DJ Shadow: Pressing On XLR8R, Issue 59
When a little-known Davis, CA college DJ named Shadow dropped his first single, “Entropy”, on his own Solesides label, no one could predict the impact it would have on the world of music. Following his 1996 debut, Endtroducing, for London’s Mo’ Wax, he went from kid-from-the-sticks to recording partner with the likes of Radiohead and his idol, legendary ‘70s producer David Axelrod. Always one to challenge his own songwriting methods, Shadow is again poised to change how we think about music.
IT’S ALL HIP-HOP
Contrary to what Vanity Fair would have you believe, Josh Davis, a.k.a. DJ Shadow, no longer thinks hip-hop is “one of the most uncreative forms of modern music.” When the swanky mag recently reprinted his 1995 quip about hip-hop stagnating, Davis was understandably upset. “Now somebody would see that and think that’s still how I feel,” he sighs. “In the mid-‘90s, I felt like if you were making hip-hop, you had to be either the underground camp or everything else. It was this really conservative, closed-minded view. In the ‘80s growing up, I listened to all types of hip-hop, whether it was Miami bass or Oakland rap or LA rap or New York rap. Now my listening tastes have gone back to more how they were, where I can listen to [either] something on Def Jux or Three 6 Mafia. It’s all hip-hop to me.”
This is the first topic Davis speaks on, and he seems glad to clear the air. Though some consider him to be head-and-shoulders above the flotsam and jetsam of hip-hop musicians these days, the man’s no cynic. He’s a person who loves music of all styles, even if it’s only a couple seconds of an otherwise unremarkable song. In the mind of a master of musical pastiche, everything has potential. It’s all in how you flip it.
Davis arrives for an interview at – where else? – a record store. He hands the clerk several copies of the brand-new 12-inch, “Monosylabik”, off his forthcoming album The Private Press. After telling the employee to save a copy for himself, Davis asks him not to sell all the records to one person, in order to avoid the eBay shenanigans that started the cottage industry of bootlegs of Brainfreeze, the much-vaunted all-45s mi CD he performed and released along with Cut Chemist. Even now, with his new major label home, MCA, inserting a copy-tracing code into the promo CDs of the album, he still must fret about piracy.
Online auctions may be a bugaboo for Davis, but that’s not the only technology about which he’s wary. He sticks to methods that seem behind the times by today’s standards (no Korgs? No Pro Tools?) when making music. He’s not a Luddite, and he understands the potential of all these advances. He just has a different aesthetic. It seems simple at a glance, but not once you burrow into it.
BASEMENT JACK
In the movie Scratch, Davis is interviewed in what he calls his “own little nirvana”, a record store basement filled with vast stacks of records. He calls the dizzying array of vinyl “a pile of broken dreams” because they represent music careers that no longer exist. “And if you’re a DJ and you’re putting out releases,” he plaintively states, “you’re adding to this pile, whether you want to admit it or not.”
Davis has contributed quite a bit to the pile through his own prodigious use of samples. Still, he has profound respect for the artists whose work is re-imagined into his own, and he notes that in a way, he’s doing their careers a service more than damaging them. “It’s so transitory – a musical career can just be there and gone in a heartbeat,” he explains. “That basement in particular, when I’m down there, I just suddenly feel calibrated. I fell like, ‘Wow, this is it. This is where dreams are made and broken.’ For me, it’s like I’m making my own dreams out of other people’s broken ones. And in that way, it’s like a 360. It’s the whole cyclical nature of sampling – keeping old stuff alive and keeping other people’s dreams alive, which is how I prefer to look at it.”
Plenty of people dream of a musical career, but Davis has achieved an ideal one. Through his deft sampling touch, he has breathed new life into modern music – not to mention old records. There’s certainly a fair share of kids who’ll buy a vintage record because Davis sampled it.
