Out of the Shadow

But with his latest album, The Outsider, Shadow has altered his familiar, non-threatening musical stance, recasting himself as a hip-hop visionary and embracing the bay's upstart hyphy movement. With that bold move, he runs the risk of alienating his faithful devotees, but also stands to gain untold legions of new listeners. Will his audacious gambit result in a fanboy backlash? Or is he leading the vanguard of an international breakthrough for Bay Area music? Like pioneering comic book writer Will Eisner might say, only the Shadow knows.

On the surface, the notion of trip hop's greatest icon joining forces with the hyphy movement would seem a puzzling one. However, "anyone who really knows his tastes knows that Shadow is a huge fan of gangsta rap, especially from the bay, and always has been," says music journalist Oliver Wang. "Will he lose some fans? Possibly," Wang speculates. "Any time an artist reinvents him or herself, there's always that risk."

Many of Shadow's longtime fans are indeed upset that he saw fit to change his musical direction after more than a decade of churning out lush, beautiful, atmospheric trip-hop soundscapes and the occasional warm and fuzzy alt hip-hop single. But now he's being called a "hyphie (sic) cockrider" and worse by belligerent bloggers, who can't understand why their hero degraded himself and sullied his stellar legacy by working with Bay Area rap artists like E-40, the Federation, Turf Talk, Keak Da Sneak, and Nump.

Shadow gallantly defends his rep, pointing out that he's always been a fan of Bay Area artists and, furthermore, he started his career working with local rappers, so why shouldn't he be allowed to continue that tradition? Although he admits he "totally lost touch with bay music" between 1996 and 2002 — the period when he blew up internationally — he casually name-checks local rap classics like Lil Bruce's "Mobbin' in My Old School," an obvious precursor to hyphy that bigs up classic American muscle cars (called "scrapers" in contemporary parlance).

Shadow's reintroduction to the local scene began around 2002, when he moved his home studio to the Mission District and found himself listening during his commute to KMEL, which had recently begun to play local artists again after a long drought. Inspired by the production work of Rick Rock, a Fairfield-based producer considered the architect of the uptempo, energetic hyphy sound, Shadow decided to make a Bay Area record, one that would be, as he puts it, "deceptively simple." He enlisted rappers Keak Da Sneak and Turf Talk for what would become The Outsider's kickoff single, "3 Freaks" — an almost industrial-sounding, pulse-pounding jam whose chorus repeats the rappers' names until it becomes a hypnotic mantra: turf-talk-and-keak-da-sneak/ turf-talk-and-keak-da-sneak/ turf-talk-and-keak-da-sneak!!!!

"I heard of his name, but I wasn't too, too familiar with his music," says Turf Talk, an E-40 protege who's generated enough local buzz to spill over into national write-ups (for XXL and the New York Times). Turf pays Shadow perhaps the ultimate compliment, in thug-speak: "I heard he was a factor."

Shadow explained to the rappers that he wanted to go in a different direction with his sound, and as Turf relates, "everything just fell into place when we got into the studio." Shadow was a little reluctant to release the song as a single initially. The finished track was "slappin'," Turf exclaims, "I was like, man, you gotta put this on the radio. ASAP."

With numerous successful international tours, producing classic songs like Latryx's "Lady Don't Tek No" and his own "High Noon," and solid, though not astounding, record sales (Endtroducing notched platinum status in the U.K., moving in excess of 100,000 units), Shadow had etched out a comfortable niche for himself — Too Short and E-40 are the only other Bay Area hip-hop artists signed to major-label deals throughout the past decade. But Shadow never had a song included on local turf-rap mixtapes, or warranted radio play on "hot urban" commercial stations until "3 Freaks." As his Web site notes, "'3 Freaks' was a song that was inspired by the bay, made for the bay, and embraced (at least initially) by the bay."

However, electronic music heads who'd found their bliss with the intricate use of samples in songs like "Midnight in a Perfect World" and "What Does Your Soul Look Like" felt perturbed, even betrayed. To them, "3 Freaks" sounded like ignorant "garbage shit rap" unworthy of being affiliated with Shadow; blogosphere-circulated rumors that even more hyphy songs were to follow on his new album agitated them further.

As Internet chat room discussions heated up (the threads can be viewed at DJShadow.com and Solesides.com), opinions about Shadow's stylistic shift overflowed into open resentment — paralleling the initial unhappiness among Greenwich Village hipsters over Bob Dylan's sea change from acoustic folk to electric rock 'n' roll in the mid-'60s, not to mention the kvetching among bop fans when Miles Davis ushered in jazz-fusion with Bitches Brew and Live-Evil.

Rather than attempt to squash the beef by kowtowing to popular sentiment, or making apologies, a defiant Shadow lashed out at his critics on his personal blog. Downplaying his detractors as a "couple of disgruntled bloggers," he said, "It's hard for me to take some 30-year-old dude from New Jersey or wherever seriously when he tries to critique a culture and music he knows nothing about."