Out of the Shadow

For the Bay Area rappers, going overseas and playing before crowds of 6,000-10,000 in large arenas nightly was an eye-opening experience, to say the least. "(Shadow) told me, Ôman, we gon' go on tour,' and at the time, none of us really thought it was true," Turf Talk says. "He took us out there and we were able to see something that maybe we'll never see again in our life, you know what I mean? That's big."

Turf recalls one particularly cathartic moment, when he and Mistah F.A.B. were looking out over the city of Barcelona, from a hotel pool on the 16th floor, thousands of miles and, it seemed, several dimensions removed from 'hood life. "We was tripping out, man, thanking God. From where we come from, from what I done did, and what I done seen, it's big to know that now I'm doing something positive."

Another tour highlight was the Wireless Festival in London, where Shadow and crew shared a bill with pop music A-listers like Gnarls Barkley, Damian Marley, and Pharrell and hung out with jet-setting supermodels like Paris Hilton and Devon Aoki. Shadow's tour diary had more to say on the subject: "We looked like a pack of dead-end kids from the other side of the tracks, with everyone turfed-out in Bay Area tees and Girbauds."

Shadow's blog could barely contain his excitement over being the first to introduce hyphy to Europe. "I felt proud to have contributed to the movement by broadening everyone's horizons and allowing the world to see what the Bay has to offer," he wrote.

While The Outsider will certainly go down in history as Shadow's most ambivalently received, even controversial, album to date, not all of the chat room discussions regarding it were negative; some compared Shadow's sea change to the similar stylistic transitions of Miles, the Beatles, and Charlie Parker; one blogger even made an analogy between Endtroducing and The Outsider and Picasso's blue and cubist periods. Despite the online bickering, nobody really has anything bad to say about Shadow personally; while he does hip-hop music, he's not a domestic abuser or murderer, but a married man with two kids whose idea of relaxation is to go on record-collecting road trips. And while hyphy might not be welcomed by some, it plays well in the bay, as does his introducing local artists to European audiences. The one valid criticism that could be levied at Shadow prior to this album is that he makes hip hop for white audiences, and he's addressed that in a major way with The Outsider without being too overt about it. As he says, "I love rap music. I don't want to imitate, mimic, or water it down. I want to keep the continuum moving."

DJ Shadow plays with Massive Attack Sept. 22 at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley.