DJ Shadow - 'Endtroducing.....'
No. 43 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“I would like to be able to continue to let what is inside of me … which comes from all the music that I hear … I would like for that to come out … and it's like, it's not really me that's coming … the music's coming through me …..”
— DJ Shadow’s ‘Building Steam with a Grain of Salt’*
Do you remember? Do you recall the little thing that holds the key to who you used to be? There’s a shadow that lives deep in memory that sometimes we cannot see. That little thing when the world was full of possibility. What if you forgot entirely? Even that feeling you had when we heard the sound that came to us from eternity. Might no one remember it, or see its trace in everything that came to be, everyone listening to its magic without understanding what also made it tragic?
But memories don’t just belong to you or me, because memories are echoes of a world that touches everybody. And so what happens when our memories are all mixed together — one with the other — are they still memories? Or are they something else, every second, every moment — a chance to discover a deeper reality? These are the time-warping questions that DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. asks, with the grainy hiss and pop of its infinite mystery, the needle on a spinning record — a window into our past, present, and future psyches — where long lost memories become destinies.
Or in the words of the great American author, William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Which is to say history is always alive inside us and inside our culture, even when we don’t recognize it. While other forms of electronica trumpeted the future, DJ Shadow’s experimental hip hop propositioned the idea that music was the ultimate time machine. But not only that, for his style was a powerful redeemer. Because as Faulkner’s words unintentionally evoke — the racial and economic divisions of America were what hip hop long sought to supplant and revoke.
“I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie,” raps Wonder Mike in Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ at the dawn of the hip hop age, its hook borrowed from Nile Rodger’s Chic disco classic ‘Good Times’; one side of the same coin as ‘The Message’s’ electro riff, sampled from Melvin Bliss’s ‘Synthetic Substitution.’ Psychedelic to the max, Shadow took the music that never made it into the mainstream — and reimagined it: “To the hip hip hop and you don't stop.”
The feel-good rap and groove of 1979’s ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ vibes in a stark oppositional relief to Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ — another New York City hip hop classic suffused with the blues of Black urban life, economic despair, and the righteous fury of youths giving back biting commentary: “It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under,” raps Melle Mel. “Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge, I'm trying not to lose my head, ha-ha-ha-ha!” Uplifted by Bliss’s bright keyboard riff from ‘Synthetic Substitution’ and released in 1982, ‘The Message’ was a revelation. Afrika Bambaata’s ‘Planet Rock’ the same year and Cybotron’s ‘Clear’ the year after continued to thrust into the futuristic — a frequency that jazz master Herbie Hancock would shuttle into the mainstream with his instrumental sensation, ‘Rockit’ — all moments of an era that DJ Shadow revered and that pulled him down into an undying past to dig deeper and deeper.
An M.C. Escher maze of deep destinies, DJ Shadow’s first album brought the term “crate diggers” to fame, a sort of play on grave diggers. And yet the old and forgotten and obscure records that he found and sampled, and weaved and recast and layered, were resurrected as he unburied their secret, discarded, rejected, or passed-on lives. A testament to vinyl’s second chances, of finding that great lost record, of hearing its hidden wonders emerging like an ancient artifact under the desert, of turning it over and then finding a gem on the b-side, Endtroducing….. is about music’s unending.
That unending is etched into the instrument that helped birth DJ Shadow’s 1996 masterpiece — the Akai MPC60 sampler workstation, designed by none other than Roger Linn, who also designed the LinnDrum and the Linn LM-1, two of the earliest drum machines that helped revolutionize the history of music. The MPC60 was no less important, if not more so — critical to its design was its 4 x 4, 16-button key pad, that allowed for two-handed finger-thumping, rewarding timing and dexterity; different samples could be assigned to each button and further modulated using multiple effects and functions; and crucially, it had memory banks to fill a custom library.
DJ Shadow AKA Joshua Paul Davis, was the perfect match for the MPC60. For isolation can often breed an iconoclasm. He grew up in a small town in northern California in between Oakland and Sacramento. At 10, he discovered hip hop and never looked back — imbibing everything from Mantronix’s ‘King of the Beats’ and Planet Detroit’s ‘Invasion’ to Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ and Double Dee & Steinski’s ‘Lesson 1, 2, 3,’ from Afrika Bambaata to Public Enemy to 2Live Crew, and the alternative Native Tongues stalwarts of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, and on and on — reshaping it as a self-described outsider.
