Endtroducing.....

When Josh Davis (aka DJ Shadow) started out in the early ’90s, hip-hop didn’t have a place for him. First off, there was no MC. Then there was the presentation thing. “To be a club DJ at that time,” he tells Apple Music in 2021, “you had to have a certain panache that just wasn’t in me.” Hip-hop was social music, the soundtrack for barbecues and block parties, and the DJ, by extension, was the conjurer of a collective energy. Davis had spent the years leading up to 1996’s Endtroducing….. in the basement of a Sacramento record shop finding new life in what he later called a pile of broken dreams: His quest wasn’t social, it was existential. When he did try to play parties, he bombed anyway. “Nobody’s really dancing to Ultramagnetic MC’s,” he says. “They’re head-nod records. And those are the records I gravitated toward.”

Endtroducing…..’s liner notes put it like so: “This album reflects a lifetime of vinyl culture.” But it also presaged the hyperlinked world that came after, where narratives are built from fragments and histories are rewritten by putting disparate elements in conversation across time, place, and culture. At its core are the same drum breaks that have given hip-hop its spine since the ’70s, but the mood is mellow and reflective—as much a comment on the art form as a contribution to it. It’s as personal and intimate as any classic of ’70s folk. Only here, the subject is how much one man loves music. “In my own kind of delusion, I thought, ‘Well, maybe I have a voice to offer,’” he says. “Maybe I can contribute and amplify some of the things about the music and the culture that I feel like had gone by the wayside.”

That Davis was embraced first by English audiences makes sense: Not only did his self-presentation eschew the regionalism of American rap and his sample programming pick up on the broken beats of UK garage and drum ’n’ bass (“Napalm Brain / Scatter Brain,” “Stem / Long Stem”), but his attitude synced with a generation of techno and dance producers transforming extroverted music into something you could take home with you on headphones: The Dark Side of the Moon for people raised on Gang Starr. And when its motifs recur—the organ of “Stem / Long Stem” and, later, “Organ Donor”; the “Transmission” interludes; the reprise of “What Does Your Soul Look Like”—it’s both as the connective tissue of a DJ set and images at the margins of a dream.

Rap’s revolutions were always cycling—Wu-Tang’s first album, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, the evolution from gangsta into the glossy, pop-friendly sound that dominated the late ’90s. But like Burial’s Untrue, Jamie xx’s In Colour, or any number of sample-based instrumental albums that came out in the decades after, Endtroducing….. captures a quiet voice outside the bustle of its genre—more eulogy than play-by-play. Davis’ metaphor for the record store basement isn’t just waxing poetic, it’s a gesture of remembrance for the people who gave their lives to their art knowing that they’d end up in the basement one day, too. “I want, again, in 2021 or 2022, to be able to sit down and be able to access that ancestor voice that speaks to all artists, you know what I mean?” he says. “That you can feel when it's not accessible, and you can feel when you don't have the passcode and you can’t get through.”