Out of the Shadow

His rant continued: "I care about what hard-core fans think, but they lose me when they ask me to just repeat myself. I feel like if they understand Ôthe real me' the way they claim to, then they would understand why to ask me NOT to change and pursue my musical interests goes against everything I have ever stood for. Repeat Endtroducing over and over again? That was never, ever in the game plan. Fuck that. So I think it's time for certain fans to decide if they are fans of the album, or the artist."

To understand who the "real" DJ Shadow is, one has to time-travel back to the mid-'80s, when Josh Davis was an introverted teenager growing up in Davis, California. Obsessed with record collecting and hip hop even at an early age, he started bringing homemade tapes to jocks on the local college station, KDVS.

Oscar Jackson — better known to fans of political hip hop as Paris, the "Black Panther of Rap" — was hosting a graveyard shift show on KDVS when he first encountered Davis. The future superstar DJ was just a "pee-wee" then — 12 or 13 years old, in Jackson's estimation. Jackson remembers him as "a pretty quiet cat ... The DJ Shadow moniker fits his personality," he says. "That's not to say he doesn't have opinions."

In 1990 author Jeff Chang was a UC Davis student, and also hosted a show on KDVS (going by the name DJ Zen), when he first met Shadow. "He had a knowledge of the music not a lot of other people did at the time," he says — in part due to Shadow's father's record collection, which allowed him to identify obscure tunes like the Isaac Hayes song "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" looped by Public Enemy on "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos."

Shadow began bringing his own homemade mixes by the radio station. His mixtapes showed a diverse interest in music, frequently incorporating original breakbeats, as well as electro music's various offshoots: freestyle, Miami bass, and new wave — everything from 2 Live Crew to Debbie Deb to Depeche Mode. On one occasion, Chang recalls that Shadow brought him a Maxell cassette with a remix of Eric B & Rakim's "I Know You Got Soul." Chang played it on the air, and "after a minute or two, I started screaming, 'This is incredible!'"

In addition to figuring out how to scratch on a belt-driven JVC turntable with a straight tone arm, Shadow was experimenting with advanced production techniques. "He created this whole remix, four beats at a time for a four-minute song, and then had the audacity to try to figure out ways to flip that beat and create an actual song structure for it," Chang says. "That's how he created most of those early mixes ... I guess you'd call it mash-ups now."

Shadow's ambition pushed him to ever-further heights in the music industry; his talent has helped him stay there ever since. He quickly progressed from KMEL mix-shows to remix and production work for both domestic and overseas labels. In 1993 he became one of the mainstays of James Lavelle's influential Mo' Wax label, whose abstract takes on club music formed the basis for the trip-hop movement of the '90s. At the same time, he was making weird, funky hip hop with the Solesides (now known as Quannum) crew — Chief Xcel, Gift of Gab, Lateef, and Lyrics Born —whom he'd met, quite appropriately, while browsing the record stacks at KDVS.

In 1996, Shadow released Endtroducing (on Mo' Wax/A&M), the record that would make him a superstar. Released first in Europe, the English press went absolutely apeshit over it; when the album was released Stateside months later, so did the American media.

Endtroducing intellectualized hip hop by presenting the record as found-art object and making a strong case that sampling wasn't theft, but an art form in and of itself. "This was considered the Ph.D. on crate-digging," says Ben "Beni B" Nickleberry, a founder of the Bay Area Hip-Hop Coalition and owner of Oakland indie hip-hop label ABB. "It was a dissertation on sampling."

While other Northern California DJs (such as Quest, Apollo, and Q-Bert) were earning fame as turntablists for their scratching and beat-juggling prowess, Shadow had quietly developed into a composer. He wasn't just a DJ-cum-producer making simple sample loops, but someone who could take fragments of old records, blend them together, add his own special touches, and make them seem like entirely new songs.

Endtroducing also brought the underground record-collecting subculture known as crate-diggers into a much wider pop cultural sphere. Its cover depicts a blurry, unrecognizable Shadow along with two other renowned diggers — Beni B and Blackalicious' Chief Xcel — engaged in their favorite pursuit, flipping through stacks and stacks of ancient, obscure vinyl at some anonymous record outlet, in search of the dusky gem with the superlative drum break or über-funky horn riff that could then be sampled and looped.

"Prior to Shadow, crate-digging was largely thought of as an N.Y.C. hip-hop thing," explains Wang, a noted digger himself. "What Shadow did was bridge that subculture to the suburbs and really help fuel an interest in 'bedroom producers' the same way DJs like the Invisibl Skratch Piklz had helped broaden the interest in scratching."