DJ Shadow: classic or dud?

Listening to Endtroducing recently I was thinking that part of what I love about the record is the way Shadow acts as a drum/percussion soloist on the MPC. Maybe that had been done before, but it was what made the record feel so fresh to me when I first heard it as a teenager and so different from other sample-based records that were mainly about loops. Also the oddly pleasing dissonances created by the samples brushing against one another, which I wonder if it was partly accidental. Like it's actually a harmonically and melodically interesting album too, and it's not just individual loops by jazz fusion dudes that make it so.

The beat on the Run The Jewels track is horrible, the De La Soul song is way better

I remember the first thing previewed off of Private Press was "Monosylabik" and he was talking about how it's based on a one second thing chopped a thousand different ways and it took months to do... and hearing it and just thinking.. ok good for you...... Thankfully there was plenty more going on with that album.

I loved that song and its expression of craft. That album is as good as Endtroducing to me - while not as "fresh" the songs felt far more polished and established the pinnacle of his sound, which he quickly and forever abandoned afterwards, almost as if to intentionally tell his audience to fuck off.

Only heard the first disc so far - pretty dull and even less original than the last one, which was marginally decent but a shadow *pun intended* of his first two. Ugh. RIP DJ Shadow.

yeah man alive, well put about how the interesting harmonic/melodic roughness

I put on the first 20 mins or so of the instrumental suite this morning and it's sort of a mess. The first track I thought was just bad. Second was sort of interesting but maybe didn't quite hit the mark it was going for. What was maybe either the third or fourth track (I was in the car and didn't notice) sounded like a really shitty jam session involving a real jazz drummer and a complete novice keyboard player (like when the guitar player who doesn't know keys jumps on the keys for fun during a break). I made it as far as Ju-ju-juju-juggernaut and I felt like I didn't get what he was even going for.

Listening to the instrumental side and it sounds like he's fully absorbed the influence of the beat scene (that was originally influenced by him, at least in part) and become a self-sufficient digital producer who doesn't need to sample records when he doesn't want to. Unfortunately it sounds like shitty future bass half the time.

He still has a pretty idiosyncratic approach to rhythm and I like that a lot of it is pretty wonky. But a lot of the sound design just sounds like presets or software demos, but with a weirder approach to rhythm & structure.

Got to the last few tracks and it's amazing how much more 'DJ Shadow' it sounds when he throws a breakbeat in there.

There are a few good songs on side 2 (Wiki, Pusha T, the fake Future Islands track), but it's so all over the place. Maybe it's just supposed to function as a "hey maybe hire DJ Shadow as a producer" resume.

i don't see anyone but the most ardent Shadow stans giving this much play at all

I tried but I won't be going back to this really.

The Outsider killed any interest I had in hearing his new material. Except for 3 Freaks which I think is the weirdest song I've ever heard played on commercial hip hop radio.

The Private Press showed that he had been expanding his listening in contemporary music beyond just backpacker hip hop/trip hop and the sources of those samples. That was an explosive time in music there, a lot of disparate factions mingling styles.

Everyone should be allowed a bad album. But yeah I can't really see listening to this a second time.

he seems genuinely restless and always searching which I think is bound to result in another good album at some point, but yeah on first pass this ain't it

That's optimistic considering what others pointed out that his interests are moving increasingly in the navel gazing technical production aspects.

What I meant by 'disparate styles' on The Private Press was mostly drum & bass and affiliated styles that were booming in the Bay Area around that time. You can hear also the echo of James Lavelle in that polished sheen over some of it, and I'd guess Lavelle was probably a guy vacuuming up influences from up and coming styles.

Still, Psyence Fiction has held up decently, but my favorite Shadow release is In Tune & On Time. The transition from Fixed Income/What Does Your Soul Look Like Pt 2. Great tour too.

the De La joint live on Kimmel with Babu & Melo-D from Beat Junkies, and a horn section:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_I_CDJTyfs

man is gonna get checks from nobody speaks for decades, i swear it’s been used in dozens of ads and trailers

That album is as good as Endtroducing to me

I rank his first two albums roughly equally as well - Entroducing is superior in terms of depth and texture, but Private Press is much catchier and more playful.

