DJ Shadow: URB Magazine, July 2006
By: Aidin Vaziri
After five quiet years and two traumatic life experiences, DJ Shadow returns as a new man with a new Sound.
It took Josh Davis not one but two near-death experiences to finally make the album he always wanted. The first happened late one night in London, about two years ago. The 32-year-old Californian producer known to the world as DJ Shadow had just made a club appearance and his British label, looking to save a few pence, hired one of the city’s unlicensed mini-cabs to drive him back to his hotel. Slumped in the backseat of the tiny car as it sped through London’s narrow, twisting streets, Davis noticed that his driver, most likely of dubious employment status, had nodded off. He watched as the car barrelled through a red light and a giant SUV came flying toward it from the side.
The next few seconds played out in slow motion: flashing headlights, blaring horns and broken glass. When it was all over, Davis was almost certain he would find himself in the middle of a horrible tangle of flesh and steel. Instead, he opened the side door of the car, got out and stepped away from the wreckage. “I was walking around after it happened, going ‘It could have been really bad, really bad,’” He recalls, “I wasn’t asleap. I saw us going through the light. I saw the other car coming.”
The extend of his physical injury was fairly minor – whiplash. But the accident shook him in other, more profound ways. Over the next few days its impact fully hit. “I just remember thinking, I walked away from this and if I have something I need to say and something I need to do, I just got to do it.”
Around the same time Davis had another matter of mortality on his mind. He had recently learned that his pregnant wife, Lisa, back home in Mill Valley – an affluent hippie town just north of San Francisco – was suffering from a rare, high risk complication called Monoamniotic that meant the fetuses of their twin girls were growing in the same sac and that they would most likely have to terminate one of them in utero.
The babies came out fine – two healthy girls, born at the end of 2004 – but the experience took everything out of him .”My mind was blown,” he says. “At that moment, nothing else mattered. For six months I was just determined that those babies be born healthy. I didn’t go into the studio. I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t do anything.
These two vens also set off an unlikely but obvious musical rebirth for DJ Shadow, inspired by a significant philosophical shift in the man behind the low-slung baseball cap: “Don’t play with it. Do it.”
Sitting in front of a wide flat-screen monitor at an upscale recording studio in one of the more treacherous alleys San Francisco’s South of Market district has to offer (two nights later someone will be murdered on the corner), Davis has his engineer, Count, bring up a handful of tracks that are in the final stages of production for his new studio album “The Outsider”.
As most people who have heard DJ Shadow’s radio-friendly first single, “3 freaks”featuring hyphtastic vocals by Bay Area rappers Keak da Sneak and Turf Talk, already know, this disc does not sound much like its introspective, sample-based predecessors. 2002’s “The Private Press” and 1996’s “Endtroducing”. Shadow has always had roots in hip-hop – just check his far- reaching collaboration with the Quannum and SoleSides crew – but it never sounded quite like this.Dressed in an ensemble of denim cargo pants and an oversized grey-and-black striped rugby shirt that makes him look like an eternal teenager, Davis leans back in his chair. “People assume a lot of things about me, “ he says. “But hip-hop is what I grew up on. People need to realize that. I liked rap before Public Enemy. I liked rap during Public Enemy. And I liked rap after Public Enemy. But back then I didn’t have to explain why I liked it. It was just, well, this is what’s happening. It’s hot, it’s fresh, it gives you that adrenaline rush. I like music that does that. “
As count brings up the new album’s set list on Pro Tools, the full extent of Davis’s renewed love for the music of his youth is revealed. A song called “Turf Dancing” features the Federation spitting raspy, raw rhymes over an old-school electro beat. Another, “Keep Em Close,” sees on of his familiar cinematic soundscapes give way to a barrage of gunshots and sirens punctuated by a dark, violent rap by another Bay Area rapper, Nump.
As for the headphone-wearing obsessives who latched onto Shadow after hearing the minimalist score to the award-winning film “Dark Days” or his work on the all-star “Psyence Fiction” Project by UNKLE, highlighted by the moody collaboration with Thom Yorke on the single “Rabbit in your headlights”, what are they going to make of these cuts? “They already got Rabbit In The Headlights, Davis shrugs.Count cues up more tracks. “Seeing Thangs” is laced with minor chord strings, heavenly choirs and machine-gun beats. It features David Banner blasting away at Bush and the CIA. With potent post-Katrina lyrics. “Erase You,” meanwhile, is a seven-minute stormer that matches soulful R&B beats with moody vocals by Chris James (Stateless).