A college radio DJ at UC Davis, he began to experiment with turntables and samples, developing an innate sense of storytelling yet still following a mostly traditional hip hop template filled with raps and harder rhythms. Even then flashes of a more tranquil side peeped through along with headier grooves. In 1993, as DJ Shadow And The Groove Robbers, he made his first big statement with ‘Entropy,’ which showcased his deep range, a five part, 17-minute-plus medley of the tricks, vibes and sensibilities that would make him a legend. It’s an undeniably funky trip through hip hop’s soul.
James “Holygoof” Lavelle, the owner and founder of Mo’ Wax Records in England, who had gotten his start as a tastemaker with his “Mo’ Wax” column in the Straight No Chaser magazine — an atlas for beat-heads across the globe — heard it and flew all the way to California to knock on DJ Shadow’s door. He quickly signed Davis and encouraged him to take all of the artistic risks he wanted. The first result of their partnership was a double bill release with Japan’s DJ Krush: Shadow’s ‘Lost and Found (S.F.L.)’ sampled U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’ Larry Mullen Jr.’s martial drumbeat stuttering under a billowing cloud of scratches and jazzy horns.**
But it was his ‘In/Flux,’ produced for Lavelle’s Headz compilation series, that transformed the conversation about hip hop. It was a 12-minute odyssey into sound, concluding the first Headz album and coming right after Tranquility Bass’s ‘They Came In Peace’ — originally released in 1991 by Los Angeles label Exist Dance and arguably the first true instrumental “trip hop” record; Lavelle did his homework, and smartly connected the two California dots, Shadow’s flux bringing that heady psychedelic legacy full circle. The ripples were converging into a bigger wave. Journalist Andy Pemberton famously coined the moment in a June 1994 article for Mixmag titled simply “Trip Hop,” with a fun subtitle of “It’s Insane, Scary, Trippy, Very Dope”:
“I don’t take acid,” stated DJ Shadow, as clearly as he can after 30 hours in the studio and no sleep. “When I was working on ‘In/Flux’ people told me the music took you somewhere that may be similar. It’s the track I’d always wanted to do, not heeding any unwritten laws of hip hop.”
And so Shadow had begun his long journey into the unknown, moving out of the shadow of the mountains that had come before. Spurred on by Lavelle, Shadow began the painstaking work of making his first album, an album made entirely of samples. Along with another key release, the What Does Your Soul Look Like E.P. — which featured the nearly 14-minute ‘Part 2,’ with its grungy guitar loop, ‘Part 3’ with its Asiatic flute, an homage of sorts to DJ Krush, the slow rambling ‘Part 4’ with its midnight jazz — Endtroducing….. and ‘In/Flux’ represented a body of work, an unwritten “book” in the annals of where dusty memories alone might take us.
Featuring Davis on the cover of their November issue that year, with his trademark baseball cap on (or just a visor as he was photographed crate-digging in the article), Urb magazine enlisted the Irish filmmaker and hip-hop historian Brian Cross to pen a story and interview, titled and inspired by Shadow’s own song, “Why Does Hip-Hop Suck In ‘96?” Endtroducing….. had set off an earthquake when it was released two months before. While plenty of people had been plugging into the instrumental delights of house or techno, most listeners, including hip hop fans, were being reintroduced to the power of music in purer form — the muse-ness of music.
“Hip-hop is an instrumental art-form,” Davis mused to Urb. “People were rocking breaks before they were rapping. Rapping came in to celebrate the DJ, and nobody ever talks about that. Breaks were first, the DJ was first. From Kool Herc on down….I feel that instrumental music can be more of a challenge as a producer. With a vocalist or a rapper, the music has to provide a background and not much more than that. That was never what Mantronix was about, for example.”
“I want there to be a story within each song, that means I have to arrange the song to make it a fruitful listen from beginning to end,” he continued on. “With this album, each song reflects a different mood I had to be in to work on that song. Instrumental music can actually be more subversive. To suggest ‘fuck you’ musically is a lot more powerful than just saying fuck you on a track.”
Lavelle himself remembered receiving the DATs of Endtroducing….. by FedEx in London, perhaps the first to hear it other than Shadow and his production crew. “It was just one of those moments,” he recalled years later, “where you were like, ‘Fuck, this is a masterpiece!’” It was subversive. It was powerful. The music critic emeritus, Robert Christgau, who had also prophetically celebrated Brian Eno’s Another Green World in 1975, pegged Endtroducing….., 20 years later, as a similar achievement, picking it as his top album of 1996. A labor of love, its success shocked Shadow.