This is obviously all my opinion but Endtroducing is one of those classic debuts where it’s obviously the result of years and years of honing a “long”term artistic vision and sorting wheat from chaff (there’s probably an actual term for this sort of thing). It just has a such a deep deep mood and it’s obvious that he went all in and threw down all his favorite magical samples... Private Press to me sounds like it was made by someone else who was really into Endtroducing but also maybe Moby’s Play and other electronica things.. with significantly less love for electric pianos. it’s like the old yarn about a band using up all its good songs on the debut... it’s not even remotely in the same wheelhouse to me, he fell to earth with a thud. endtroducing evokes a lot of heavy Bay Area atmosphere to me.. downtown SF at sunset, foggy mornings at the Ashby BART station flea market... Private Press doesn’t have a feel to me. Just my 8 million cents, sorry to go all turrican

I made similar point re: The Avalanches. Sample-based-collage producers blow their wad on 1st album and struggle thereafter.

imo shadow's real debut was "what does your soul look like"

i like entroducing and brimstead's post a lot tho

Yeah, brimstead otm. I should probably revisit The Private Press tho, I haven't heard it in 18 years.

I made similar point re: The Avalanches. Sample-based-collage producers blow their wad on 1st album and struggle thereafter

they only became sample-based collage producers on that album though, whereas Shadow's 1993-94 stuff is very much in the vein of Endtroducing - and the Avs had the problems of having albums that weren't in the vein of SILY rejected by Pav, and then the two who did the collage stuff becoming unable to work together, possibly related to various health issues of the one who didn't quit, which then further slowed down his process.

Shadow just seems to have wanted to make all his albums have a different sound, and to change his working methods

brimstead makes a very valid point for sample based music. when you think about it, dj shadow was probably destined to fall into that mode. he literally built his early eps and endtroducing on his favorite records. and everyone's list eventually ends, so it only figures that he started to just look for similar records to build similar sounds on with the private press. i still think private press is really good, but ultimately disappointing coming after endtroducing.

Dilla didn't seem to have that problem

Read Nate's new book about sampling and hip hop, which is excellent.

^Didn't know about that book, looks great, thanks!

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/bring-that-beat-back/ btw

for those that would prefer The Private Press to be a little more compact :

https://soundcloud.com/strictly/press-cuttings-the-private-press-compacted

(totally forgot i had this until this thread bump)

Dilla didn't seem to have that problem

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, August 31, 2020 4:43 PM

and superman didn't have any problem flying. bit difficult for the rest of us tho.

i like endtroducing and brimstead's post a lot tho

― the late great, Monday, August 31, 2020 6:03 PM (yesterday)

yep. and yeah, like many others, private press did nothing for me.

He's doing a show at Webster Hall in February. Not expensive if you get tickets at the box office (online fees add 50%). Is he still worth seeing? I love Endtroducing and The Private Press but I noticed on setlist.fm that lately he typically does only one track from each, maybe two.

it feels to me like he did not cross over to zoomers the way similarly lauded 90s albums (my bloody valentine or radiohead's for example) did

I saw him about 10 years ago doing a DJ set with his own (octapad) drumming, it was great tbh.

He was amazing at Portola last year, but who knows how much it's changed given he's dropped a new LP

I've actually never seen him before so maybe I'll go for that reason alone. My only reluctance would be if he's been less-than-good, in which case I would hold out for (hopefully) a better tour.

The new album mostly reminded me of the Stranger Things soundtrack.

There were occasional nice moments on the new album but it was definitely not my thing. I like when an artist follows their muse but he's moved away from anything I found interesting about him in the first place, which like, good for him, do your thing man.

In that sense I feel like his muse has taken him further and further from anything I originally found interesting about him over the years.