What will the hip-hop kids lured in by “3 freaks” think of this? “Fuck ‘em, they’ll figure it out,” he blasts in a mischievous grin breaking at the corner of his typically impassive lips. The playback contrinues. James resurfaces on another song. “This is the pop tune, ” Davis says of “You made it”, a bittersweet island ballad with a big, glorious chorus. On “The Tiger”, the British dance-rock band Kasabian add their skeletal, menacing guitars to the producers’ typically exotic belly dance rhythms. “Enuff” once again sees a shift in gears. It’s a straight-up party track built around an obscure Gregory Hynes sample, and featuring Lateef and Q-Tip trading verses, with the latter blurting out the line nobody expected to hear: “DJ Shadow, let’s go!”
It’s hard to imaging anything further removed from the detailed, wilfully focused musical narratives of Shadow’s last two studio albums than “The Outsider”. Then again, this is the album people should have expected from a guy who, by his own admission, owns three large storage spaces full of records….and then some.
The album is called “The Outsider” because I don’t fit in anywhere”. Davis says, swerving his chair toward the monitor. “I don’t dabble in all these different types of music, I love all these different types of music. There’s too much good stuff out there to limit yourself.”
The last track aired tonight is called “This Time (I’m doing it my way)”, which truly sounds like a lost ‘70s relic, complete with wah-wah guitars, Love Boat strings and soft disco beats. In a way, it could be Shadow’s new theme song, ousting the studied “Midnight in a perfect world” in favour of something significantly more flamboyant, funky and – gasp! Fun.
“All I want to articulate to people is I’m not who you think I am, “Davis says. “I know that sounds like some Britney Spears bullshit but when I go online and read some of the stuff my own fans think about me, it’s like “Wow, do they really have that narrow a view of what I do?” the hardest thing for people to grasp is that you can love something and move on with your life but not fall out of love with that thing. I’m not about what I was 10 years ago. “
The first time DJ Shadow appeared on the over of URB, close to when Endtroducing was released, the cover tagline repeated the title of a provocative interlude on the breakthrough album called “Why Hip-Hop Sucks in ‘96” The 30-second snippet didn’t rile people so much because of its punchline “it’s the money” but because the music surrounding it contrasted so sharply with everything else that was going on at the time.
Davis asserts the statement was posed at a very specific moment. “it was directed at the underground hip-hop community to say ‘Why are you so hung up on G-Funk and this and that?’” he says. “None of those conditions exist now. There is no more underground hip-hop scene. There is no more G-Funk. I’m not interested in the genre, but I do listen to contemporary hip-hop.
We’re back at his Mill Valley home, a big pink place that sits consiciously at the end of a busy street, talking in the studio he built in the garage downstairs. He moved here in 1999 from his hometown of Davis because of its close proximity to Village Records, an overcrowded record store just a few miles away. As you might expect, his studio looks a lot like a small radiostation. The walls are lined with the shelves bulging with vinyl. There are stacks of records all over the floor, on the couch and even more in the bathroom. “This is where I keep all the stuff I’ve still got to listen to”, Davis says, surveying the heap in the tub. Most of the 12” that crown the piles are the latest hyphy platters by the likes of E-40, Rick Rock and Federation.
Davis got into hip-hop early on, lured by the low-budget videos he saw on a local independent television station y the likes of Run-DMC, the World Famous Supreme Team and Grand Master Flash. By 1984, he had a Sears combination turntable, radio tuner and dual cassette deck, which he used as a primitive sampling device to make his strange sound collages. All other hobbies there quickly cast aside. Three years later he was DJing at the local college radio station. While attending the University of California, Davis, he met people who shared his passion – Jeff Chang (aka DJ Zen), Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab (members of Blackalicious) and Lateef and Lyrics Born (the duo Latyrx). They formed their own record label, SoleSides and put out a 17minute DJ Shadow track called “Entropy”. One of their cassettes somehow made its way into the hands of Mo’Wax record owner James Lavelle in London. In 1993, his imprint released another single, “In/Flux” that put the bedroom mixter’s name at the forefront of the new cerebral dance movement. The song also laid blueprint for DJ Shadow’s 1996 masterpiece “Endtroducing…” which with its mix of liquid instrumental samples, slow beats and sophisticated scratching, made Davis an uneasy star – one who often attemted to disguise his face in photographs and conducted most of his interviews in the safte haven of a used record store. The album sold moe than a million copies worldwide and still regularly crops up on critical best-of lists.
