Hip Hop Hump Days #8: DJ Shadow – Endtroducing (1996)

A common criticism levelled at DJs is that they’re essentially just playing music someone else has made.

Big deal. Some people choose to express themselves creatively via a set of turntables instead of picking up a guitar. No one’s pretending to be Jimmy Page here.

DJ Shadow has taken this concept one step further by using someone else’s music to make music of his own. And by that, I don’t mean he’s just lifted a familiar old vocal sample and stuck it over a drum machine and then tried to pass it off as his own.

Nope. He’s dug deep in the dusty crates of record shops, thrift stores and garage sales to find the elements that make up almost the entirety of ‘Endtroducing’. Drums, pianos, strings, guitars, basslines, snatches of dialogue… they’ve all been painstakingly extracted from these forgotten slabs of vinyl and then looped, manipulated or generally reconstructed to create something completely different.

The result is one of the most ground-breaking, cinematic-sounding examples of instrumental hip hop you will ever encounter. ‘Endtroducing’ is a record that many have tried to emulate (even Shadow himself has struggled to match it) but no one has yet come close to capturing its widescreen atmosphere and creative genius.

Opening with ‘Best Foot Forward’, a 48-second sound collage of hip hop samples, the album takes a decidedly eerie turn almost from the word go with second track (and arguable highlight) ‘Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt’ conjuring up images of being chased through an endless, rapidly darkening forest by an unseen force, soundtracked by an emotive piano loop, slightly sinister female choir and interview snippets.

Shadow’s penchant for cutting up and then painstakingly rebuilding beats is evident throughout, particularly on ‘Stem/Long Stem’, where industrial machine-gun drums tear mercilessly through gentle strings and harp, and ‘The Number Song’, in which percussion becomes the lead instrument. On ‘Napalm Brain-Scatter Brain’, drums slowed down to a dreamlike pace evolve into sprawling jungle-style rhythms which, in turn, give way to mellow strings and delicately plucked guitar: the calm AFTER the storm, if you will.

As complex as this may sound on paper, Shadow’s method appears to be taking a relatively simple idea and then gradually adding layers of colour and texture as the track progresses. For example, ‘Organ Donor’ (for the definitive version of this track, check out the ‘Pre-Emptive Strike’ compilation) revolves around a hypnotic two-finger organ riff punctuated by a subtle, vibrating bassline and an unashamedly funky drummer. ‘Midnight In A Perfect World’ is based around a synth loop sampled from Pekka Pohjola’s ‘The Madness Subsides’, seasoned with haunting hints of piano from David Axelrod’s ‘The Human Abstract’ and multi-layered drums, while seemingly disembodied female vocals fade in and out across the airwaves.

The album is broken up with little interludes which, while considerably shorter than the full tracks, are no less atmospheric. ‘Transmission 1’, ‘Transmission 2’ and ‘Transmission 3’ are particularly disturbing, sounding like distress signals from hell transmitted through a detuned radio (in fact, they sample dialogue and effects from the film ‘Prince of Darkness’). ‘Transmission 3’, which rounds off the album, also borrows the familiar and equally unsettling “It is happening again” line spoken by the giant in Twin Peaks during one of Agent Cooper’s visions. There are warmer moments too, such as ‘Why Hip Hop Sucks In ‘96’, a G-funk workout lasting less than a minute which ends with a knowing voice exclaiming “it’s the money” (see what he did there?), and an untitled track in which an unidentified man talks about a girl having eyes “as big as Jolly Ranchers” over a laidback blues-funk background.

‘Endtroducing’ demonstrated that a hip hop record didn’t need to rely on vocals – it was about the attitude, the ideas and the method (2006’s bitterly disappointing ‘The Outsider’ was widely criticised for focusing too heavily on guest vocalists and relegating the music to second place).

However, while forward-thinking in its approach and realisation, ‘Endtroducing’ also serves as something of a history lesson, going full circle to recapture hip hop’s formative years in the early to mid-70s, when DJs such as Kool Herc would play just the percussion elements of records, missing out the vocals, to create something new – even going as far as to buy two copies of a record so that he could stretch out those breaks. As Herc stood behind the turntables at those parties in the Bronx 40 years ago, he couldn’t possibly have envisaged that his sonic experiments would go on to inspire a global movement which, in turn, would give birth to one of the most important albums of the 90s.

‘Endtroducing’ continues this proud legacy. Those dusty junk shop records are the orchestra and DJ Shadow is composer and conductor combined. Encore.