Still Unique After All These Years: DJ Shadow's 'Endtroducing.....' Turns 20

‘Endtroducing.....’ is the record that broke DJ Shadow, the Californian turntablist, in the US and UK, while simultaneously helping to define trip-hop; a uniquely ambient hip-hop subgenre. It’s an album that influenced a generation of producers and one that has been described as “trip-hop’s crowning achievement”. At 20, it remains in rude health.

DJ Shadow had already been performing and making beats in his native town of Davis for years by the time ‘Endtroducing.....’ dropped. A precocious scratch DJ and esoteric beat matcher, Shadow - born Joshua Davis - quickly became a staple of the town’s college radio station, KDVS, during his youth.

Interviewed by The Cut in 2012, Shadow described 1990 as “a pivotal year”. “I graduated high school and went in as a freshman college,” he said. “And being inspired by the likes of Rick Rubin starting Def Jam in their dorm room I was like: ‘OK, I’m ready now. I’m not living under the parents’ roof. I gotta start doing something and making some moves.’”

Those initial moves took him to KMEL in San Francisco, another radio station that would give him a platform, and resulted in further experimentation with four track mixes. Soon, he’d be contacted by The Source magazine and featured in the their Unsigned Hype column.

In 1991, he shelved any plans to get further into the vibrant DJ battle scene, where his west coast contemporaries Cut Chemist and Dan the Automator cut their teeth, after seeing DJ Qbert scratch in the West Coast DMC final. He told The Cut: “For the first time I remember being like: ‘I can’t do that. As a DJ I can’t do that and I’ll never be able to do that.’”

His creative focus turned to production and remixes that channelled samples from outside territories traditionally mined by hip-hop beat-makers. His mixtape found its way to Hollywood BASIC label head Dave Funkenklein, who asked Shadow to do a ‘Hollywood BASIC Megamix’: his first proper paying job in music. It was that and his work in remixing the first record by Zimbabwe Legit, another act signed by Funkenklein, that would bring him to the attention of James Lavelle, whose Mo’ Wax label would ultimately put out ‘Endtroducing…..’ and with whom Shadow would collaborate under the U.N.K.L.E umbrella.

Lavelle, who is the subject of a new documentary by Matthew Jones, saw that Shadow’s sound could be aligned with the burgeoning trip-hop scene of the mid ‘90s, which revolved around the southwest English city of Bristol and bands like Morcheeba, Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack.

Crucially, Shadow’s offering broadened trip-hop’s appeal. Its progenitors had been critically lauded and - certainly in Massive Attack’s case - commercially successful, but as a sound, it was in danger of becoming parochial. The American sensibility of ‘Endtroducing.....’ gave the sound transatlantic depth while also being a remarkable album in its own right.

It is a record of intense ambience and patient complexity, which was immediately recognised in the UK. It peaked at number 17 in the albums chart amid a wash of positive reviews. It took longer to land in America, but developed a cult following in the meantime.

Moreover, the album gave momentum to a whole generation of DJ-producers, from Bonobo, Four Tet and the Avalanches to the aforementioned Dan the Automator, whose album ’Handsome Boy Modeling School’ (a co-production with Prince Paul), is another gem of the era. ‘Endtroducing.....’ helped fashion a distinctive new intellectualism within hip-hop and a multicultural sound that broke away from the G-funk and gangsta rap that dominated the charts in the mid ‘90s.

This bullish approach to diversity appears to be at the creative epicentre of the record. After all, it’s an album that defiantly features the track Why Hip Hop Sucks in ‘96. That broad palette stems from an early interest in the diverse influences that flow together on The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel, an influential single released in 1981. “He uses disco, he uses rock, he uses children’s records,” Shadow told The Cut. “To me, that’s the template for everything I’ve ever done. Sometimes these rock critics will be like: ‘Why do you use rock, why do you use guitars?’ And it’s like: ‘Man, this is nothing new.’

“Going up the line, when you hear Jam Master Jay scratching Billy Squier and Mr Mix using all these comedy records, all that stuff informs you. De La Soul’s ‘Three Feet High and Rising’ comes out and they’re using everything but the kitchen sink. It kinda makes you go: ‘Oh, I was limiting myself only soul and funk or these few rock breaks, and now I can go out and look for all this stuff too.’”

But this cross-pollination did not stop at hip-hop and the record’s influence soon spread way beyond the turntable, reaching Radiohead as they worked on ‘OK Computer’. As Jeff Chang, one of the founders of the SoleSides label with DJ Shadow in the early ‘90s and later author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, put it in an interview with the Portland Phoenix:

“The first thing I remember was that it transformed the way rock bands produced their drum sound. From Oasis to Radiohead to Tortoise, bands started to have a more syncopated, New Orleans type of feel to their drums. I think that had a lot to do with the breaks and aesthetics that Shadow favoured and championed. ‘Endtroducing.....’ pushed hip-hop beyond the craft of making a song for the mix or the dance floor or the radio. It made it cool to be a DJ again and cool to be a record nerd."

But perhaps the album’s legacy lies not with the musicians it influenced, but in the continuing uniqueness of its sound when heard in 2016. ‘Endtroducing.....’ is an album built out of thousands of hours of crate digging. The effort amounts to a spiritual journey that feels alien in an age of streaming. It’s the emotional, tactile value of the sounds that drives its specialness and that is impossible to synthesise through #ThrowbackThursdays on Instagram accounts (although there are some excellent attempts out there).

“I think it’s OK to start asking that the internet develops a conscience and becomes a little more self-critical and self-aware,” Shadow told Time Out shortly after the release of ‘The Less You Know, the Better’ in 2011. “For the last 15 years we’ve been blindly accepting the fact that the internet is our saviour and at a certain point we have to ask for a little moderation here and a little conscience there. Maybe it’s OK to go out for several hours and leave your phone at home, look at things around you and remember what it’s like to not be linked in 24/7.”

‘Endtroducing…..’: 20th Anniversary Endtrospective Edition’ is out on October 28 through UMC/Island.

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