With his involvement in several side projects, including “Brainfreeze”, Quannum and the UNKLE album, plus a singles set called Preemtive Strike, it took Davis six years to deliver an official follow-up, “The Private Press” In some ways, it was even more inventive than the debut, gathering most of his source material from one-of-a-kind discs made in ancient public recording booths. But the critical and commercial reaction was cool, mostly people couldn’t help but compare it to its genre-busting predecessor.
“That frustrated me because it’s like Steven Spielberg having Raiders of the lost Ark compared to 1941” Davis says. At the time The Private Press came out I didn’t feel like I was feeling a whole lot of pressure. But in retrospect I was under enormous pressure. Maybe my mistake was that it wasn’t different enough”His personal rap renaissance happened shortly after the second album came out, when his studio was still located in San Francisco’s Mission district. The hour-long daily commute gave Davis an opportunity to rediscover the mix shows on the Bay Area’s big urban radio station KMEL. He started hearing cuts that blew his mind by local producers like Rick Rock, Droop-E and Traxxamillion.
“I started listening to it again and I while I was listening to it I discovered songs like “White T-Shirt, Blue Jeans and Nikes’ by Keak, a lot of Rick Rock stuff basically, Federation’s hyphy” Davis recalls with uncharacteristic excitement. “I was like, now this sounds good!” it isn’t any kind of grand plot. This is the shit I’m into”When they first heard “3 freaks” many DJ Shadow’s longtime fans on his official message board conjectured that the grimy, heavily synthesized track wasjust ananomaly, a misguided phase that would eventually pass. That clearly wasn’t the case.
“I just threw that song out to see what would happen” Davis says. “What happened was I was getting my music played on urban radio. I can’t tell you what a good feeling that is. It’s a tribute to a genre of music that shaped everything that I am. To have the video alongside 50 cent, for that to finally have broken down a little it, it’s done wonders for my confidence musically. So I go, I’m going to do another one”
He smiles, “I can honestly say, sitting here right now, I didn’t have any pressure on this album because to some degree people have written me off. “
Work on “The Outsider” was problematic even before the accident in London. In America, Davis’ career had been thrown into limbo thanks to a series of record company personnel changes and mergers that left him without a label to comfortably call home. He had wasted a good chunk of time working on Zach de la Rocha’s much-anticipated solo album, only to find out that the former Rage Against The Machine singer had basically flown the coop and that the material would never see the light of day. Meanwhile, his wrists where in chronic, crippling pain following an extensive world tour.
“It was a really hard moment,” Davis says. “I remember just yelling at everybody and not getting any respinse back. That’s when I realized, you know, I need to take a long break.”
Most frustratingly, he wasn’t getting anywhere with his new ideas. Davis felt he was merely repeating himself just for the sakeof keeping his fans happy.
He decided to take the summer off, driving along the Canadian Rockies. His intention was to go all the way to Nova Scotia and down and around, but instead he met up with a friend. Together they spent six weeks in Ohio tracking down James Brown’s former bandleader, J.C. Davis, with the intention of reissuing his music on Shadow’s own Cali-Tex label (the imprint has also put out a 45 by Portlang, Oregon’s The Cavaliers Unlimited and a double CD by Mickey and the Soul Generation). When Davis finally returned to the Bay Area, he felt a fresh start was in order. He moved his studio back into the garage of his Mill Valley home and decided he didn’t want to make music on the MPC sampler anymore, which is how he had been working for the past 15 years. He embraced Pro Tools, bought some key-boards and took time to properly learn MIDI. Instead of relying solely on samples, he hired musicians and full orchestras when necessary. He also brought in nearly a dozen vocalists.
