Music's been an influence
on my art for years
Whether it's images
inspired by lyrics or me
doing portraits of
musicians I love, from
punk, from hip hop.
But really, to bring
together art and music in
a way that was more
well-rounded was something
I had never actually done
until I decided to do an
art show called
"Sound and Vision"
And the concept was really
to, not only do stuff
inspired by music, but to
work with my favorite DJ
and producer, DJ Z-Tripp,
have him create a
soundtrack riffing off
of all the different
inspirations for
the visual art.
I also shipped over a
thousand of my own records
to London for the show and
created a record store
installation with
turntables and headphones
where people can take my
vinyl collection, some of
the record sleeves were
signed by people like DJ
Shadow or Malcolm Mclaren
or Chuck D and they could
take those records and
they could listen to them
and I looked at it in much
the same way that I look
at street art.
When I put a piece of art
on the street it's a gift
to the public.
And though I wasn't
literally giving my
records away I was sharing
them and people said
"Oh my God, some of these
records are really rare,
they're signed by
important people.
How are you gonna let the
public just handle them?
Stuff might get stolen" I
said "Because that's what
art is about.
It's about sharing things
with an audience and
you know, finding common
ground and common
inspiration and pushing
culture forward."
I'm artist, activist and
DJ Shepard Fairey and
you're watching
Crate Diggers
♪ ♪
You're now about to
witness the strength of
street knowledge.
♪ ♪
I think I have about
four thousand records.
I got into music as a kid,
I think like most people
do, listening
to the radio.
My parents had a small
record collection.
They had some Rolling
Stones, Diana Ross, Beatles,
"Johnny B. Goode", Chuck Berry.
Which, great record, I
actually still have it.
Mostly I just
listened to FM radio.
I had a small radio in my
room and whatever
struck me, struck me.
And my parents knew that
I always loved music.
When we were in the car I
wanted the radio on,
when I was in my room drawing
or working on model
airplanes I wanted
the radio on.
And you know eventually
when I started to earn a
small allowance, I started
to collect records.
The very first record
I ever bought, this is
pretty embarrassing,
was "Y.M.C.A."
by The Village People.
And it was in the store in
Charleston, South Carolina
where I grew up.
Not a super culturally
progressive place.
And I walked into the
record store and they had
all the top twenty
45s in a row.
"Y.M.C.A." was number two,
not number one.
And I said "There must
be some mistake here.
I'm sorry, but this is
clearly the best song in
the world right now."
One of the next records I
really remember buying was
Joan Jett's "I Love Rock &
Roll" and I remember that
the 45 of that was pressed
super loud and I loved
that because I didn't have
a really powerful stereo.
So, compared to ELO or any
of the other stuff that my
parents had or my sister
had, "I Love Rock & Roll",
that crisp snare sound
at the beginning.
Boom!
So loud
Tom Tom Club, "Genius of
Love" is on this record
and that is a track that
sort of took what
The Talking Heads were doing
because Chris and Tina
from The Talking Heads
are in this band.
Sly and Robby were part
of the rhythm section and
that's been sampled by
ODB, Mariah Carey, so on
and so forth...Grand
Master Flash for "It's Nasty"
Great record and
somebodies gonna say
it should be in new wave or
it should be in funk,
I'm putting it in hip hop.
We're in my DJ lair, it's
in a top-secret bunker
fifty feet beneath the
earth's surface somewhere
in Los Angeles.
I organize my stuff in a
few different ways,
I've got some stuff
alphabetically, some stuff
as favorites, some stuff
by beats per minute.
I wish there were more of
a method to the madness.
You know I've got punk and
indie, 80s and disco,
hip hop and funk,
my favorite rock.
Compilations,
you know, beats.
80 to 92 BPM
93 to 99
100 to 105
105 to 110
Yeah this is all
alphabetical, Black Sabbath,
Beck
Jeff Beck
[Laughing]
The Bee Gees
Chaos.