Humbly, it begins with humor, in the form of a throwback radio host announcing the production, followed by a psychedelic electronic tone-sprawl — errowwwwhhhnn! — and then another voice sample, repeating “Guess who’s coming…?” More voices are crashed in, “Just another DJ savior…” — all scratched to perfection. It’s an expert introduction that in about 45 seconds flashes the whole album in miniature.***
More importantly, the juxtapositions, the kaleidoscopic aural splash, simultaneously bewilders and orients the listener for what will be a constantly surprising trip through not only Shadow’s archaeological selections but also his imagination. What we get here is not just music but a powerful blast of cultural immersion. Here was a White purveyor of sound not just floating, but piloting through a Black universe of light. ‘Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt’ was the perfect statement following the introductory ‘Best Foot Forward’ — its unforgettable piano motif, its humble interviewed drummer, the tentative then assured beats, the “moon rules.”
That thoughtful piano trance, sampled from Jeremy Storch’s ‘I Feel A New Shadow,’ along with samples of wah-wah guitar licks and ethereal bells, so fused and so right, was both a feather-light manifesto of Shadow’s aesthetic, but also a door into a deep, reflective and heavy introverse. We have been introduced, we have entered, a deeply emotional, melancholic, and yet mighty multiverse of memory — living in an unending, dare we say, spiritual, ever-expanding, human universe. It’s that “God frequency” Shadow has later invoked. It’s “the music's coming through me…” — the steam.
And so comes ‘The Number Song,’ the grind that brings the metal to the mettle — Metallica’s ‘Orion’ smeared over The Third Guitar’s ‘Baby Don’t Cry’ soul, a drum-funk bedrock. Here Shadow takes two things that seem worlds apart and reconnects them to one world, a world that brings music back to the common spirit that binds us. It maybe shouldn’t work. And yet, of course it works. It’s bold. It’s slick. It’s perfect. Including the fuzz grit of He 6’s rendition of The Temptations’ ‘Get Ready’ — a psychedelic 1972 funk and rock cover by a Korean band no less — the sheer cheekiness and inter-connectedness of ‘The Number Song’ ever inspires.
Memories become destinies — for next ‘Changeling’ ever changes, contradictions in motion — so gentle, so old sounding, yet wigging, rolling, joyous, beautiful — delirious. Here the same spirits that flow in music and words converge, samples from Tangerine Dream and Motherlode forming some of the backbone with pioneering female composer Kay Gardner’s ‘Touching Souls’ from her 1975 album Mooncircles hypnotizing us into a cathartic meditation that can restore our lost optimism.
Again, resurrection — because the obscure haunting organ melody that begins ‘Changeling’ and sets the tone for its otherworldly beauty is rarer than rare. It was never released on a record company label. It is a recording of a recital or performance by the Chaffey College Jazz Ensemble, a song called ‘Imagination Flight’ that Shadow excavated in one of his mythical vinyl digs, very likely in the basement of his favorite record store, The Beat in Davis, California — what he called “my little nirvana.” This ‘Imagination Flight’ was practically lost to history until Shadow found it and then breathed new life into it with Gardner’s heavenly plucks, Motherlode’s drums, Tangerine Dream’s electric guitar riffs, and Klondyke Neddi’s ‘Embryo’ bass.
‘Changeling’ is a miracle. For besides all of the instrumental archaeology and gymnastics, Shadow sprinkles and almost floods the voice of American folk singer Loudon Wainwright III singing ‘The Man Who Couldn't Cry’: “And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried, rained 40 nights…” — submerged then emerged, changed. And come to find and think that Chaffey College is in “nowhere” Rancho Cucamonga. Weaved and burbling beneath and over the album’s surface, is again both the tragic and the magic. You cannot have one without the other — both light and shadow.
“Another day, another batch of samples,” says Davis as he climbs out of hills and stalagmites of vinyl records in Matthew Jones’ documentary about Lavelle and his legendary label, The Man From Mo’ Wax. “My way of working, everything is from a record. I’d find something that I thought had interesting qualities as a loop. I had to sample each word or phrase. And just play with it in the MPC, to get it to line up the way I wanted it. It was time consuming.” Digging deep in The Beat’s basement with a flashlight and then sculpting away in his studio in a little apartment, one can perceive so easily and clearly the artistic continuum of the DJ going back to cave painters.
There were even bats inside that cave — as Shadow recalled in the documentary Scratch, describing as he took director Doug Pray through a tour of The Beat’s vast basement, identifying the exact spot where he once found a “mummified bat” under a stack of records. Sitting in one of his favorite drifts inside that underground landscape of vinyl, he reminisced about the power of discovering many of his favorite samples and by extension his own songs, by way of living that search for the forgotten, the “karmic element of I was meant to find this on top, or I was meant to pull this out because it worked so well with this.” Old memories connected to new destinies.