“I started listening to it again and I while I was listening to it I discovered songs like “White T-Shirt, Blue Jeans and Nikes’ by Keak, a lot of Rick Rock stuff basically, Federation’s hyphy” Davis recalls with uncharacteristic excitement. “I was like, now this sounds good!” it isn’t any kind of grand plot. This is the shit I’m into”When they first heard “3 freaks” many DJ Shadow’s longtime fans on his official message board conjectured that the grimy, heavily synthesized track wasjust ananomaly, a misguided phase that would eventually pass. That clearly wasn’t the case.
“I just threw that song out to see what would happen” Davis says. “What happened was I was getting my music played on urban radio. I can’t tell you what a good feeling that is. It’s a tribute to a genre of music that shaped everything that I am. To have the video alongside 50 cent, for that to finally have broken down a little it, it’s done wonders for my confidence musically. So I go, I’m going to do another one”
He smiles, “I can honestly say, sitting here right now, I didn’t have any pressure on this album because to some degree people have written me off. “
Work on “The Outsider” was problematic even before the accident in London. In America, Davis’ career had been thrown into limbo thanks to a series of record company personnel changes and mergers that left him without a label to comfortably call home. He had wasted a good chunk of time working on Zach de la Rocha’s much-anticipated solo album, only to find out that the former Rage Against The Machine singer had basically flown the coop and that the material would never see the light of day. Meanwhile, his wrists where in chronic, crippling pain following an extensive world tour.
“It was a really hard moment,” Davis says. “I remember just yelling at everybody and not getting any respinse back. That’s when I realized, you know, I need to take a long break.”
Most frustratingly, he wasn’t getting anywhere with his new ideas. Davis felt he was merely repeating himself just for the sakeof keeping his fans happy.
He decided to take the summer off, driving along the Canadian Rockies. His intention was to go all the way to Nova Scotia and down and around, but instead he met up with a friend. Together they spent six weeks in Ohio tracking down James Brown’s former bandleader, J.C. Davis, with the intention of reissuing his music on Shadow’s own Cali-Tex label (the imprint has also put out a 45 by Portlang, Oregon’s The Cavaliers Unlimited and a double CD by Mickey and the Soul Generation). When Davis finally returned to the Bay Area, he felt a fresh start was in order. He moved his studio back into the garage of his Mill Valley home and decided he didn’t want to make music on the MPC sampler anymore, which is how he had been working for the past 15 years. He embraced Pro Tools, bought some key-boards and took time to properly learn MIDI. Instead of relying solely on samples, he hired musicians and full orchestras when necessary. He also brought in nearly a dozen vocalists.
“Basically, I came back with nothing unter my belt and completely changed the way I think about music, make music, everything,” Davis recalls.
On February 2, 2005, Davis wrote in his studio log: “Back in the mix”
That was the day he was able to put all the drama behind him and resumed work on “The Outsider”. When he surveyed what he had done during the previous year – tons of stuff that will never see the light of day – he realized he just wasn’t at that place anymore. “You reach 30 and you go, I have nothing to lose,” he says. “I’ve never based my happiness on wealth or chart position. When I put out “Endtroducing….” I wanted to ruffle feathers. I don’t want my music to just be played in some fucking hair salon because it sounds edgy. I want to drive people out of the shop. I don’t want to make music that’s safe.
At the Soma studio, Davis and Count are discussing the near impossible task of sequencing such a diverse album. But Davis is confident. “It’s all in the mix,” he says. And somehow that phrase, with its evocation of harmony and balance, always seems to be the solution.
The video for “3 freaks” features grinding stippers, pimping luxury cars and slick-looking gangsters getting roughed up. DJ Shadow makes a brief appearance at the end but even from that it’s obvious he’s no longer the reclusive producer dodging the spotlight. “I don’t want to be caught with all these restrictions of sustaining a legacy,” he says. “I don’t care. People will either embrace it or reject it. But I’m confident” He rises out of his seat. “To be honest, I would much rather KMEL embrace ‘3 Freaks’ than the rock stations,” he says. “I mean, I was driving in Vallejo the other day and I was at a stop sign and these kids were crossing the thing going ‘Turf Talk and Keak da Sneak.’ That’s what you want. I don’t want dudes in their 30s sitting around pondering the significance of this or that. Fuck the dumb shit. I want kids to be singing my music.