All these old seven
inches, and you know I'll
probably never DJ with
those but it's just stuff
that I've collected over
the years because I like
the bands, I
like the music.
You get all sorts of
people arguing about which
record should be
in which thing.
"Should James Brown
be in soul or funk?
It depends which year man"
A lot of it's debatable.
New wave, no Blondie is
not new wave, they should
go in indie.
It's semantic warfare but
what it comes down to,
for me, is just good music.
This is a pretty rare
record by a band called
the Count Five called
"Psychotic Reaction"
And it's a great, great
garage track, it's sort of
proto-punk.
And the only way I knew to
look for this record was
because The Sex Pistols
had a bootleg called
"Psychotic Reaction" where
they had covered this song
in a set and that was the
only way that I knew it.
This is a pretty rare
record, The Beastie Boys
first twelve-inch single
from '85 "She's On It"
with "Slow and Low"
"She's On It" is not on
License To Ill, it's not
that great a song.
It's when they're making
that transition from being
you know a punk rock to
a rap group with rock influence.
I got this when I was
living in Providence so
I wanna say it was around
1988 I got this, and even
though it's from '85, and
I think it was pretty rare
by '88, there's always
some nitwit that doesn't
know what they're losin'
so I got this from
a friend who was like "Yeah
here if you wanna buy this
record it's three
bucks or whatever"
When I first started the
Andre The Giant Has a Posse
sticker campaign, I was
listening to a lot of stuff.
Really hip hop had become
the new punk rock for me.
Public Enemy, Ice T, N.W.A.
I made that sticker in the
summer of 1989 and the use
of the word posse was
inspired by Beastie Boys,
Public Enemy, Ice T.
In fact, the line
from Ice T's "Power",
"I'm livin' large as possible.
Posse unstoppable."
Was one of the things that
made me embrace that.
But it was also just
skateboard slang.
We were all, you know,
sticking a toe into black
culture and saying like
"Hey, you know,
we're gangster,
we're bad" you know?
And using the word "posse"
was sort of a dangerous
affectation.
Culturally there weren't, um...
Malibu's Most Wanted
hadn't come out yet.
And you know, and since I loved
the rebellion of hip-hop,
but I still felt like
it was a little bit taboo
to be a white guy
and saying, "I'm down."
I used to listen to this
record a lot,
both when I was screen printing
my posters by myself
in my garage or
in my studio,
and also to go out
to put posters up
because it just starts off
with this Queen sample
from "We Will Rock You"
but it's sped up and it just...
it's intense.
It says , "Walkin', stalkin'
in my big black boots,"
and I was just like,
I wanna go out and
do some stuff that
I'm not supposed to do.
It, um, it hyped me up and
the certain records that,
you know, lyrically and
sonically can do that to you.
When I had a Discman
I used to put
"It Takes A Nation Of Millions"
in there
and go out and
just be fearless.
I've been arrested 16 times.
You can, um, you can get
in trouble for doing art,
so every time
I would feel like,
"Okay, I want something that
just makes me feel like
"I'm not thinking
about the police,
"I'm just thinking about the
task at hand," crushing it.
This is an exceptionally
rare record.
It's basically the
Gilligan's Island theme song
played to
"Stairway to Heaven"
by Little Roger
and the Goosebumps.
And um, the guy
that gave it to me,
who just knew I was
a big fan of music
and knew I'd done some stuff
for Led Zeppelin,
he said that
the day this came out,
he went to the record store
to get it because
a friend had told him
that it was coming out.
I think they were a local band;
this was from 1978.
And shortly after that,
Led Zeppelin found out about it
and sued them and
all the copies were pulled.
He thinks there's probably no
more than 500 copies out there,
but this is- I call this
maybe the first mash up
because sung perfectly like
Robert Plant sings "Stairway"
it's the Gilligan's Island
theme song.
