NYLON - January 2008 - (Page 125) The countdown has begun for the launch of NASA’s star-studded debut album. By Mikael Wood. Photographed by Rony Alwin AST OFF BL In Sam Spiegel’s view, the age of the niche-specific music fan has come to an end. These days, says the 27-year-old DJ/producer better known as Squeak E. Clean, “everyone listens to more eclectic shit. People aren’t about one genre like they were in the ’80s, when they’d say, ‘This is my identity. I won’t go outside this one thing.’ Now you’ll see an indie-rock kid dressed in emo clothes who listens to Klaxons and Dirty South hip-hop.” That’s the listener Spiegel has in mind for the upcoming debut by NASA, his defiantly open-eared world-funk duo with Brazilian DJ Zegon. (In this case, NASA stands for North America/South America.) Due for release early in 2008, the album is slated to feature Spiegel and Zegon’s partnerships with a hugely expansive list of collaborators including—deep breath—George Clinton, M.I.A., Spank Rock, Seu Jorge, Ghostface Killah, KRS-One, Karen O, and the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard. “The album is based on the concept of two worlds coming together,” Spiegel says, kicking back with Zegon at the shabby-chic Squeak E. Clean studio compound in Hollywood. (The younger brother of film director Spike Jonze, Spiegel makes his living—and financed the NASA album— producing music for TV commercials; in 2005 he earned loads of blog buzz when an adidas commercial featured “Hello Tomorrow,” a dreamy track with Karen O.) “Every song has different worlds colliding. We said to each other, ‘Let’s get the craziest combinations of people who you’d never expect to work together but who fit together in some crazy way.’” They succeeded in that respect: “Spacious Thoughts” features Tom Waits in an unlikely duet with Kool Keith, while “Electric Flowers” has Cardigans frontwoman Nina Persson trading lines with Wu-Tang mastermind RZA. “Sam wanted me to write my own part, which made me realize how much I come from the pop world,” Persson says with a laugh. “I understand verses and choruses, but he only had words and beats. I was like, ‘Where does it start?’” “This is where I see hip-hop going,” says Blackalicious MC the Gift of Gab, who appears alongside David Byrne and Chali 2na of Jurassic 5 in “People Tree.” “Rock and country and folk—that’s all inside hip-hop, which is why hip-hop will never die.” Spiegel and Zegon met at a party in 2003, when Zegon was living at the L.A. home of Beastie Boys producer Mario Caldato. “Sam said, ‘Let’s make some beats,’” Zegon remembers. “So the next day I brought some records over and we made a beat that day.” Those records were vintage Brazilian funk from the ’60s and ’70s, which Spiegel says no one knows more about than Zegon. “Some of that first stuff ended up on the NASA album,” Zegon adds. Spiegel says that working around so many different artists’ schedules occasionally drove him to the brink of insanity, and he admits that there were a few fantasy cameos that never materialized. (The late James Brown wanted too much money, Spiegel says, and Al Green was too busy working on his own album.) But once folks entered NASA’s orbit, mellowness prevailed. “People who’d be on a rock-star vibe wouldn’t fit on the album anyway,” says Spiegel, who has a fond memory of Method Man’s visit to the studio. “He was awesome—just hanging out, doing magic tricks, smoking blunts. He was happy that we’re so close to Roscoe’s [the famous SoCal chicken-and-waffles joint].” Both Spiegel and Zegon acknowledge the similarities between NASA and other all-star projects such as Handsome Boy Modeling School, Deltron 3030, and Gorillaz. (Filmmaker Syd Garon is at work on a companion piece to the album that he says will feature the work of visual artists including Shepard Fairey and Marcel Dzama.) “But I like to think that we tried to have more breadth” with NASA, says Spiegel. “We didn’t wanna make a hip-hop concept record. We wanted to make a great record that doesn’t fit in anywhere.”
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