Via: URB Video Interview, July 2006 Issue
By: Aidin Vaziri
After five quiet years and two traumatic life experiences, DJ Shadow returns as a new man with a new Sound.
It took Josh Davis not one but two near-death experiences to finally make the album he always wanted. The first happened late one night in London, about two years ago. The 32-year-old Californian producer known to the world as DJ Shadow had just made a club appearance and his British label, looking to save a few pence, hired one of the city’s unlicensed mini-cabs to drive him back to his hotel. Slumped in the backseat of the tiny car as it sped through London’s narrow, twisting streets, Davis noticed that his driver, most likely of dubious employment status, had nodded off. He watched as the car barrelled through a red light and a giant SUV came flying toward it from the side.
The next few seconds played out in slow motion: flashing headlights, blaring horns and broken glass. When it was all over, Davis was almost certain he would find himself in the middle of a horrible tangle of flesh and steel. Instead, he opened the side door of the car, got out and stepped away from the wreckage. “I was walking around after it happened, going ‘It could have been really bad, really bad,’” He recalls, “I wasn’t asleap. I saw us going through the light. I saw the other car coming.”
The extend of his physical injury was fairly minor – whiplash. But the accident shook him in other, more profound ways. Over the next few days its impact fully hit. “I just remember thinking, I walked away from this and if I have something I need to say and something I need to do, I just got to do it.”
Around the same time Davis had another matter of mortality on his mind. He had recently learned that his pregnant wife, Lisa, back home in Mill Valley – an affluent hippie town just north of San Francisco – was suffering from a rare, high risk complication called Monoamniotic that meant the fetuses of their twin girls were growing in the same sac and that they would most likely have to terminate one of them in utero.
The babies came out fine – two healthy girls, born at the end of 2004 – but the experience took everything out of him .”My mind was blown,” he says. “At that moment, nothing else mattered. For six months I was just determined that those babies be born healthy. I didn’t go into the studio. I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t do anything.
These two vens also set off an unlikely but obvious musical rebirth for DJ Shadow, inspired by a significant philosophical shift in the man behind the low-slung baseball cap: “Don’t play with it. Do it.”
Sitting in front of a wide flat-screen monitor at an upscale recording studio in one of the more treacherous alleys San Francisco’s South of Market district has to offer (two nights later someone will be murdered on the corner), Davis has his engineer, Count, bring up a handful of tracks that are in the final stages of production for his new studio album “The Outsider”.
As most people who have heard DJ Shadow’s radio-friendly first single, “3 freaks”featuring hyphtastic vocals by Bay Area rappers Keak da Sneak and Turf Talk, already know, this disc does not sound much like its introspective, sample-based predecessors. 2002’s “The Private Press” and 1996’s “Endtroducing”. Shadow has always had roots in hip-hop – just check his far- reaching collaboration with the Quannum and SoleSides crew – but it never sounded quite like this.Dressed in an ensemble of denim cargo pants and an oversized grey-and-black striped rugby shirt that makes him look like an eternal teenager, Davis leans back in his chair. “People assume a lot of things about me, “ he says. “But hip-hop is what I grew up on. People need to realize that. I liked rap before Public Enemy. I liked rap during Public Enemy. And I liked rap after Public Enemy. But back then I didn’t have to explain why I liked it. It was just, well, this is what’s happening. It’s hot, it’s fresh, it gives you that adrenaline rush. I like music that does that. “
As count brings up the new album’s set list on Pro Tools, the full extent of Davis’s renewed love for the music of his youth is revealed. A song called “Turf Dancing” features the Federation spitting raspy, raw rhymes over an old-school electro beat. Another, “Keep Em Close,” sees on of his familiar cinematic soundscapes give way to a barrage of gunshots and sirens punctuated by a dark, violent rap by another Bay Area rapper, Nump.
As for the headphone-wearing obsessives who latched onto Shadow after hearing the minimalist score to the award-winning film “Dark Days” or his work on the all-star “Psyence Fiction” Project by UNKLE, highlighted by the moody collaboration with Thom Yorke on the single “Rabbit in your headlights”, what are they going to make of these cuts? “They already got Rabbit In The Headlights, Davis shrugs.Count cues up more tracks. “Seeing Thangs” is laced with minor chord strings, heavenly choirs and machine-gun beats. It features David Banner blasting away at Bush and the CIA. With potent post-Katrina lyrics. “Erase You,” meanwhile, is a seven-minute stormer that matches soulful R&B beats with moody vocals by Chris James (Stateless).