Still, sampling occupies a strange place in the musical continuum. Purists deride it as an illegitimate way of making music. Many almost-30 hip-hoppers bemoan its forced decline due to corporate, legal and financial issues. Producers who stacked hefty loops atop each other are mostly gone, or at least reinvented. Davis feels it’s important to remain sample-based “now more than ever, because so many people for various reasons – some of them artistic and some of them just because it’s a trend – have kinda moved away from sampling, which is fine. But my instrument is the sampler. Just because other people move on to another instrument doesn’t mean I’m just gonna jump ship and follow them as well. You’ve just gotta find new ways to express yourself.” And when it comes to expression, Davis is constantly finding new tricks.
GIVE THE DRUMMER SOME
The drums are everything in Davis’s music. This may seem like an obvious statement – after all, the drums are the backbone of all hip-hop. But Davis’s talent lies in using them to the fullest, making them not merely the skeleton of the song, but also the muscles, sinews and flesh. While most composers convey emotion with a swollen string section or wailing horns, Davis does it with drums. Using non-melodic instruments to strike chords within the listener is no small feat. The other sounds don’t so much follow the drums as cling to them.
This percussion-centered approach lends bottom heavy heft to Davis’s preoccupation with death on The Private Press. He’s not a morose guy, but song titles like “Giving Up the Ghost”, “…Meets His Makers”, and “Blood on the Highway” belie the moody content within. “When I’m making music, I like it to have a certain weight,” he confirms. “I like it to have a sense that it actually means something. For me, it’s definitely therapeutic making music – I’m definitely getting a lot of the black goo out.
“Drums, to me, convey the most energy of any instrument, whether that’s positive or negative energy. [Drums] are always the beginning, and if the rhythm section isn’t tight, the song’s gonna have problems. And I hate stiff programming. There’s nothing I detest more when I hear a hip-hop record than stiff programming.”
It’s such programming that strips the drums of their power and weight. Without emotionality, a song can easily be reduced to a technical exercise. “I’m only interested as long as it has soul,” says Davis. “You can communicate that through any technological means you want. I just don’t like it when it sounds too cerebral. It’s speaking to my brain, but it’s not speaking to my heart.” Davis’s mission is to re-ignite the human element that can be lost in technical translation. By doing this, he makes the drums sing.
THE OFF BEAT PATH
Above all else, Davis challenges himself, whether it’s finding new ways to make the drums talk or simply innovating within true instrumental hip-hop. “Vocals propel a song forward,” he notes, “so if you don’t have the benefit of that, it’s much more challenging to make instrumental music that can hold up for five minutes.”
To Davis, the best music comes from pushing boundaries, not from sticking with a successful formula. “On this album, I didn’t use a computer again. [For] every new sound and every new thing I was able to pull off, I used ‘conventional’ means. That doesn’t matter to some people, but to me it mattered a lot. It challenged me, and it also meant that hypothetically, my record isn’t gonna sound like everybody else’s, because I’m not using the current en vogue plug-ins or sound modules, and I’m sampling from sources that are hopefully very obscure and very off-the-beaten-track.”
Take, for example, “Monosylabik”, which is constructed entirely out of a single two-bar loop. “Normally when I make music, I like it to be a good song. Then if I can infuse some sort of technological aspect or make the arrangement technically interesting as a challenge to my peers, I do so. But on this song, I started off with the technical concept, which is a 180 from how I usually start off. It was definitely the most labor-intensive song I’ve done. If I hit a brick wall, I couldn’t just go, ‘Well, let me see if I can find more samples.’ I had to force myself to come up with every sonic element – again, not using plug-ins, doing it the old way. It was challenging, for sure.”
Plenty of artists in Davis’s position become complacent. They assume they’ve “figured out” music and stop trying to take in new directions; they’re unwilling to risk alienating any fans. Davis’s passion lies in taking people beyond the fringes of “hip-hop”, “trip-hop”, “downtempo” or whatever other label might get slapped on his records.
“Lots of times when I make music – particularly hen I haven’t had something out for a while, or when I feel like there’s a certain perception about the music that I make – I like to throw the gauntlet down and separate the men from the boys,” he acknowledges. “That’s why ‘Monosylabik’ is the first white label. I’d have felt like I failed if I didn’t have some people be like, ‘Man, what is this?’ I think that needs to happen. If you’re always just making music to please your fans or to please the status quo, then it’s never really gonna be that exciting. I like to see who’s gonna stick with me this time. I need to know that. I don’t make music to try to turn people off – I make it to expand peoples’ perceptions.”
