Soul Strut 100: # 31 - DJ Shadow - Endtroducing

[countmacula]

I found a DJ selling his records last weekend and I bought this record. I had never heard it before. I don't know how I avoided hearing it. Probably cause every white dude I knew who had been waving glow sticks and wearing Jnco's was telling me how great it was. So last weekend I put it on with an open mind and expected to hear a "classic" album. I played it all the way through and recognized a few songs from the Scratch Movie and some other random things but I didn't "get it". It was exactly what I thought it was gonna be, "bad white dude hip hop production." it sucks, he is way over rated.

 

[LoopDreams]

crabmongerfunk said:it was landmark at the time...at least in montreal where i was living when it came out...it was the one cd every damn person had no matter what genre of music or scene that person mostly into or whatever... within 6 months that record was all you ever heard at cafes and trendy boutiques.





almost 20 years later that record has not aged that well in my opinion (does anyone on here ever whip this one out?).




I was living in Mtl too at the time Shadow was big in the city, it seemed to fit the mood: dark and restless.

 

[GatorToof]

Kinda embarrassing being on here now. I thought the SS 100 was for real music music.





Waaaaahhambulance.

 

[Controller_7]

I know it's more cool to front on this shit now than it is to jock it, but there is some straight tripping in this thread.





Whether or not it sounds great today doesn't mean that it wasn't pretty major back in the day. You can argue against the musical content of the album by todays standards, but it's pretty much technically perfect in terms of sampling and programming. Yes, that brings up Steve Vai type comparisons of a virtuoso who just isnt listenable, but Shadow has plenty of heat in his catalog.





Countmacula and Gatortoof, what be dat rill shit?

 

[GatorToof]

Controller_7 said: in terms of sampling and programming.




Nuff said / do you work for Akai / Montage

 

[cai]

Mr. Attention said:What about it hasn't aged well? Which tracks? It's been a few years since I've listened to it in full, but the tracks I come back to ("Changeling", "Midnight", "Napalm", etc.) still sound good to me.




For me those jerky drum fills that sound like him holding down the 'note repeat' button on the drums put it in a certain time period for me. I'm now no longer interested in listening to people flexing those kind of programming skillz. Thats pretty much the only thing about the record that makes me cringe when i hear it.

 

[batmon]

"How come u dont like it as much as I do?"

 

[DOR]

GatorToof said:Kinda embarrassing being on here now. I thought the SS 100 was for real music music.





Waaaaahhambulance.







Just to note once again. This is a list of "Top 100 Soul Strut Related Records". Not OMG this is the definitive best music ever made list.








Take that shit to www.iamamusicsnob.com








I've never hated this record or particularly died in love for it (I do enjoy it tho). But to think this record wasn't a big discussion on this place since the beginning is odd.

 

[yuichi]

no doubt Entroducing was a game changer.

The above statement is truth.





But I listened to Private Press first.......and would probably put that album over Endtroducing.





Still, there's no denying the sheer impact it had on suburban and nerdy America about beat-digging for obscure records. Sure, there were pioneers doing that shit way before, but it opened doors for a whole different demographic of nerds.

 

[yuichi]

I can appreciate Krush's work, but it lacks a bit of movement. Depends on your mood.

This is true as well. And I like Krush's body of work, especially "Kakusei".

 

[DocMcCoy]

RAJ said:A lot of the REAL Josh talk is lost in the Waybackmachine.org Archives.





I recall a thread calling out all the samples on Private Press before it was even released.




I think that might have been me who started that thread. I was working at Universal at the time, and Josh was signed via their UK office. They were having trouble tracing some of the sample owners, and the head of legal & business knew I used to work at MCPS as an advisor in their sample clearance department and asked me if I might be able to help.





She gave me a couple of CD-Rs (which I still have somewhere) with the album tracks and the sampled songs, and an email from Josh with some pretty extensive notes, and asked me to try and find out whatever I could. At that point they were struggling to trace the Marc Z sample, the Soft Touch sample on Monosylabik - apparently Josh had already retained someone to track this down - and a few others, but pretty much all the big samples were on the list and the clearance process had started on many of them.





With hindsight, there was quite a bit of stuff on there that he presumably just didn't tell Universal about - David Wertman, most of the samples on Blood On The Motorway, probably a couple of other things. Like most music publishers, Universal had an unofficial don't-ask-don't-tell policy - anything an artist tells you about, you're obliged to clear (or attempt to) or else you're liable. If they don't tell you about it, the liability's on them. As I understood it, even back then Josh was concerned at the extent to which samples were eating into his royalties and was trying to minimise the impact on both his creativity and his bottom line. If your publishing advances are structured on how big the percentage of control you have on your album is, it's conceivable that you mightn't be as transparent as you could be. Either way, by the time I left Universal in 2008 (at which point I was actually directly involved in clearing samples), they were still negotiating buyouts and tying up clearances for shit on both Private Press and Endtroducing.





