DJ Shadow: The Shadow Knows: Pulse!, June 2002
By: Todd Inoue
The man who reinvented hip-hop six years ago with Endtroducing..... takes another step forward with The Private Press.
In the rearview mirror, 1996 seems light years away. Hip-hop was a shiny suited parody of itself as Bad Boy and Death Row battled over territorial pissings. It took a 24-year-old from the college town of Davis, Calif. - with nothing but turntables, a sampler, a crate of records and a vision - to remind the industry what hip-hop was and could be. DJ Shadow and his sonic confessional Endtroducing.... was just what hip-hop needed in 1996 - a temperate, patient, instrumental record filled with moods and emotions that still linger and resonate today.
On Endtroducing.... track "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '96," the answer Shadow gives - through Lyrics Born's echoplexed voice - is "It's the money." Today at age 30, Shadow - government name Josh Davis - feels far more Zen about things. Six years post Endtroducing...., he has emerged an advocate of all kinds of music, not just underground, turntablized hip-hop.
"I think in the mid-'90s and up until a few years ago, if you were making hip-hop, you had to delineate yourself between underground and commercial," Shadow says. "For initial good reasons, underground was like a secret society that had a strict code of conduct to preserve the culture. Then it became more incestuous and close-minded. I've excused myself in the years since Endtroducing.... and basically just gone back to listening to everything from Def Jux to the Three 6 Mafia or Hot Boys or Mystikal or whatever. I'm much more free."
The success of Endtroducing.... offered Shadow the freedom to follow his whim. He collaborated with Mo' Wax head James Lavelle on the UNKLE project and lent tracks to the Dark Days soundtrack. He produced for his Quannum crew family album and created obscure funk 45 mixes with Cut Chemist.
Most of all, Shadow kept digging. He sharpened his knowledge of psychedelic records and "private press" recordings - records cut by companies who would take any recording and put them on aluminum acetate for a fee. The "everybody is a star" nature of these recordings inspired Shadow's new The Private Press (MCA).
"I found these records really charming and empowering in a weird kind of way," he says. "I think in making them, people had nothing to lose. I had really achieved a lot of what I set out to do in between the making of Endtroducing.... and the beginning of making this record. I felt like I pressed reset on my career."
The Private Press recasts Shadow as a DJ with the incisive eye and the deft touch of a surgeon. His narrative voice - hinted at in Endtroducing….'s "What Does Your Soul Look Like" and "Midnight in a Perfect World" - has doubled in scope and articulation. Shadow can do things with a sampler that bands can only wish for. It's even more outrageous when you consider the layers of sound conjured by The Private Press' "The 6 Day War" or the Devo funk of "You Can't Go Home Again" - were created using found sound fragments fed into his MPC.
"Arrangement is what I concentrated on for this record," he says. "When you've only done 10 songs, it's like throwing darts at a dartboard. It's easy to hit a new place every time. When you've got 50 darts on the board - or 50 songs under your belt - it gets hard to hit a new part, to hit something you've never hit before. That became a challenge and through arranging, I was able to back myself out of corners."
He approached songs in different ways. "Mashin' on the Motorway" and "Blood on the Motorway" are a two-act play. "Mashing" simulates the movement of a reckless driver, voiced by Lateef, before leading into "Blood," a subdued meditation on an out-of-body experience. On the robotic pulse keeper "Monosylabik," Shadow challenged himself by building a song around a simple two-bar break. All elements were painstakingly chopped and mixed, a process that took two months to complete.
"Every single sound is ripped from the first two bars," he says. "It deconstructs and deconstructs and gets more manipulated and twisted as it goes along. It's the most labor-intensive song I've ever done. It was like animation, every day I'd get 3-4 seconds. It was really hard. On average, it'd take me four days to get the sounds right, then one day would be to program 30 seconds worth."
Such dedication to craft and perfectionism is DJ Shadow's forte. Fans waiting six years for new material will be pleased that The Private Press wows with production value without sacrificing its heavy emotional center. He's the Tiger Woods of the turntable.
"I would like people to get a sense that the spectrum of music is wider than they previously thought," Shadow says. "Hip-hop can be so broad. I want people to be challenged and feel like they had this revelatory new exposure to music they didn't think was possible."