The Private Press is out now on Quannum/MCA Records.
www.djshadow.com, www.mcarecords.com
ENLIGHTENING STABS IN THE DARK: Five of DJ Shadow’s Favorite Sample Usages
1. Main Source, “Looking at the Front Door” 12” (Wild Pitch)
One of my favorite sample compositions of all time. At the very end, Large Professor samples Dyke & The Blazers’ “Let a Woman Be a Woman”, and it’s just so low in the mix. Right in the little bit when [Professor’s] like, “We outta here”, the [sample’s] going “uh-huh!” in every bar, real quiet underneath. I was like, “Man, he really thought about his shit.”
2. Organized Konfusion, “Releasing Hypnotical Gasses”, O.K.
The track speeds up into an explosion sound about two and a half minutes into it. I thought that was dope.
3. Pete Rock & CL Smooth, “T.R.O.Y.” 12” (Elektra/Asylum)
A beautiful use of the Tom Scott record [“Today”]. Pete Rock was really good at using stuff that, when you hear it on his record, you’re like, “Man, that’s the dopest sample ever”, but when you hear the original record, you’re like, “He got that from that?”
4. Eric B and Rakim, “Run for Cover”, Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em (MCA)
I always thought it was ill how they let so much of [The Belairs’] “Sexy Coffee Pot” just roll. It’s almost off beat, but it just keeps on rolling. That was one that used to fuck me up.5. Public Enemy, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”,It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam)My dad had [Isaac Hayes’s] Hot Buttered Soul, and I put “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” on tape like six months before I heard the P.E. song. That was one of the first times that I was like, “Damn, I could’ve theoretically used that and put it out first.” That was when I started thinking about buying old records and trying to make my own beats – by spotting samples before the fact or concurrently.
PROJECT FAMILY
By: Spence D.
Formed by DJ Shadow, Lyrics Born and Chief Xcel in the early ‘90s, Quannum Records (formely Solesides) has, for a decade, remained a true incarnation of a successful, independently run hip-hop label.
Within the spectrum of independent hip-hop labels, Quannum Projects reigns supreme. That would be a brash statement if it weren’t true. Indie labels, particularly those within hip-hop, have a terminal lifespan; any that make it to 10 years represent something of an anomaly. Quannum Projects is that anomaly.
Based on the blueprints created by legendary labels of the past (take your pick from the likes of Stax, early Def Jam and classic Verve), Quannum Projects has assembled a diverse stable of artists that ranges from DJ Shadow and Blackalicious to Poets of Rhythm and Lifesavas. The result is a label that’s forged a unique and essential place within the global pantheon of hip-hop. Quannum general manager Isaac Bess puts it a bit more humbly: “We’re not documenting a scene or anything, just purveying music we think is great.”
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and risen from the ashes of Solesides Records, Quannum Projects takes a decidedly grassroots approach to creating and promoting its music. While most labels operate hierarchically, with a figurehead group surrounded by secondary acts, QP prefers a more familial approach.
While the label does have three main principals – Chief Xcel of Blackalicious, DJ Shadow and Lyrics Born of Latryx, each with their own imprint (X’s Mahogany Sun, Shadow’s Cali-Tex and Lyrics Born’s Mobile Home) – it’s truly an egalitarian family affair, with a loving sense of camaraderie between the artists, who regularly pop up on each other’s albums and singles. Bess jokingly sees Quannum Projects resembling a co-operative rather than a traditional label, but with a more fragrant twist: “We are like a co-op, only without the body odor and Brussels sprouts.”
