barnett) (Transmat)
R-Tyme – ‘R-Theme’ (with D. Wynn) (Transmat)
Sueno Latino – ‘Sueno Latino’ (Derrick May Remix) (Ital. DFC)
Rhythim Is Rhythim – ‘Beyond The Dance’ (Transmat)
Deee-Lite – ‘Wild Times’ (Mayday Remix) (Elektra)
Rhythim Is Rhythim – ‘The Beginning’ (Transmat)
