DJ Shadow

DJ Shadow

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  • Endtroducing.....
    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.”

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About DJ Shadow

Known for his innovative use of samples, legendary DJ and producer DJ Shadow has left an indelible mark on hip-hop and electronic music. • Joshua Davis got his start as DJ Shadow hosting a radio show on the campus station while attending the University of California, Davis. A copy of his self-released 1991 mixtape Hip-Hop Reconstruction from the Ground Up made its way to the hip-hop magazine The Source, which featured him in its “Unsigned Hype” column that June. • Sampling obscure jazz, soul, funk, and experimental records, DJ Shadow began remixing songs for the Hollywood Records imprint Hollywood BASIC in the early ’90s and was involved with the underground label Solesides. • When Hollywood BASIC folded, Shadow jumped to the UK label Mo’ Wax, which released his 1993 single “In/Flux.” • Considered a hip-hop landmark, DJ Shadow’s 1996 debut album, Endtroducing….., entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the “first album made completely from samples.” • After the singles compilation Preemptive Strike in 1998 and a pair of mixtapes with DJ and producer Cut Chemist in 1999 and 2001, DJ Shadow released his second studio LP, The Private Press, in 2002. The album went Top 10 in the UK and reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart in the US. • In 2003, DJ Shadow teamed with Rage Against the Machine singer Zack de la Rocha on the free single “March of Death” to protest the US invasion of Iraq. • DJ Shadow’s 2006 album The Outsider featured collaborations with musicians from the hyphy hip-hop scene in Oakland. Other guest artists included rapper Q-Tip, Chris James of the UK electronic group Stateless, and Kasabian guitarist Serge Pizzorno. • DJ Shadow split his 2019 double-album Our Pathetic Age between two halves: the “Instrumental Suite,” and the “Vocal Suite,” which includes contributions from Run the Jewels, Nas, Pharoahe Monch, De La Soul, and Wu-Tang Clan members Inspectah Deck, Ghostface Killah, and Raekwon.

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