THE HIPPEST HOP EVER
David Bennun
Guardian 13/9/96
DJ Shadow
Endtroducing ...
* * * * * [out of five stars]
Since Vanilla Ice queered the pitch, this is probably the only way a
white guy from California can make his mark in hip-hop : record
instrumentals under the imprimatur of DJ Shadow. Very apt, that. The
message is as clear as the identity is not: it doesn't matter who's
behind the name. Hip-hop albums are inevitably caught up with the public
personas of their creators. Not this one. And in other ways, too, it's
like no other hip hop album you've ever heard.
Shadow (his driving licence, mundanely, would read Josh Davia) is the
jewel in the crown of Mo'Wax. a record label whose excruciating hipness
has inflated its reputationfar beyond its substantial assets. Since its
inception, Mo'Wax has been at the forefrom of trip-hop, a genre that
emerged from a haze of slo-mo atmospherics and marijuana smoke to become
depressingly formulaic, and whose leading lights are Portishead, a highly
unwilling, Tricky, and Shadow himself.
Shadow has yet to invade the mainstream, which is why, while his fellow
innovators have been mimicked to the point of parody, he stands alone.
His records so far have been discreetly dazzling. Last year saw the
release of What Does Your Soul Look Like, a 40 minute four-part single
which on anybody else's part would have been an appalling indulgence.
Every moment of it was beautiful and thrilling. Endtroducing .... his
first LP, is every bit as good.
While all around him are knocking together callously functional music to
smoke to, Shadow lovingly creates exquisite tracks from the simplest
elements. His breakbeats are slow and stately, but never ponderous. He
overlays them with chords of such limpid dignity they could have come
from Handel, and to judge by the breadth of his sources they probably
have. Even where the rhythms become hectic - The Number Song or
Stem/Long Stem - the tracks retain a placid grace, like swans gliing
across a still surface with their feet frantically paddling beneath them.
Shadow favours organs and choral samples and manages to make them sound
as dignified as they have ever done. His music is astonishingly
expressive, all the more for its precision and obvious craftmanship.
Rather than a technician, Shadow is an artist who happens to posess
perfect technique.
Listen to the funky yet majestic single Midnight In A Perfect orld; to
Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt, with piano from Nyman or Glass,
voice-overs from television and background vocals from Elysium; to the
haunted Changeling; to the starker-than-Old-Skool menace of Napalm
Brain/Scatter Brain.
You will swiftly realise that Endtroducing ... is not only one of the
most daring and original albums of recent times, but also one of the
loveliest. Nor does it suffer from the po-faced self-importance of many
of its contemporaries - check out Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96, whose title is
longer than its deadpan lyric: "It's the money". Who knows what evil
lurks in the mind of rappers? DJ Shadow knows.
In fact, hip-hop doesn't suck in '96. It's thriving, and Shadow is a
prime example. But even if that doesn't interest you in the slightest,
you should hear this album. Genius is a hideously abused term, and
believe me, I use it sparingly. This is genius.