Endtroducing….. was something else. By mixing memories into new destinies, by breaking them apart onto his MPC60, then synthesizing them through a kind of deep electronic rebirth, an intuitive yet conscious surfacing of the cultural unconscious, it was not just past, present or future, but timeless. He had created a kind of time-shadow, in the same way that California mountains create desert rain shadows: deserts emerge on one side of a range because moisture and rain is caught by mountains, creating a “shadow” — and indeed a different dimension of nature.
And it is in such shadows — with their expanse of shifting elements — that new imaginings, new destinies and new ideas can take starker shape. The more vintage or past that Shadow’s sounds were, the more futuristic they became in the light of today. Davis the person and the place was its own shadow. It was suburban, small, isolated, though not cut off, the mists of time and the California coast still drizzling down from the freed up trailing clouds overhead. On ‘Transmission 1,’ you can picture little Josh Davis daydreaming about the world “out there.” Using the dark tachyon transmission messages from John Carpenter’s 1987 cult film Prince of Darkness, he channeled anxieties and hopes about our past and future — a trick ambient lords Boards of Canada would emulate in 1998 and onward — “Through your conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream.”****
“All I can do is just make the kind of music that I think will contribute something positive and experimental to the genre that raised me,” he told Cross for Urb. “I have no interest in making a record that sounds like every other record because that’s not helping anybody…having a narrow framework about what hip-hop can be, only hurts hip-hop. The most ironic thing of all is now experimentation is frowned upon in hip-hop…People like Bambaata, his whole theme was unity through music. Unity within music and then through music. That’s why they called him the peacemaker.”
The middle of Endtroducing….. represents a kind of hip-hop grand junction. ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 4’ makes an album appearance — its midnight jazz pulling us in with a slow blues train languor. Tipping his hip-hop hat to the British techno underground, reconnecting both cultures back to electro, Shadow layers Kraftwerk’s ‘Numbers’ over the bass of Flying Island’s ‘The Vision and the Voice.’ ‘Stem/Long Stem’ brings back some of the loopy Steve Reich-ism of ‘Steam,’ its pensive guitar taken from the UK act Nirvana — not the Seattle grunge gods of Shadow’s own generation — with 1969’s ‘Love Suite’ before the drums come in rocking it hardcore, slow but then rapid fire, followed by strings from the Italian progressive rockers Osanna, the cello of Dennis Linde’s ‘Linde Manor,’ and deconstructed rhythms cut up from Run DMC’s ‘Run’s House’ of 1988.
‘Transmission 2’ is a short plaintive piece. Quintessential Shadow. The bluesy ministrations of Finnish composer Pekka Pohjola’s ‘Sekoilu Seestyy’ are married seamlessly with the classical strains of Meredith Monk’s ‘Dolmen Music.’ With the thunder of James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ and the echoing “suicide!” of KRS-One, it’s all almost too much, ‘Mutual Slump’ sampling Bjork’s ‘Possibly Maybe,’ the hoopla breaks from Pugh Rogefeldt’s ‘Love, Love, Love’ and the flute of Ed Thigpen’s ‘Action, Re-Action - Illusions.’ The dreamy synths of ‘Oleo Strut’ by Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company were already a revelation on ‘Stem/Long Stem,’ but then Shadow gives us the scratch, then erasure, then organ of ‘Organ Donor.’
For here now comes the undulating keys of Italo-disco electro maestro Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Tears,’ a whirling madness that calls to mind the destruction of Neo-Tokyo in the climax to Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. The drums of Tim and Bill’s ‘Someone’ and the soulful hollers of Anthony Mitchell on Samson and Delilah’s ‘There’s a DJ in Your Town,’ gives it that underlying, unstoppable funk. An "Extended Overhaul” version would come out a year later on his High Noon single, using the prog electro of Supersister’s motor-rev-ing ‘Judy Goes On Holiday,’ a Dutch gem from 1972.
‘Why Hip-Hop Sucks in ‘96’ follows, again ‘There’s a DJ in Your Town’ scratching us forward or backward or wherever we might now be marooned. The shift between these sonic worlds is often smooth and silent on Endtroducing….. However, the scratch, which slowly erases the grooves in a vinyl record, creates fissures that through which we can exit and enter. So comes the glorious synths and fretless groove of Cleo McNett’s ‘Snap’ from 1982’s Let the Music Guide You. Priceless. Riposte to the G-funk bluster of 1996? Or a self-ironic stealth maneuver?