Releases on the QP horizon include Lyrics Born’s highly anticipated solo album Later that Day, albums from Maroons (a.k.a. Chief Xcel and Lateef of Latry), and a second single and subsequent full-length from resident soul songstress Joyo Velarde. The Lifesavas are wrapping up work on their full length debut, Spirit in Stone, and further down the road lie albums and/or singles from Blackalicious, rare groove veterans Mickey and the Soul Generation, and German funk outfit the Poets of Rhythm.
www.quannum.com
When a little-known Davis, CA college DJ named Shadow dropped his first single, “Entropy”, on his own Solesides label, no one could predict the impact it would have on the world of music. Following his 1996 debut, Endtroducing, for London’s Mo’ Wax, he went from kid-from-the-sticks to recording partner with the likes of Radiohead and his idol, legendary ‘70s producer David Axelrod. Always one to challenge his own songwriting methods, Shadow is again poised to change how we think about music.
IT’S ALL HIP-HOP
Contrary to what Vanity Fair would have you believe, Josh Davis, a.k.a. DJ Shadow, no longer thinks hip-hop is “one of the most uncreative forms of modern music.” When the swanky mag recently reprinted his 1995 quip about hip-hop stagnating, Davis was understandably upset. “Now somebody would see that and think that’s still how I feel,” he sighs. “In the mid-‘90s, I felt like if you were making hip-hop, you had to be either the underground camp or everything else. It was this really conservative, closed-minded view. In the ‘80s growing up, I listened to all types of hip-hop, whether it was Miami bass or Oakland rap or LA rap or New York rap. Now my listening tastes have gone back to more how they were, where I can listen to [either] something on Def Jux or Three 6 Mafia. It’s all hip-hop to me.”
This is the first topic Davis speaks on, and he seems glad to clear the air. Though some consider him to be head-and-shoulders above the flotsam and jetsam of hip-hop musicians these days, the man’s no cynic. He’s a person who loves music of all styles, even if it’s only a couple seconds of an otherwise unremarkable song. In the mind of a master of musical pastiche, everything has potential. It’s all in how you flip it.
Davis arrives for an interview at – where else? – a record store. He hands the clerk several copies of the brand-new 12-inch, “Monosylabik”, off his forthcoming album The Private Press. After telling the employee to save a copy for himself, Davis asks him not to sell all the records to one person, in order to avoid the eBay shenanigans that started the cottage industry of bootlegs of Brainfreeze, the much-vaunted all-45s mi CD he performed and released along with Cut Chemist. Even now, with his new major label home, MCA, inserting a copy-tracing code into the promo CDs of the album, he still must fret about piracy.
Online auctions may be a bugaboo for Davis, but that’s not the only technology about which he’s wary. He sticks to methods that seem behind the times by today’s standards (no Korgs? No Pro Tools?) when making music. He’s not a Luddite, and he understands the potential of all these advances. He just has a different aesthetic. It seems simple at a glance, but not once you burrow into it.
BASEMENT JACK
In the movie Scratch, Davis is interviewed in what he calls his “own little nirvana”, a record store basement filled with vast stacks of records. He calls the dizzying array of vinyl “a pile of broken dreams” because they represent music careers that no longer exist. “And if you’re a DJ and you’re putting out releases,” he plaintively states, “you’re adding to this pile, whether you want to admit it or not.”
Davis has contributed quite a bit to the pile through his own prodigious use of samples. Still, he has profound respect for the artists whose work is re-imagined into his own, and he notes that in a way, he’s doing their careers a service more than damaging them. “It’s so transitory – a musical career can just be there and gone in a heartbeat,” he explains. “That basement in particular, when I’m down there, I just suddenly feel calibrated. I fell like, ‘Wow, this is it. This is where dreams are made and broken.’ For me, it’s like I’m making my own dreams out of other people’s broken ones. And in that way, it’s like a 360. It’s the whole cyclical nature of sampling – keeping old stuff alive and keeping other people’s dreams alive, which is how I prefer to look at it.”
Plenty of people dream of a musical career, but Davis has achieved an ideal one. Through his deft sampling touch, he has breathed new life into modern music – not to mention old records. There’s certainly a fair share of kids who’ll buy a vintage record because Davis sampled it.
