DJ Shadow Endtroducing - A 25th Anniversary Deconstruction
Cited as one of the best records of the nineties by most major music publications and included in Time Magazine’s list of greatest albums of all time, one of the keys to the resounding impact of DJ Shadow’s Entroducing can be found in the title of one of the album’s less substantial cuts, a 43 second interlude entitled “Why Hip Hop Sucks in ‘96”. It kind of did. While there were certainly a handful of classics released that year, the second half of the nineties saw the genre moving from the underground to the mainstream while selling out was considered a cardinal sin, and now issues of social justice were mentioned less frequently than the brand names of upmarket champagne. On the cusp of the Puff Daddy era of familiar crowd pleasing samples, Josh Davis offered an alternate path in the form of this melancholy collage of obscure records meticulously curated from the basement of the aptly named Rare Records in Sacramento, California, then immortalized on the iconic cover.
In terms of defining the trajectory of hip hop, the alternate path forged by this rapless rap record was no more able to overwhelm the commercial undeniability of emerging artists like Timbaland and Missy Elliot than the Dogme 95 purist filmmaking movement founded by Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier a year earlier was able to derail the big budget dominance of directors like Tony Scott and Michael Bay. More accurately, Endtroducing was a statement that hip hop was now universal, and that the production techniques once reserved for crafting beats for emcees to rhyme over could be employed in every facet of music. Any music detective would bag this album as evidence when trying to determine why Radiohead’s OK Computer sounds so much different than The Bends.
Noted by the Guinness Book of World records as the first record comprised entirely of samples, which was easier said than done before the age of digital music, his primitive setup of an Akai MPC60 sampler, a Technics SL-200 turntable, and an Alesis ADAT recorder was drastically more limited than what can now be accomplished on a laptop; but great artists often find their genius within the limitations forced upon them, which is why Steven Spielberg was able to do more with an unconvincing mechanical shark than whoever directed that movie where a CGI shark eats Samuel Jackson was able to do with a room full of computers.
The act of deconstructing the most dominant samples from Endtroducing into a continuous mix reveals that the hip hop pedicure with which this material was presented wasn’t the subject of the album, it was merely a lens through which to view what is essentially an intricately woven mix of plaintive progressive rock, folk, and free jazz. This effort to restore this source material to the fore attempts to get inside the head of the creator by shining a light on what drew him to the records he embraced. The result is a selection of mostly melancholy and introspective songs that seem to codify the depression Davis describes during this time in his life - the frenetic drums he added would then exemplify the exhilaration he must have felt while in the midst of creating an album that would irrevocably change the trajectory of music.
Track List
Jeremy Storch - I Feel a New Shadow
Baraka - Sower of Seeds
Pekka Pohjola - The Madness
Shawn Phillips - All Our Love
Ross - Discovery
Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
Nirvana (UK) - Love Suite
Jeremy Storch - I Feel a New Shadow
Billy Cobham - Funky Kind of Thing
Motherlode - Soft Shell
Pugh Rogefeldt - Love, Love, Love
DJ Shadow - Mutual Slump (Alternate Take)
Flying Island - The Vision and the Voice
David Axelrod - The Human Abstract
Heath Brothers - The Voice of the Saxophone
Osanna - Variazione II
Chaffey College Jazz Ensemble - Imagination Flight
Dennis Linde - Linde Manor
Gianni Nazzaro - C’era gia
Lexia - I Worship You
Tangerine Dream - Invisible Limits
Alan Parsons Project - Nucleus
Charles Bernstein - Moment of Truth/ Ghetto Shakedown
Signs of the Zodiac - Planetary Motivations
Kay Gardner - Inner Mood I
DJ Shadow - What Does You Soul Look Like (The Electric Adolescence Suite)
Song Exploder Podcast - Mutual Slump
Bjork - Possibly Maybe
DJ Shadow - Midnight In a Perfect World (Extended Version Excerpt)
DJ Shadow - Midnight In a Perfect World
Stanley Clarke - Concerto for Jazz/ Rock Orchestra (Part II)
DJ Shadow - Best Foot Forward (Alternate Version)
Bama the Village Poet - Social Narcotics
DJ Shadow - Soup
DJ Shadow - What Hip Hop Sucks in ‘96 (Alternate Version Excerpt)
DJ Shadow - Changeling (Original Demo)
The Troublenenck Brothers - Back to the Hip Hop (Acappella)
Run DMC - Run’s House (Excerpt)
Apple and Three Oranges - Free and Easy (Part One)
Frankie Seay & the Soul Riders - Soul Food
Song Exploder Podcast - Mutual Slump
DJ Shadow - Mutual Slump
DJ Shadow - Stem (Cops n’ Robbers Mix)
DJ Shadow - Organ Donor
DJ Shadow - Organ Donor (Extended Overhaul)
DJ Shadow - Red Bus Needs to Leave
DJ Shadow - Live Interview on XFM
Loudon Wainwright III - The Man Who Couldn’t Cry
DJ Shadow - Midnight In a Perfect World (Gift of Gab Mix)
DJ Shadow - What Does Your Soul Look Like (Blue Sky Revisit)
