You've been living here for 20 years, and visiting since the late '70s. How do you feel the dance scene in New York has changed? Are you nostalgic for the old days?
It's hard for me to make qualitative generalizations. You can make quantitative generalizations and say New York used to be really cheap -- apartments were cheap and food was cheap and beer was cheap, and now everything's expensive. But if anything, I see this as being this really remarkable golden era in New York for music and culture because there's so much going on. The worst time, ironically, for music and culture in New York, was the late '80s -- '88, '89, '90; it was exciting, but it was terrible. Lower Manhattan had been decimated by AIDS and crack, and so everybody you knew was scared, sick or in the hospital. There wasn't a lot going on. In some ways it was a good time for dance music, because for a lot of people it was the only refuge they had. But at that time, the dance scene was very Latino, very black and very gay. When I was DJing in the late '80s, more often than not I'd be the only white person in the club, and I found that strangely comforting.
And as a DJ in the late '80s, you had people from the inner city that were looking for any sort of relief or refuge, because in the gay community, and in the Latino and black communities of the late 1980s, everybody was just being assaulted on every side. Either your friends were dying of AIDS, or they were crack addicts, or they'd been shot. So being a DJ in the late '80s, you became almost like a comforter. Your job was just to create an environment where people could finally relax and have a nice time. Certainly things are a lot different now.
New York magazine recently called you a "stealth slut." What does that mean?
More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality. I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is.
A part of me wants to sort of try and sound cool and feed this myth that I'm some sort of glamorous lothario, but I was raised by women -- my mother and her mother and my aunts -- and as a result most of my friends have always been women. So I guess some people in the media will see me with lots of different women and assume that I'm dating all of them, and as unsexy as this might sound, they're just my friends. Of course, I'm not a saint; occasionally I go out and get drunk and go home with a stranger, but I'm not at Tommy Lee levels or anything.
Do you feel like you have any sort of control over your public image? Sometimes there's this perception of you as very canny, plotting things out very carefully. I think people got that idea from "Play," maybe, that something so big could only have been orchestrated.
The success of "Play" was such an arbitrary accident. I mean, I only had a record deal for "Play" in the States like three months before it was released. And V2 Records, at that time, it was almost like they were doing me a favor. There was no advance for it, and I remember sitting down with them as it was being released and they were talking about their sales goals. Someone in this meeting said that they thought maybe it could sell 100,000 copies, and there was almost this chuckle, like no, there's no way this weird, lo-fi record could ever sell 100,000 copies -- that seemed absurdly ambitious. In the first week it came out, I think it sold 3,000 copies. And they were all very happy. So the success, the licensing, the whatever, was completely accidental. There was no plan. There never has been. Whenever I've tried to plan things, they've always failed. Whenever I've tried to pick singles, I always pick the wrong singles.
Has the backlash from "Play" run its course?
At this point, I don't read my own press because I just assume people are going to hate me. The backlash was really intense and disturbing, but when I looked at it objectively, it made sense to me. I realized, if I wasn't me, I'd hate me too. Like, "Would he just shut up, would he just go away for a while -- it's become annoying." So I understood why people were annoyed with me, but it still hurt my feelings. I'm sure that there are some people out there who are just going to hate me forever. It's bizarre being loathed by people I've never met. And usually for weird reasons. I recognize that there just isn't much that I can do about that, except for hang out with my friends and make spaghetti and watch "Family Guy."
Any thoughts on the presidential election?
Three or four months ago, if you had asked me that, I would have said I'd be happy with either [Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton], whoever gets the nomination. They had that debate in Los Angeles where they were being really collegial and respectful of each other. And one of the questions was about a Clinton-Obama ticket, and both of them responded in a benign, coy way. At that point I would have happily supported either one of them.
I hate to say that I have since found the way in which the Clinton campaign has comported itself to be so distasteful that I now enthusiastically support Obama. I think he'd make a great president. I think he's run an amazing campaign. I think he's smart. He's dignified. I think it sends an amazing message to the rest of the world. But Hillary Clinton has surrounded herself with some really bad people. A lot of the people, Harold Ickes and Terry McAuliffe and James Carville -- these guys are nasty. You think Democrats are all like soft, tree-hugging NPR listeners? The people she's surrounded with are just ... awful. Their approach to politics is sort of "take no prisoners." They are like the collective equivalent of Karl Rove on the left. They don't care what it takes; they want their person to be installed in office.
How is life as a blogger?
It's been interesting. When I started the blog, I think it was 1999, and I started writing about being on tour. And then the election, the Gore-Bush election campaign happened, and I was really incensed that anyone was taking Bush seriously. It was also when Nader was getting his three and a half percent of the vote, and I was really incensed that anyone would support Nader, because it was pretty clear that to me that a vote for Nader was the equivalent of a vote for Bush. I started being more and more outspoken about politics, and that's when I started offending a lot of people, on the right and the left. Some of the most vitriolic stuff I've been on the receiving end of has been from people who ostensibly agree with me. But they find my tone somehow arrogant and strident and didactic, which at times I guess it is.
I'm under no illusions. I don't think I'm a particularly good writer, and I'm not terribly insightful. The reason people read my blog is because I'm a musician. And if I weren't a musician, it's pretty safe to say no one would pay attention to anything I have to say. I see myself as being the blogging equivalent of the annoying drunk in the bar in the middle of the afternoon who just has an opinion about everything, but the other people in the bar stopped listening to him a long time ago.
About the writer
Scott Lamb is a senior editor at BuzzFeed.com.
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