Something I think about a fair amount with musicians and artists is that an artist is a kind of character or persona, and that's true musically too. I don't think it should just be "musically whatever I feel like doing, whether or not it has continuity with my prior work." Like that's what side projects/alternate names are for. Or some artists with very long careers have "periods" like Dylan or Bowie. But Shadow's career just feels like it kind of zigs and zags all over the place without clear purpose. Oh well, Endtroducing remains one of my all-time favorite records, and there is at least a compilation's worth of good to great material from the rest.

my buddy is trying to get me to go to that show with him but idk maybe

I feel bad for him though, there's basically no way he could have continued in the same vein. You know what they say, you have your whole life to find samples for your first album, and...

(also sampling laws)

I probably said this upthread but he's clearly made an effort to become a producer using modern tech that doesn't rely on sampling, but there are millions of those and it doesn't show off his most distinctive gifts (his ear and his digging).

RJD2 went the route of learning to play all the instruments and record them to sound like vintage samples...it still doesn't have the magic of his sample work, but it's way better than DJ Shadow's synth-based beats.

I've never seen him, so if it's cheap I guess I'd probably go just to see what it was like, although the new record is pretty weak. Just generic, tired beats.

I don't get sampling laws. Wouldn't rights holders want to price sample usage so that they can make money off them? I know it's complicated for a collage like Endtroducing but you'd think they'd have an incentive to figure out a scheme for assigning percentage of revenue so those works can be made and sold.

I don't think it's very codified, if you're doing it by the book you need to reach out to all the publishers and come to an agreement with each one. At the very least it's a big hassle that might end up with having to lose/replace/redo some samples, and then the artist probably isn't making much money from the record if it's entirely sample-based. But since no one makes money off records anymore, maybe he should just say fuck it and making Endtroducing 2?

The Private Press is still my favorite one btw (and maybe that was his interim solution, mostly sampling records not associated with major labels?).

Some interesting bits here: https://thequietus.com/articles/31624-dj-shadow-private-press-review-anniversary

He'd already set a few rules here: while, working on U.N.K.L.E.'s Psyence Fiction, he had allowed himself the leeway of using musicians to play things when sampling wasn't going to work, for The Private Press he refused to use any musical ingredients that didn't come from previously released records. The hugely influential Brainfreeze mix, made with Cut Chemist in 1999, found the pair only allowing themselves to use 7" 45rpm singles. Its all-45 follow-up, Product Placement, incorporated numerous 7"s released to promote some product or other, and recreated a fans' favourite sequence from Brainfreeze using different versions of the same tracks in a kind of "cover version" of part of the earlier mix.

The delight in accomplishing such absurdly, arbitrarily and unnecessarily difficult tasks was clear: so it was little surprise that there would be challenge he would set for himself here, and that it would be of another order of magnitude altogether. With the notable exception of its introductory cry of "What you gon' do now?", which comes from a 1977 United Artists release by The Whitney Family, on 'Monosyllabik' Shadow forced himself to make an entire track using only sounds he could make out of the first two bars of that privately pressed late-period funk 45. He began by cutting the two bars into 32 pieces, then set about attacking them in the studio, using only outboard gear and analogue equipment - no plug-ins or computers. Microphones were set up to record the sound being played in different ways from different speakers, then fed back through the system and spat out in new shapes, each to be reforged, sifted, rearranged and reconstructed in a process he compared to stop-motion animation.

He's never seemed interested in trying to do an Endtroducing 2. Which is okay because there were a bunch of other producers who tried to do it.

And that's the right attitude I think, it's just too bad he's not left with a fruitful alternative, apparently.

FWIW, re: ticket prices, the Webster Hall show is $35. If you purchase it online (via axs) they add $17 in fees. Webster Hall still runs a box office, but it's only open during evenings when they have a show going on (which thankfully is most evenings in general) - if go there when doors open (typically 6 or 7pm), you can get tickets for upcoming shows without paying those additional fees.

I only started doing this in the past year or two, and the savings really add up. The only indoor venue I've gone to that doesn't do this is City Winery (only members get fees waived). Anyway, the show's four months away, so I doubt it'll sell out imminently.