Transmission 1, 2, 3….. ‘Midnight in a Perfect World’ and ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 1 (Blue Sky Revisit)’ bookend the last movement like great build-up and come down scenes in an epic movie. Like the foreshadowing of any great narrative, he uses elements of Pekka Pohjola’s ‘Sekoilu Seestyy,’ Meredith Monk’s ‘Dolmen Music’ and David Axelrod’s ‘The Human Abstract’ as leitmotifs that he brings back into focus. Baraka’s ‘Sower of Seeds’ gives these album echoes a healing divine center, with Axelrod’s piano giving ‘Midnight’ the clear emotion of a heartfelt melody.
‘Blue Sky Revisit’ is the album’s gentle coda. Shadow had exerted himself greatly for the original What Does Your Soul Look Like E.P., and here his journey returns him back home as he decelerates into ‘Pt. 1,’ but altered. The bluesy ‘Voice of the Saxophone’ by the Heath Brothers gives it a deep smokey soul as Shadow double-loops the sax from different sections, folding them over each other to give it a deeper resonance. Carefully hand-picking drum hits and fills from David Young’s ‘Joe Splivingates,’ he pairs Shawn Phillips’ longing vocals from ‘All Our Love’ with Irene Kral’s ‘Star Eyes,’ serenaded by Gianni Nazzaro’s ‘C’era Gia’ — lamenting lost love in Italian — while science fiction ambience from The Alan Parsons Project gives it effervescence.
Concluding Shadow’s debut album, ‘Transmission 3’ tunes back into the tachyon messages broadcast from the year “1-9-9-9” from Prince of Darkness — “This is not a dream…This is not a dream…” — followed by a sample of actor Carel Struycken as The Giant in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, repeating, “It is happening again!” It is both creepy and yet somehow inspiring because it rings true with our experience and the loopy spiraling DNA of Endtroducing….., reminding us of nature’s cosmic rhythms, while reflecting life’s mortal prisms — for most of these artists were once forgotten.*****
In the years that followed Endtroducing….., crate-digging culture emanated far and wide. Shadow did not ignite the obsession. But he did greatly accelerate it. Other DJs and artists played crucial roles in the rise of digging. DJ Premier had greatly inspired Shadow with his Beats that Collected Dust series, and his seminal work with Guru as Gang Starr. DJ Krush — who makes the most striking appearance in Pray’s Scratch, fluidly scratching and sliding a shakuhachi flute over New Flesh for Old’s ‘186,000 Miles’ — brought Japanese jazz and wabi sabi aesthetics to the fore. While Lucas McFadden AKA Cut Chemist would anchor the LA hip-hop supergroup Jurassic 5.
In 1999, Cut Chemist and Shadow would up the game with their stone-cold, deep cutting 45s mix CD, Brainfreeze. Pray’s 2001 film was something of a culmination for this alternative hip-hop culture wave. Bay Area scratch-wizards like Mixmaster Mike, QBert, and their Invisible Skratch Pickles group toured the world; the SoleSides and Quannum crews, which included the likes of Blackilicious, Lyrics Born, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop hip-hop historian Jeff Chang, and soul-funkers Poets of Rhythm were riding high as darlings of a new global beat society; in LA were Stones Throw — Madlib’s Quasimoto and Yesterdays New Quintet, Peanut Butter Wolf — and the Valley’s Styles of Beyond; and in NYC, the X-Ecutioners and the Rawkus roster.
England seethed with its own hip hop and trip hop talent, from Bristol’s Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, to Manchester’s Grand Central Records, Andy Votel, Rae & Christian and Aim, Hull’s Pork Recordings and Fila Brazillia, London’s Coldcut and Ninja Tune crew, Morcheeba, and Mo’ Wax’s RPM, Luke Vibert, and Attica Blues. In France, there was DJ Cam, La Funk Mob, and Kid Loco, and of course the banlieu and African stylings of MC Solaar, IAM and their many followings. In Germany, there was Terranova and Jazzanova, by way of Kosma, and of course Austria’s Kruder & Dorfmeister with their own ‘High Noon,’ and into Tosca and Peace Orchestra.
It was a hip hop or trip hop renaissance, whatever the semantics. The craze for memories lost and found was perhaps best symbolized in the image of a massive shipping container in the Southern California desert near Joshua Tree. There a legendary goldmine of vinyl dreams was to be found, a trove of 45s from old decommissioned jukeboxes from across the Southwest. To the very edge of civilization and beyond, dreamers searched the landscape for the sublime.