By: Todd Inoue
The man who reinvented hip-hop six years ago with Endtroducing..... takes another step forward with The Private Press.
In the rearview mirror, 1996 seems light years away. Hip-hop was a shiny suited parody of itself as Bad Boy and Death Row battled over territorial pissings. It took a 24-year-old from the college town of Davis, Calif. - with nothing but turntables, a sampler, a crate of records and a vision - to remind the industry what hip-hop was and could be. DJ Shadow and his sonic confessional Endtroducing.... was just what hip-hop needed in 1996 - a temperate, patient, instrumental record filled with moods and emotions that still linger and resonate today.
On Endtroducing.... track "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '96," the answer Shadow gives - through Lyrics Born's echoplexed voice - is "It's the money." Today at age 30, Shadow - government name Josh Davis - feels far more Zen about things. Six years post Endtroducing...., he has emerged an advocate of all kinds of music, not just underground, turntablized hip-hop.
"I think in the mid-'90s and up until a few years ago, if you were making hip-hop, you had to delineate yourself between underground and commercial," Shadow says. "For initial good reasons, underground was like a secret society that had a strict code of conduct to preserve the culture. Then it became more incestuous and close-minded. I've excused myself in the years since Endtroducing.... and basically just gone back to listening to everything from Def Jux to the Three 6 Mafia or Hot Boys or Mystikal or whatever. I'm much more free."
The success of Endtroducing.... offered Shadow the freedom to follow his whim. He collaborated with Mo' Wax head James Lavelle on the UNKLE project and lent tracks to the Dark Days soundtrack. He produced for his Quannum crew family album and created obscure funk 45 mixes with Cut Chemist.
Most of all, Shadow kept digging. He sharpened his knowledge of psychedelic records and "private press" recordings - records cut by companies who would take any recording and put them on aluminum acetate for a fee. The "everybody is a star" nature of these recordings inspired Shadow's new The Private Press (MCA).
"I found these records really charming and empowering in a weird kind of way," he says. "I think in making them, people had nothing to lose. I had really achieved a lot of what I set out to do in between the making of Endtroducing.... and the beginning of making this record. I felt like I pressed reset on my career."
The Private Press recasts Shadow as a DJ with the incisive eye and the deft touch of a surgeon. His narrative voice - hinted at in Endtroducing….'s "What Does Your Soul Look Like" and "Midnight in a Perfect World" - has doubled in scope and articulation. Shadow can do things with a sampler that bands can only wish for. It's even more outrageous when you consider the layers of sound conjured by The Private Press' "The 6 Day War" or the Devo funk of "You Can't Go Home Again" - were created using found sound fragments fed into his MPC.
"Arrangement is what I concentrated on for this record," he says. "When you've only done 10 songs, it's like throwing darts at a dartboard. It's easy to hit a new place every time. When you've got 50 darts on the board - or 50 songs under your belt - it gets hard to hit a new part, to hit something you've never hit before. That became a challenge and through arranging, I was able to back myself out of corners."
He approached songs in different ways. "Mashin' on the Motorway" and "Blood on the Motorway" are a two-act play. "Mashing" simulates the movement of a reckless driver, voiced by Lateef, before leading into "Blood," a subdued meditation on an out-of-body experience. On the robotic pulse keeper "Monosylabik," Shadow challenged himself by building a song around a simple two-bar break. All elements were painstakingly chopped and mixed, a process that took two months to complete.
"Every single sound is ripped from the first two bars," he says. "It deconstructs and deconstructs and gets more manipulated and twisted as it goes along. It's the most labor-intensive song I've ever done. It was like animation, every day I'd get 3-4 seconds. It was really hard. On average, it'd take me four days to get the sounds right, then one day would be to program 30 seconds worth."
Such dedication to craft and perfectionism is DJ Shadow's forte. Fans waiting six years for new material will be pleased that The Private Press wows with production value without sacrificing its heavy emotional center. He's the Tiger Woods of the turntable.
"I would like people to get a sense that the spectrum of music is wider than they previously thought," Shadow says. "Hip-hop can be so broad. I want people to be challenged and feel like they had this revelatory new exposure to music they didn't think was possible."