Still, sampling occupies a strange place in the musical continuum. Purists deride it as an illegitimate way of making music. Many almost-30 hip-hoppers bemoan its forced decline due to corporate, legal and financial issues. Producers who stacked hefty loops atop each other are mostly gone, or at least reinvented. Davis feels it’s important to remain sample-based “now more than ever, because so many people for various reasons – some of them artistic and some of them just because it’s a trend – have kinda moved away from sampling, which is fine. But my instrument is the sampler. Just because other people move on to another instrument doesn’t mean I’m just gonna jump ship and follow them as well. You’ve just gotta find new ways to express yourself.” And when it comes to expression, Davis is constantly finding new tricks.
GIVE THE DRUMMER SOME
The drums are everything in Davis’s music. This may seem like an obvious statement – after all, the drums are the backbone of all hip-hop. But Davis’s talent lies in using them to the fullest, making them not merely the skeleton of the song, but also the muscles, sinews and flesh. While most composers convey emotion with a swollen string section or wailing horns, Davis does it with drums. Using non-melodic instruments to strike chords within the listener is no small feat. The other sounds don’t so much follow the drums as cling to them.
This percussion-centered approach lends bottom heavy heft to Davis’s preoccupation with death on The Private Press. He’s not a morose guy, but song titles like “Giving Up the Ghost”, “…Meets His Makers”, and “Blood on the Highway” belie the moody content within. “When I’m making music, I like it to have a certain weight,” he confirms. “I like it to have a sense that it actually means something. For me, it’s definitely therapeutic making music – I’m definitely getting a lot of the black goo out.
“Drums, to me, convey the most energy of any instrument, whether that’s positive or negative energy. [Drums] are always the beginning, and if the rhythm section isn’t tight, the song’s gonna have problems. And I hate stiff programming. There’s nothing I detest more when I hear a hip-hop record than stiff programming.”
It’s such programming that strips the drums of their power and weight. Without emotionality, a song can easily be reduced to a technical exercise. “I’m only interested as long as it has soul,” says Davis. “You can communicate that through any technological means you want. I just don’t like it when it sounds too cerebral. It’s speaking to my brain, but it’s not speaking to my heart.” Davis’s mission is to re-ignite the human element that can be lost in technical translation. By doing this, he makes the drums sing.
THE OFF BEAT PATH
Above all else, Davis challenges himself, whether it’s finding new ways to make the drums talk or simply innovating within true instrumental hip-hop. “Vocals propel a song forward,” he notes, “so if you don’t have the benefit of that, it’s much more challenging to make instrumental music that can hold up for five minutes.”
To Davis, the best music comes from pushing boundaries, not from sticking with a successful formula. “On this album, I didn’t use a computer again. [For] every new sound and every new thing I was able to pull off, I used ‘conventional’ means. That doesn’t matter to some people, but to me it mattered a lot. It challenged me, and it also meant that hypothetically, my record isn’t gonna sound like everybody else’s, because I’m not using the current en vogue plug-ins or sound modules, and I’m sampling from sources that are hopefully very obscure and very off-the-beaten-track.”
Take, for example, “Monosylabik”, which is constructed entirely out of a single two-bar loop. “Normally when I make music, I like it to be a good song. Then if I can infuse some sort of technological aspect or make the arrangement technically interesting as a challenge to my peers, I do so. But on this song, I started off with the technical concept, which is a 180 from how I usually start off. It was definitely the most labor-intensive song I’ve done. If I hit a brick wall, I couldn’t just go, ‘Well, let me see if I can find more samples.’ I had to force myself to come up with every sonic element – again, not using plug-ins, doing it the old way. It was challenging, for sure.”
Plenty of artists in Davis’s position become complacent. They assume they’ve “figured out” music and stop trying to take in new directions; they’re unwilling to risk alienating any fans. Davis’s passion lies in taking people beyond the fringes of “hip-hop”, “trip-hop”, “downtempo” or whatever other label might get slapped on his records.
“Lots of times when I make music – particularly hen I haven’t had something out for a while, or when I feel like there’s a certain perception about the music that I make – I like to throw the gauntlet down and separate the men from the boys,” he acknowledges. “That’s why ‘Monosylabik’ is the first white label. I’d have felt like I failed if I didn’t have some people be like, ‘Man, what is this?’ I think that needs to happen. If you’re always just making music to please your fans or to please the status quo, then it’s never really gonna be that exciting. I like to see who’s gonna stick with me this time. I need to know that. I don’t make music to try to turn people off – I make it to expand peoples’ perceptions.”
