Qbert’s sound philosophy starts with healing. Music is supposed to massage, not punish. He wants analog warmth, a little muffled, a little imperfect — the way old film looks different from digital even when both are technically correct. The imperfection is the point. Everything he plays has to be scratchable, rooted in breaks, built with space. Organic. Because his life is organic.
“Everything is God — you’re God, I’m God, that thing is God. It’s all just one energy. This is a temporary life as a character in a very advanced, Godlike video game.”
Twenty-five years in, what has he learned? That the ultimate happiness is making other people happy — and that it comes back. Make the DJ happy, the DJ makes the crowd happy, the energy returns to you. Plant the seeds. Keep planting. That’s the whole philosophy distilled into two sentences.
Then it gets cosmic. Asked what question he wishes more people would ask artists, Qbert goes straight to life after death, the nature of reality, and whether any of this is real. His answer: everything is God. You are God. The room is God. All of it is atoms, pixels, one energy temporarily assembled into the illusion of separate things. This life — a character in an advanced spiritual video game. He believes that. Genuinely. You can feel it.
DJ Qbert is from the Bay Area. He is on Thud Rumble. He has been one of the most important turntablists on the planet for three decades. None of that is what stays with you after this conversation. What stays is the energy in the room — the warmth, the positivity, the sense that you are sitting with someone who has genuinely figured out what matters. More artists should be asked the weird questions.