A Look Back: Endtroducing...

I probably will not be able to do justice to the idea that I would like to express here, but anyways here it goes. I have been ruminating recently on the idea of nature vs. nurture in my musical evolution and subsequently about the music that helped form the basis of my current musical tastes. While not relying very heavily on the standard classics, Depeche Mode, Midnight Oil and Aerosmith resonate dimly in my childhood and hopefully sooner or later I will talk more about them.

The focus here though is a later album that was not only a watershed point in my musical tastes, but also I feel for popular music as a whole. DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... really enlightened me to the realm of turntablism and hip hop. Taking a broader approach, Endtroducing... as a true work of art, rather than a mere experiment or test, proclaimed the arrival of the retro sample in modern music and really in an early stage, the omnipresent mashup. DJ Shadow's ability to sew together dusty and obscure record samples into songs that are both, big beat, but also beautiful prove that sampling was here to stay. From hip hop mainstays like Talib Kweli and Timbaland, electronic artists like RJD2, and then peripheral artists such as Danger Mouse, who combine disparate musical elements, sampling has become central to what hipsters and popsters alike consider popular music. Rather than remaining an underground trend, turntables and sampling are mainstream and here to stay.

Well, thank you DJ Shadow for transforming how we define and interpret music. While covering and reinterpretations have existed forever, the idea of patchwork music as art was pretty novel and important. Eleven or so years later, we're still living in DJ Shadow's shadow.

DJ Shadow - Organ Donor (YSI) (filesavr)
DJ Shadow - Midnight in a Perfect World (YSI) (filesavr)