And um, you've probably
heard Jimmy Fallon do his, uh,
Neil Young version of The Fresh
Prince of Bel-Air theme song.
This was miles ahead of that.
I've always collected records,
and had a lot of records just
because I'm a music lover.
And on the weekends
I'd hang out with my girlfriend,
later my wife, and uh,
we'd just flip through records,
throw them on the turntable,
drink a glass of wine,
drink a beer,
and um, listen to music.
But DJ Diabetic and MC Insulin
were joke names
that my coworkers
gave me because
I was always in my office
bumping Ice Cube or something,
singing. And um, when I did
actually start DJing,
the name DJ Diabetic stuck.
Being a Type 1 diabetic,
I'm not supposed to eat sugar,
so it's DJ Diabetic, skipping
the jelly, bringing the jams.
In '99 I was approached about
a documentary in the works
called "Scratch",
about DJ culture,
and I befriended
the producers and the director,
and eventually some of
the DJs included in the doc.
And in working on that project,
I met Qbert, I met DJ Z-Trip,
I met DJ Shadow, and you know,
these were people that
I love to talk to about music
because I love their music,
and I was fascinated
to just hear about
their creative process.
So when they saw
how much I loved music,
they encouraged me
to start DJing.
Um, I was told, "Hey, you've got
a great record collection,
"you know music really well,
all you have to do
"is learn how to beat match,
BPM your records,
"learn how to mix, and you know,
you can go out"
"on the most important things,
being a good selector.
So I didn't go through
a rigorous period
of training and
honing my skills.
I just jumped right in
and I think that
because I wasn't technically
the most amazing DJ right away,
I didn't get "shake your romp"
nights anywhere but I did get-
I did get a lot of opportunities
to play the music I loved,
and like everything,
practice yields improvement,
so soon enough
I think that,
uh, I got to be
a pretty solid DJ,
and I think the ultimate mark
of my improvement as a DJ
was DJ Z-Trip hearing me
after I'd been doing it
for a couple of years
and saying,
"You've gotten really good.
"Do you wanna open
for me sometime?"
The Dead Kennedys were
really important to me.
I actually got
this record first,
Fresh Fruit for
Rotting Vegetables.
Um, this was
the second one I got.
I got Plastic Surgery Disasters,
this was like the third
punk rock record I got.
Great record.
So is this one.
I got all the Dead Kennedys
to sign this
after Jello was no longer
part of the band.
And when Jello came here
to my house
and stayed right on this couch
when we were working
on a project together,
I said, "Will you sign
my Dead Kennedys record?"
and he said, "I'm not signing
it. I'm not signing that one.
"It's got all these
other guys on there
"who I don't relate to anymore."
So the good thing was,
during the night Jello Biafra
being a night owl,
during the night he went through
some of my other records,
found The Life Sentence ,
Bleed for Me 12",
which is...
"Bleed For Me" is maybe
my all-time favorite
Dead Kennedys song,
and he doodled on it and wrote,
"If I'd only listened to
Shepard Fairey." - Jello Biafra.
"Obey."
(laughs)
You know, one of the things that
I loved about spinning vinyl
was that you had to work hard
to get certain things,
and the idea of DJing
as an artform
where you wanna play things
that people might recognize
but also pepper in things
that are really novel,
and that tension and
that rhythm between the two,
and you know, there's good stuff
that was hard to find.
There's obscure stuff
that's good
that you gotta
introduce people to, and um,
and it all just felt a little
bit more tangible with vinyl.
Now it's easy to go online
and find virtually anything.
And I love DJing
with Serato because
I can create my own remixes
and my own edits of things,
but yeah, there's something
special before Serato
about just being able to say,
"I got this stuff
and I worked for it."
I am critical when
it comes to album art,
and when there's an album
that's a great album,
like the first Snoop record,
and the art is so bad.
Not even really in a kitsch way
can I say that art's okay.
That art is just bad.
It's too good a record to
have art that's that bad.
