Album: Endtroducing...
Artist: DJ Shadow
Born: San Jose, California
Released: November 1996
Genre: Instrumental Hip Hop
Hip hop with no MC providing vocals, otherwise known as instrumental hip hop, is the genre that DJ Shadow pioneered with this record. As has happened many times in pop history, a groundbreaking American musician had to first win recognition in Britain before seeing his stock rise in the States. As a perennial crate digger (DJ Shadow apparently has a vinyl collection of over 60,000 records), his approach was to unearth great sounds from classic albums and stitch them together in original ways. Using his programming expertise, he could fuse samples from hip hop, krautrock (Embryo, Tangerine Dream), contemporary pop (Björk), jazz (David Axelrod), electronic (Giorgio Moroder) and heavy metal (Metallica), as well as film, TV (Twin Peaks) and interview snippets, and come up with something completely new and thrilling. Like much of the best 90s music, it was retro but totally modern at the same time. DJ Shadow took much of his inspiration from time spent in the basement of his favourite record shop, Rare Records in Sacramento, an experience he talks about in the documentary Scratch. "Just being in here is a humbling experience to me because you're looking through all these records and it's sort of like a big pile of broken dreams in a way." The picture on the front cover is of two guys on the main floor of Rare Records, but it was in the basement where DJ Shadow resurrected many of these broken dreams.
After the album's opening assault of hip hop samples, Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt has a beautiful piano loop melody and funky guitar riff that blend to great effect with the stuttering beats, giving the record real forward impetus. The Number Song mixes big beat with jazz samples and scratching, while Changeling really slows the pace, introducing an ambient element and some of the most artful use of sampling on the record. After a brief intermission, What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4) explores feelings of technological anxiety not long before Radiohead's OK Computer would cover similar territory. Stem/Long Stem is one of my favourite tracks on the record, its quiet string-heavy passages interrupted occasionally by jungle beats, as well as snippets from Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack. Brilliantly atmospheric. Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96 is a brief but effective commentary on how creatively bankrupt and commercially minded west coast hip hop and G-funk had become. Midnight In A Perfect World is another of the record's standout moments, and is as close as DJ Shadow comes to trip hop. Then the tension builds on Napalm Brain / Scatter Brain, with psychedelic guitars and shadowy choruses the backdrop to a rapidly intensifying breakbeat. What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 – Blue Sky Revisit) closes the album on a more upbeat note, with its warm saxophone hook and keyboards. The final transmission includes the words, "It is happening again", spoken by a spooky voice sampled from the television series Twin Peaks. The soundtrack to Twin Peaks is so good it almost made this blog list, but here it gets to play a small role in the creation of one the 90s most accomplished masterpieces.
Hip hop with no MC providing vocals, otherwise known as instrumental hip hop, is the genre that DJ Shadow pioneered with this record. As has happened many times in pop history, a groundbreaking American musician had to first win recognition in Britain before seeing his stock rise in the States. As a perennial crate digger (DJ Shadow apparently has a vinyl collection of over 60,000 records), his approach was to unearth great sounds from classic albums and stitch them together in original ways. Using his programming expertise, he could fuse samples from hip hop, krautrock (Embryo, Tangerine Dream), contemporary pop (Björk), jazz (David Axelrod), electronic (Giorgio Moroder) and heavy metal (Metallica), as well as film, TV (Twin Peaks) and interview snippets, and come up with something completely new and thrilling. Like much of the best 90s music, it was retro but totally modern at the same time. DJ Shadow took much of his inspiration from time spent in the basement of his favourite record shop, Rare Records in Sacramento, an experience he talks about in the documentary Scratch. "Just being in here is a humbling experience to me because you're looking through all these records and it's sort of like a big pile of broken dreams in a way." The picture on the front cover is of two guys on the main floor of Rare Records, but it was in the basement where DJ Shadow resurrected many of these broken dreams.
After the album's opening assault of hip hop samples, Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt has a beautiful piano loop melody and funky guitar riff that blend to great effect with the stuttering beats, giving the record real forward impetus. The Number Song mixes big beat with jazz samples and scratching, while Changeling really slows the pace, introducing an ambient element and some of the most artful use of sampling on the record. After a brief intermission, What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4) explores feelings of technological anxiety not long before Radiohead's OK Computer would cover similar territory. Stem/Long Stem is one of my favourite tracks on the record, its quiet string-heavy passages interrupted occasionally by jungle beats, as well as snippets from Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack. Brilliantly atmospheric. Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96 is a brief but effective commentary on how creatively bankrupt and commercially minded west coast hip hop and G-funk had become. Midnight In A Perfect World is another of the record's standout moments, and is as close as DJ Shadow comes to trip hop. Then the tension builds on Napalm Brain / Scatter Brain, with psychedelic guitars and shadowy choruses the backdrop to a rapidly intensifying breakbeat. What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 – Blue Sky Revisit) closes the album on a more upbeat note, with its warm saxophone hook and keyboards. The final transmission includes the words, "It is happening again", spoken by a spooky voice sampled from the television series Twin Peaks. The soundtrack to Twin Peaks is so good it almost made this blog list, but here it gets to play a small role in the creation of one the 90s most accomplished masterpieces.
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