In the rain shadows and time shadows, still lived a world full of possibility. Endtroducing….. showed everyone there was something vital we had lost along the way from 7” vinyl 45s to 12” vinyl 33s, to CDs, to MP3s. In those caves and deserts, what Davis thought of as sonic shadows — the source of his timeless name — nothing captured his shadow-play better than the album’s climax, ‘Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain’ — a kind of kiss between California and England through the medium of music, back from the Pacific and across the Atlantic — from the New World to the Old World.
In so many ways, it was an unlikely journey. For one, Davis was White. But he found in Dan the Automator, Lyrics Born, Gift of Gab, and others, a multicultural family of hip hop missionaries. He had great mentors like Dave “Funken” Klein, who gave him a chance because of his passion and whom Shadow thanks profusely in the album’s liner notes. And Lavelle, his British music champion who believed in him and gave Endtroducing….. a platform, Shadow would never forget, even after the Mo’Wax visionary pushed him too far. Years later, Shadow would come to his aid. Which illustrates the kind of person Davis is — for ‘Napalm Brain’ is his peace offering.
Another miracle, it is arguably Shadow’s greatest song. It is moving and thrilling, starting with a bizarro sample from the 1986 movie, The Aurora Encounter, starring Jack Elam who welcomes and befriends an alien from outer space, his “little buddy” who enjoys his “Dr. Neptune’s Delicious Elixir.” The scene set in small-town Aurora, Texas, based on a legendary and alleged 1897 UFO incident — the drums kick in. Shadow’s most ambitious composition on the album, it shifts tempos thrice, and syncopates with a light touch, rendered by some of his best drum programming.
“On a song like ‘Napalm Brain,’ I don’t think anybody’s ever taken drums and made them go from 4/4 to 7/8 to 3/4 to 5/4 and back to 4/4 in the span of like a minute,” he explained to Cross. “I can tell you my whole concept of progression is based on a Fixx record. This one song, called ‘Deeper,’ off The Streets of Fire soundtrack. I put it on a tape eleven years ago — I remember buggin’ out because it sounded like Uncle Jam’s Army done by a rock band. I remember thinking, ‘Damn, this shit has a perfect logical progression, every single next bar is exactly what I want to hear after the last one.’”
‘Deeper And Deeper,’ by the same New Wave synth band that did the classic ‘Red Skies At Night’ and ‘Stand or Fall,’ is yet one more corner of Shadow’s psyche, The Streets of Fire and The Aurora Encounter both representing cultural dreams that were ripe for redemption. The kid from sleepy Davis, who no doubt caught these films on HBO and TV re-runs — both were rotated over and over in the mid-1980s — would perceive these derivations — these shadows — of Flashdance and E.T., and work magic back into the tragic. His stroke of genius? Burt Reynold’s 1976 Gator.
The famed actor’s directorial debut, Gator too was a failure. Except it had a bittersweet cue in its score composed by Charles Bernstein, the ‘Moment of Truth/Ghetto Shakedown,’ that Shadow perfectly countered with the electric guitar scythes of Australia’s Daly-Wilson Big Band on ‘Space Odyssey - 2001,’ from their live album On Tour. It’s incredible not just because it all fits like it was meant to be, but because of the intense emotions it stirs, something miraculous that was never supposed to be. The way its little snares and taps lift — flirting with, and then elevating, and blessing — the polyrhythmic unity of its skittering trajectory.
There is the rock, soul, funk and hip hop — from the sounds of T.Rex to the righteous rap of Percy P. about “napalm!” on ‘Let the Homicides Begin’ to the bass line of The Fantastic Epic’s ‘Fun and Funk (Part II)’ — and the free jazz psychedelia and cries of Sonny Sharrock’s ‘27th Day’ and the high chimes of Rinlew Allstars’ ‘Yo Mama.’ And yet, even so, Bernstein’s ‘Moment of Truth’ and his ‘Ghetto Shakedown’ shakes us loose from the cares and the traumas of yesterday, today and tomorrow. How so? Christgau hit it on the nose. It flows. And it swings. For here, Shadow lets in the syncopated flight of London’s drum ‘n’ bass, hovering and dancing, like a kite.
Scattered. Ba-Bomb. The way the bass wobbles the knees, like raindrops down windshield glass, little pings and bounces at the bottom of the seas, the strings — oh the strings of Bernstein — strafing and stretching and strengthening your tired soul, an encounter with the end of the road. Float. Fly. Skip. Drift. Dig. Deep. Defy. Rise.