The Private Press is out now on Quannum/MCA Records.
www.djshadow.com, www.mcarecords.com
ENLIGHTENING STABS IN THE DARK: Five of DJ Shadow’s Favorite Sample Usages
1. Main Source, “Looking at the Front Door” 12” (Wild Pitch)
One of my favorite sample compositions of all time. At the very end, Large Professor samples Dyke & The Blazers’ “Let a Woman Be a Woman”, and it’s just so low in the mix. Right in the little bit when [Professor’s] like, “We outta here”, the [sample’s] going “uh-huh!” in every bar, real quiet underneath. I was like, “Man, he really thought about his shit.”
2. Organized Konfusion, “Releasing Hypnotical Gasses”, O.K.
The track speeds up into an explosion sound about two and a half minutes into it. I thought that was dope.
3. Pete Rock & CL Smooth, “T.R.O.Y.” 12” (Elektra/Asylum)
A beautiful use of the Tom Scott record [“Today”]. Pete Rock was really good at using stuff that, when you hear it on his record, you’re like, “Man, that’s the dopest sample ever”, but when you hear the original record, you’re like, “He got that from that?”
4. Eric B and Rakim, “Run for Cover”, Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em (MCA)
I always thought it was ill how they let so much of [The Belairs’] “Sexy Coffee Pot” just roll. It’s almost off beat, but it just keeps on rolling. That was one that used to fuck me up.5. Public Enemy, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”,It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam)My dad had [Isaac Hayes’s] Hot Buttered Soul, and I put “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” on tape like six months before I heard the P.E. song. That was one of the first times that I was like, “Damn, I could’ve theoretically used that and put it out first.” That was when I started thinking about buying old records and trying to make my own beats – by spotting samples before the fact or concurrently.
PROJECT FAMILY
By: Spence D.
Formed by DJ Shadow, Lyrics Born and Chief Xcel in the early ‘90s, Quannum Records (formely Solesides) has, for a decade, remained a true incarnation of a successful, independently run hip-hop label.
Within the spectrum of independent hip-hop labels, Quannum Projects reigns supreme. That would be a brash statement if it weren’t true. Indie labels, particularly those within hip-hop, have a terminal lifespan; any that make it to 10 years represent something of an anomaly. Quannum Projects is that anomaly.
Based on the blueprints created by legendary labels of the past (take your pick from the likes of Stax, early Def Jam and classic Verve), Quannum Projects has assembled a diverse stable of artists that ranges from DJ Shadow and Blackalicious to Poets of Rhythm and Lifesavas. The result is a label that’s forged a unique and essential place within the global pantheon of hip-hop. Quannum general manager Isaac Bess puts it a bit more humbly: “We’re not documenting a scene or anything, just purveying music we think is great.”
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and risen from the ashes of Solesides Records, Quannum Projects takes a decidedly grassroots approach to creating and promoting its music. While most labels operate hierarchically, with a figurehead group surrounded by secondary acts, QP prefers a more familial approach.
While the label does have three main principals – Chief Xcel of Blackalicious, DJ Shadow and Lyrics Born of Latryx, each with their own imprint (X’s Mahogany Sun, Shadow’s Cali-Tex and Lyrics Born’s Mobile Home) – it’s truly an egalitarian family affair, with a loving sense of camaraderie between the artists, who regularly pop up on each other’s albums and singles. Bess jokingly sees Quannum Projects resembling a co-operative rather than a traditional label, but with a more fragrant twist: “We are like a co-op, only without the body odor and Brussels sprouts.”
Releases on the QP horizon include Lyrics Born’s highly anticipated solo album Later that Day, albums from Maroons (a.k.a. Chief Xcel and Lateef of Latry), and a second single and subsequent full-length from resident soul songstress Joyo Velarde. The Lifesavas are wrapping up work on their full length debut, Spirit in Stone, and further down the road lie albums and/or singles from Blackalicious, rare groove veterans Mickey and the Soul Generation, and German funk outfit the Poets of Rhythm.
www.quannum.com