What will the hip-hop kids lured in by “3 freaks” think of this? “Fuck ‘em, they’ll figure it out,” he blasts in a mischievous grin breaking at the corner of his typically impassive lips. The playback contrinues. James resurfaces on another song. “This is the pop tune, ” Davis says of “You made it”, a bittersweet island ballad with a big, glorious chorus. On “The Tiger”, the British dance-rock band Kasabian add their skeletal, menacing guitars to the producers’ typically exotic belly dance rhythms. “Enuff” once again sees a shift in gears. It’s a straight-up party track built around an obscure Gregory Hynes sample, and featuring Lateef and Q-Tip trading verses, with the latter blurting out the line nobody expected to hear: “DJ Shadow, let’s go!”
It’s hard to imaging anything further removed from the detailed, wilfully focused musical narratives of Shadow’s last two studio albums than “The Outsider”. Then again, this is the album people should have expected from a guy who, by his own admission, owns three large storage spaces full of records….and then some.
The album is called “The Outsider” because I don’t fit in anywhere”. Davis says, swerving his chair toward the monitor. “I don’t dabble in all these different types of music, I love all these different types of music. There’s too much good stuff out there to limit yourself.”
The last track aired tonight is called “This Time (I’m doing it my way)”, which truly sounds like a lost ‘70s relic, complete with wah-wah guitars, Love Boat strings and soft disco beats. In a way, it could be Shadow’s new theme song, ousting the studied “Midnight in a perfect world” in favour of something significantly more flamboyant, funky and – gasp! Fun.
“All I want to articulate to people is I’m not who you think I am, “Davis says. “I know that sounds like some Britney Spears bullshit but when I go online and read some of the stuff my own fans think about me, it’s like “Wow, do they really have that narrow a view of what I do?” the hardest thing for people to grasp is that you can love something and move on with your life but not fall out of love with that thing. I’m not about what I was 10 years ago. “
The first time DJ Shadow appeared on the over of URB, close to when Endtroducing was released, the cover tagline repeated the title of a provocative interlude on the breakthrough album called “Why Hip-Hop Sucks in ‘96” The 30-second snippet didn’t rile people so much because of its punchline “it’s the money” but because the music surrounding it contrasted so sharply with everything else that was going on at the time.
Davis asserts the statement was posed at a very specific moment. “it was directed at the underground hip-hop community to say ‘Why are you so hung up on G-Funk and this and that?’” he says. “None of those conditions exist now. There is no more underground hip-hop scene. There is no more G-Funk. I’m not interested in the genre, but I do listen to contemporary hip-hop.
We’re back at his Mill Valley home, a big pink place that sits consiciously at the end of a busy street, talking in the studio he built in the garage downstairs. He moved here in 1999 from his hometown of Davis because of its close proximity to Village Records, an overcrowded record store just a few miles away. As you might expect, his studio looks a lot like a small radiostation. The walls are lined with the shelves bulging with vinyl. There are stacks of records all over the floor, on the couch and even more in the bathroom. “This is where I keep all the stuff I’ve still got to listen to”, Davis says, surveying the heap in the tub. Most of the 12” that crown the piles are the latest hyphy platters by the likes of E-40, Rick Rock and Federation.
Davis got into hip-hop early on, lured by the low-budget videos he saw on a local independent television station y the likes of Run-DMC, the World Famous Supreme Team and Grand Master Flash. By 1984, he had a Sears combination turntable, radio tuner and dual cassette deck, which he used as a primitive sampling device to make his strange sound collages. All other hobbies there quickly cast aside. Three years later he was DJing at the local college radio station. While attending the University of California, Davis, he met people who shared his passion – Jeff Chang (aka DJ Zen), Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab (members of Blackalicious) and Lateef and Lyrics Born (the duo Latyrx). They formed their own record label, SoleSides and put out a 17minute DJ Shadow track called “Entropy”. One of their cassettes somehow made its way into the hands of Mo’Wax record owner James Lavelle in London. In 1993, his imprint released another single, “In/Flux” that put the bedroom mixter’s name at the forefront of the new cerebral dance movement. The song also laid blueprint for DJ Shadow’s 1996 masterpiece “Endtroducing…” which with its mix of liquid instrumental samples, slow beats and sophisticated scratching, made Davis an uneasy star – one who often attemted to disguise his face in photographs and conducted most of his interviews in the safte haven of a used record store. The album sold moe than a million copies worldwide and still regularly crops up on critical best-of lists.
