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Rating: 
Summary: Terrible, Pretentious Pontifications
Review: A truly terrible read... This book is written like some sort of hiphop, dada, coffee shoppe manifesto.The texts can fit into one of three categories: Self-referential boastings, references of others accomplishments (Spooky's M.O.) or some sort of patchwork rambling about technology sprinkled with fifty-cent phrases and urbanisms like "check the flow" and "flip the script." Sigh... Spooky tries to defend this garbage in the acknowledgements section by saying "try to make people think and they'll hate you." Spare me.
Rating: 
Summary: Stop! You're both right.
Review: The previous two reviews are BOTH true, IMO. I never review stuff here but I was just so struck by how opinions vary so widely with Spooky... and all of it is true, if I were to add some perspective. Miller/Spooky is such an influence and inspiration to me - I love his music, I love what he does with sound, I love how he is able to draw so many disparate elements to play to create sound-worlds that are immersive, instructive, and wildly engaging.
Too bad he just won't shut up sometimes. He is really so hard to defend as an academic... and to the degree I love the disc, I also agree with the last take on the text.
So, bottom line from a huge fan of the MUSIC: the book is beautifully designed, gorgeous to look at, and virtually unreadable. Skip it. Consider it a nice CD holder. Buy this for the Mix CD: one of the best of Spooky's published work - a seamless integration of ambient, beats, and representative cut-ups of major pieces of 20th Century spoken word or voice performance. Where else can you hear Oval, Patti Smith, William Burroughs, Marcel Duchamp, Bill Laswell, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings and DJ Grazhopper in the same place? It's like Blake Edwards' "The Party" took place over the Algonquin Round Table and was catered to by Wordsound Records. n i c e.
Rating: 
Summary: this book is for poets.
Review: This book is not academia, it is hip hop. By that I mean it is a manifesto encoded into rhythmic, visual passages that don't always make sense right away. Eventually, if the reader is open to it, his consciousness begins to adapt to Miller's, and ideas that once seemed like gibberish begin to make sense. I highly recommend this book. It is short but the knowledge is incredibly dense/intense. It has absolutely changed the way I look at identity and cultural evolution in the information age, and it accomplishes this subtly. Perhaps readers not exposed to hip-hop culture and philosophy will get lost in the mix, but this is their loss. "Check the rhyme as it unfolds in time." This book is about the evolution of human consciousness.
Rating:
Summary: New Wave Scholarship
Review: This is a pathbreaking work; surely a future classic. Using the DJ as a model for new patterns of creativity in our culture, DJ Spooky suggests that "the selection of sound becomes narrative." Creativity is in the mix of old and exisiting texts (written, aural, visual) rather than in the invention of new ones. Paradoxically, in the mix something new IS created. This book shows that theory can be written almost poetically. A rare thing: theory that is as artistic as the art it describes. The accompanying CD of 33 songs is terrific: standout moments include James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake mixed with Oval vs Yoshihiro Hanno and William S. Burroughs reading from The Five Steps mixed with Scanner Fuse. Patti Smith ain't bad, either.
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