From his own aurora encounter, Shadow guided us from ‘Rapper’s Delight’ all the way to Endtroducing….. In 2021, Shadow talked to radio DJ Zane Lowe about how he retains the belief, his faith, in the “ancient voices” that can speak to us and then come through us in moments of truth, that “God frequency that jazz musicians talk about.”
In The Aurora Encounter, the little alien comes in peace for all mankind but is faced with suspicion and fear. He saves three girls caught in a collapsing cave — and then is called to the center of town where he is shot by a Texas Ranger. He falls back into his UFO and meets his fiery end when he crashes it into a big water tower. His human friends, including the little girls, mourn him, his spirit-gem rising up into the sky.
“What I would like people to feel,” Shadow told Cross, “is that their horizons were broadened as far as what they felt hip-hop was about, and I hope that they would feel that they had gone on an emotional journey, and feel wiser. You know even watching a sad movie can be really therapeutic because they really clench your emotions and ring’ em out, you feel relieved.” And recovered. And remembered. And reborn.
Upon the release of Endtroducing….., the UK press went bananas. The New Musical Express declared Shadow was the “Jimi Hendrix of the sampler.” A few months later, back in his native land, American publications also began to go agog. For Shadow, it was a dissonant moment, the high praise in London, where he became a kind of god, revered in many ways like Hendrix was revered there in the ‘60s — both Western cowboys in their own way — for they found their artistic voice far from London.
The album cover, a photo by Cross, reveals this distance in stark terms, showing Shadow’s friends, Xavier Mosley, AKA Chief Xcel of Blackilicious, and Tsutomo Shimiura, AKA Lyrics Born, digging through record bins in Sacramento. A bit philosophical in tone, the image captures the hunting and gathering of sonic sustenance in a world awash in commercial dynamite and detritus. Like the interweaved patterns of an Escher artwork, little worlds echo without end. Telegraphing the gaze of the resurrector, we see a path through its maze.
And yet, that escape faced something of a backlash. As he told Lowe, even compatriots of the Bay Area hip hop scene threw him some shade. He got some sideway glances over the years from East Coast hip hop legends like Pete Rock. For some, it was “corny” or “just samples” or “not real hip hop.” He even took dings from some of his heroes like DJ Premier and Large Professor, who acknowledged his talent but said it was too “atmospheric” or that they weren’t fans of it. Even so, Shadow held his ground. He would simply point out he wasn’t trying to be anyone but himself.
And over time, its impact was immense. Flying Lotus described it as life changing. Questlove even shared that it changed how he thought about drums and beats. Mos Def and Talib Kweli declared it as “revolutionary,” and Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA said it took sampling to a “new dimension.” Andre 3000, KRS-One, MF Doom, Nas — all loved it. Pharrell Williams said it would still be relevant and innovative a 100 years on. But perhaps Black Thought gave Shadow the highest compliment: Endtroducing..... changed the game, he said. It showed that hip-hop could be experimental and boundary-pushing while still being soulful and authentic — the music of Davis.
That authenticity would face a serious test two years later. Mo’ Wax was on a tear. Lavelle was in hyperdrive, channelling Shadow’s creativity into his biggest concept, UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction, an album of massive ambition, enlisting Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft, Kool G Rap, Badly Drawn Boy and the Beastie Boys’ Mike D — “I got a little story to tell / With DJ Shadow and James Lavelle / It starts right now in history…” A high watermark of the British indie crossover wave, Psyence Fiction was also a mixed bag, at turns revelatory and at others turgid, ultimately rupturing the unique partnership between Davis and Lavelle.******
Picking up the pieces and putting it back together, his second album The Private Press would indeed impress: the elegiac songs ‘Six Days,’ ‘You Can’t Go Home’ and ‘Blood on the Motorway’ proved he would always be able to connect. Subsequent albums continued to push the envelope of not just hip hop but the adventure in music. Yet somehow Entroducing….. still overshadows all of it. Its memory blazes brightest.
“You’re looking through all these records and it’s sort of like a big pile of broken dreams in a way,” he told Pray in a moment of reflection, gazing over the dungeon drifts of his vinyl nirvana. As an instrument of dreams, of a heartbreaking endless universe, he knew their gleam. “Almost none of these artists still have a career.”
Miles upon miles of music’s unforgettable power. That’s the humble insight that reconnects us with the eternal — the gift of Shadow’s light. And that asks us to remember and to rediscover — and to dig free our deepest truest life.