With his involvement in several side projects, including “Brainfreeze”, Quannum and the UNKLE album, plus a singles set called Preemtive Strike, it took Davis six years to deliver an official follow-up, “The Private Press” In some ways, it was even more inventive than the debut, gathering most of his source material from one-of-a-kind discs made in ancient public recording booths. But the critical and commercial reaction was cool, mostly people couldn’t help but compare it to its genre-busting predecessor.
“That frustrated me because it’s like Steven Spielberg having Raiders of the lost Ark compared to 1941” Davis says. At the time The Private Press came out I didn’t feel like I was feeling a whole lot of pressure. But in retrospect I was under enormous pressure. Maybe my mistake was that it wasn’t different enough”His personal rap renaissance happened shortly after the second album came out, when his studio was still located in San Francisco’s Mission district. The hour-long daily commute gave Davis an opportunity to rediscover the mix shows on the Bay Area’s big urban radio station KMEL. He started hearing cuts that blew his mind by local producers like Rick Rock, Droop-E and Traxxamillion.
“I started listening to it again and I while I was listening to it I discovered songs like “White T-Shirt, Blue Jeans and Nikes’ by Keak, a lot of Rick Rock stuff basically, Federation’s hyphy” Davis recalls with uncharacteristic excitement. “I was like, now this sounds good!” it isn’t any kind of grand plot. This is the shit I’m into”When they first heard “3 freaks” many DJ Shadow’s longtime fans on his official message board conjectured that the grimy, heavily synthesized track wasjust ananomaly, a misguided phase that would eventually pass. That clearly wasn’t the case.
“I just threw that song out to see what would happen” Davis says. “What happened was I was getting my music played on urban radio. I can’t tell you what a good feeling that is. It’s a tribute to a genre of music that shaped everything that I am. To have the video alongside 50 cent, for that to finally have broken down a little it, it’s done wonders for my confidence musically. So I go, I’m going to do another one”
He smiles, “I can honestly say, sitting here right now, I didn’t have any pressure on this album because to some degree people have written me off. “
Work on “The Outsider” was problematic even before the accident in London. In America, Davis’ career had been thrown into limbo thanks to a series of record company personnel changes and mergers that left him without a label to comfortably call home. He had wasted a good chunk of time working on Zach de la Rocha’s much-anticipated solo album, only to find out that the former Rage Against The Machine singer had basically flown the coop and that the material would never see the light of day. Meanwhile, his wrists where in chronic, crippling pain following an extensive world tour.
“It was a really hard moment,” Davis says. “I remember just yelling at everybody and not getting any respinse back. That’s when I realized, you know, I need to take a long break.”
Most frustratingly, he wasn’t getting anywhere with his new ideas. Davis felt he was merely repeating himself just for the sakeof keeping his fans happy.
He decided to take the summer off, driving along the Canadian Rockies. His intention was to go all the way to Nova Scotia and down and around, but instead he met up with a friend. Together they spent six weeks in Ohio tracking down James Brown’s former bandleader, J.C. Davis, with the intention of reissuing his music on Shadow’s own Cali-Tex label (the imprint has also put out a 45 by Portlang, Oregon’s The Cavaliers Unlimited and a double CD by Mickey and the Soul Generation). When Davis finally returned to the Bay Area, he felt a fresh start was in order. He moved his studio back into the garage of his Mill Valley home and decided he didn’t want to make music on the MPC sampler anymore, which is how he had been working for the past 15 years. He embraced Pro Tools, bought some key-boards and took time to properly learn MIDI. Instead of relying solely on samples, he hired musicians and full orchestras when necessary. He also brought in nearly a dozen vocalists.