Track Listing:
1. Best Foot Forward
2. Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt
3. The Number Song
4. Changeling
5. Transmission 1
6. What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)
7. Untitled / Stem/Long Stem
8. Transmission 2
9. Mutual Slump
10. Organ Donor
11. Why Hip Hop Sucks In ‘96
12. Midnight In A Perfect World
13. Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain
14. What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 - Blue Sky Revisit)
15. Transmission 3
*‘Building Steam with a Grain of Salt’ samples George Marsh on Drums: Interviewed by Terry McGovern, from 1974. Marsh is an American drummer who is known for his experimental jazz and jazz fusion compositions and performances.
**Lavelle did not actually just show up out of nowhere and knock on DJ Shadow’s door. To be clear, it is a figure of speech. Davis actually was expecting him and picked him up at the airport, playing David Axelrod in his car, part of a catalyst of their bond. As noted, Lavelle was well known in hip hop and rare groove circles because of his column. He was also at the heart of London’s music scene, teaming up with Gilles Peterson (of Talkin’ Loud fame) on the club night and after-hours That’s How It Is.
As Peterson later explained, their collaboration was “joining the dots, connecting things. It was a real mad mix of people.” In other words, Lavelle was an essential factor in DJ Shadow’s rise, something Shadow acknowledges often. So it was somewhat strange yet logical that Lavelle would give Shadow his big break.
***’Best Foot Forward’ samples at least 12 different records in its 45 second span: such as Stanley Clarke’s ‘Concerto for Jazz Rock/Orchestra (Part II and Part III)’ — the “errowwwwhhhnn!” synth arc — Sparky Dee feat. Red Alert’s ‘He’s My DJ (Red Alert)’ — the “Guess who’s coming?” bit — and The Beastie Boys’ ‘Party’s Gettin’ Rough’ — “You’re just fessin’ man! I don’t even want to hear about it!” — a trip through time.
For more up-for-it “hip hop you don’t stop!” attitude, he scratches through Stezo’s ‘It’s My Turn,’ Divine Sounds’ ‘Do or Die Bed Sty,’ Kool G Rap & DJ Polo’s ‘Poison,’ Jeru the Damaja’s ‘You Can’t Stop the Prophet,’ Jazzy Jay feat. Russell Simmons’ ‘Cold Chillin’ in the Spot’ and Master of Ceremony’s ‘Dynamite,’ like turning a radio dial.
Lifers Group’s ‘Real Deal (Shadow Mix)’ — ‘Nineteen nineties!” — and appropriately, DJ Shadow’s own ‘Entropy’ — “DJ Shadow!” — slips in his own history, panache and sui generis, which gives a nice wink to the “shadow” image of his persona.
Lastly, at the very beginning of ‘Best Foot Forward,’ we get that more lighthearted radio host vibe, leavening the whole affair with humor, a station identification for the CHUM Group, a Canadian media company founded in Toronto, Ontario.
****Boards of Canada would use radio interference sounds and fictional public service announcements on songs like ‘One Very Important Thought’ and ‘Telepath,’ helping build up the mythology around their music. Other artists were doing similar things before Boards of Canada and DJ Shadow, like The Orb and The KLF. However, DJ Shadow’s ‘Transmissions’ were early to bringing a more eerie nostalgia.
*****Of course, Shadow sampled many artists without their consent or knowledge. He did legally clear and license some of the samples he used on Endtroducing….. as evidenced in the credits in the album’s liner notes. However, many were also too difficult to track down, with many owner entities dissolved or even deceased. Everything has changed in recent years with the Internet. That more stealth compositional creativity through sampling is near impossible today.
Shadow has talked about the ethics of sampling, and it is still part of an ongoing debate about art, stealing and synthesizing — that is, what is original when nothing is fully original? i.e. Faulkner’s “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Also, I would be remiss if I did not credit Karl Boltzmann, a Canadian composer, for his excellent deconstructions of Shadow’s sampling on Endtroducing….. His videos are an indispensable window into Shadow’s process and sources.
******The chief tension that broke up Lavelle and Davis’ productive relationship was centered around writing credits for Psyence Fiction. While Lavelle was responsible for the overall concept, and arranging the collaborations, Davis constructed all of the music. Years later, he admitted that he could have been more tactful. However, Shadow felt that Lavelle went AWOL, leaving Davis to do the heavy lifting.
In some ways, it was the beginning of Lavelle wanting to be the artist, not just the talented A&R man, but he was too removed from the actual music-making process without a clear enough way to make the transition. Psyence Fiction got some criticism at the time for being very much a label owner’s vision, versus a music artist’s genuine creative expression. The truth is that it was somewhere in between. That breakdown doesn’t diminish its legacy. It prefigured many pop fusions in the years to come.