“I started listening to it again and I while I was listening to it I discovered songs like “White T-Shirt, Blue Jeans and Nikes’ by Keak, a lot of Rick Rock stuff basically, Federation’s hyphy” Davis recalls with uncharacteristic excitement. “I was like, now this sounds good!” it isn’t any kind of grand plot. This is the shit I’m into”When they first heard “3 freaks” many DJ Shadow’s longtime fans on his official message board conjectured that the grimy, heavily synthesized track wasjust ananomaly, a misguided phase that would eventually pass. That clearly wasn’t the case.
“I just threw that song out to see what would happen” Davis says. “What happened was I was getting my music played on urban radio. I can’t tell you what a good feeling that is. It’s a tribute to a genre of music that shaped everything that I am. To have the video alongside 50 cent, for that to finally have broken down a little it, it’s done wonders for my confidence musically. So I go, I’m going to do another one”
He smiles, “I can honestly say, sitting here right now, I didn’t have any pressure on this album because to some degree people have written me off. “
Work on “The Outsider” was problematic even before the accident in London. In America, Davis’ career had been thrown into limbo thanks to a series of record company personnel changes and mergers that left him without a label to comfortably call home. He had wasted a good chunk of time working on Zach de la Rocha’s much-anticipated solo album, only to find out that the former Rage Against The Machine singer had basically flown the coop and that the material would never see the light of day. Meanwhile, his wrists where in chronic, crippling pain following an extensive world tour.
“It was a really hard moment,” Davis says. “I remember just yelling at everybody and not getting any respinse back. That’s when I realized, you know, I need to take a long break.”
Most frustratingly, he wasn’t getting anywhere with his new ideas. Davis felt he was merely repeating himself just for the sakeof keeping his fans happy.
He decided to take the summer off, driving along the Canadian Rockies. His intention was to go all the way to Nova Scotia and down and around, but instead he met up with a friend. Together they spent six weeks in Ohio tracking down James Brown’s former bandleader, J.C. Davis, with the intention of reissuing his music on Shadow’s own Cali-Tex label (the imprint has also put out a 45 by Portlang, Oregon’s The Cavaliers Unlimited and a double CD by Mickey and the Soul Generation). When Davis finally returned to the Bay Area, he felt a fresh start was in order. He moved his studio back into the garage of his Mill Valley home and decided he didn’t want to make music on the MPC sampler anymore, which is how he had been working for the past 15 years. He embraced Pro Tools, bought some key-boards and took time to properly learn MIDI. Instead of relying solely on samples, he hired musicians and full orchestras when necessary. He also brought in nearly a dozen vocalists.
“Basically, I came back with nothing unter my belt and completely changed the way I think about music, make music, everything,” Davis recalls.
On February 2, 2005, Davis wrote in his studio log: “Back in the mix”
That was the day he was able to put all the drama behind him and resumed work on “The Outsider”. When he surveyed what he had done during the previous year – tons of stuff that will never see the light of day – he realized he just wasn’t at that place anymore. “You reach 30 and you go, I have nothing to lose,” he says. “I’ve never based my happiness on wealth or chart position. When I put out “Endtroducing….” I wanted to ruffle feathers. I don’t want my music to just be played in some fucking hair salon because it sounds edgy. I want to drive people out of the shop. I don’t want to make music that’s safe.
At the Soma studio, Davis and Count are discussing the near impossible task of sequencing such a diverse album. But Davis is confident. “It’s all in the mix,” he says. And somehow that phrase, with its evocation of harmony and balance, always seems to be the solution.
The video for “3 freaks” features grinding stippers, pimping luxury cars and slick-looking gangsters getting roughed up. DJ Shadow makes a brief appearance at the end but even from that it’s obvious he’s no longer the reclusive producer dodging the spotlight. “I don’t want to be caught with all these restrictions of sustaining a legacy,” he says. “I don’t care. People will either embrace it or reject it. But I’m confident” He rises out of his seat. “To be honest, I would much rather KMEL embrace ‘3 Freaks’ than the rock stations,” he says. “I mean, I was driving in Vallejo the other day and I was at a stop sign and these kids were crossing the thing going ‘Turf Talk and Keak da Sneak.’ That’s what you want. I don’t want dudes in their 30s sitting around pondering the significance of this or that. Fuck the dumb shit. I want kids to be singing my music.
Via: URB Video Interview, July 2006 Issue