All I really remember about that thread were a few people getting salty and accusing me of blowing up spots, but all I was doing was letting the light in early on what would have been fairly common knowledge within a few months anyway.

 

[piedpiper]

It rarely gets a spin anymore, but I still like it.

 

[Burns]

On the backside of the album cover, there is a cat sitting on the records racks staring at the viewer, well my cat at the time {Grace - male cat, R.I.P.} decided to piss all over that side to mark his territory against that cat in the store. My copy has forever been tainted with urine and a sea-smoke cloud on the corner of the album. It doesn't really bother me because I never play that record.

 

[Mr. Attention]

cai said:For me those jerky drum fills that sound like him holding down the 'note repeat' button on the drums put it in a certain time period for me. I'm now no longer interested in listening to people flexing those kind of programming skillz. Thats pretty much the only thing about the record that makes me cringe when i hear it.

Yeah, there's a bit of flexing that hasn't aged as well as the rest of the album.





batmon said:"How come u dont like it as much as I do?"




Haha...okay. Just trying to get a full-formed opinion/argument instead of the usual "Oh this shit sucks and is overrated."

 

[white_tea]

The cover alone is so simple and makes me feel nostalgic for a time that was still a few years away from me having a cash flow that afforded me a turntable of my own. I can't say that I put it on much but I still love the mood of "What Does Your Soul Look Like" and "Midnight in a Perfect World" -- both of which I can enjoy listening to in the car at night.

 

[Duderonomy]

Great album. Agree with Controller7 in that I didn't really get it at first. It wasn't as "hip-hop" as some of his previous. I think the single he dropped on MoWax just before this was Hardcore (Instrumental) Hip-Hop





and I was expecting something with a similar mood. The opener Building Steam... is perhaps one of my least favourites from the album. It has great drums but the choral voices came off a little pretentious.





But... repeated listens got me into this. Maybe it's no mistake that this was on MoWax. To me it sits neatly amongst Portishead, Massive Attack, various Ninja Tune artists and a downbeat moody sound (aka the dreaded trip-hop) that a lot of UK artists were aspiring towards but none mastered better than Shadow. Aside from that, I can't see how anyone with an interest in digging or hip-hop or drums coudn't find something to marvel at in this album.

 

[asstro]

This thread made me go back and listen to Endtroducing for the first time in probably 10-12 years, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. People on this board, especially those who have been on here for many years, who are acting like this was no big deal are seriously revising history. Yes some of it sounds dated and pompous, but dismissing it outright retroactively is just silly. Shadow's had some undeniable skills as a sampler and arranger, and the best parts of this record will always be relevant on the Strut, at least in my mindgarden.





I do think the Steve Vai comparison is pretty spot on. Which would make Q-Bert's Wave Twisters a Yngwie Malmsteen record.

 

[DocMcCoy]

Although I think it still sounds pretty good, Midnight In A Perfect World in particular, perhaps one of the reasons it may not have aged well for some is the way so much of it quickly became the lazy music supe's default go-to record. I've heard Stem/Long Stem more times as a sound-bed on TV shows than I ever did from listening to the actual album. Even good music can get boring when you're hearing it involuntarily so often.





Of course, people were already making predominately sample-based music when Endtroducing came out, but it usually adhered much more rigidly to the structures and dynamics of hip-hop or dance music. Where this was different - and I've said as much on here before - is that this was more like head music in the realm of Pink Floyd or prog-rock generally. I reckon this is borne out by the way it caught on with the stoner crowd.





+1 for the clunky drum programming as well; one aspect of the record I never liked and the one major way in which it lagged behind what a lot of the drum 'n' bass dudes in the UK were already doing, for example. How much of that was to do with the tech he was using, I've no idea.

 

[jlee]

Like others have already said, this album was one that I at first didn't really get/understand, then turned into an album that meant a lot to me, and now stands as a piece of my music catalog that I recall with fondness, albeit rarely do I listen to it anymore.





What I think is more imperative to me is how this record, for better or worse, appeared to change the landscape of what a "hip-hop influenced" producer could make and sell. Especially for someone like myself who was at best only an avid fan of rap/hip-hop at the time, but didn't have any real experience with sampling/digging culture. I won't even claim to suggest that Shadow was the first/best to do it this way, but he was arguably the most exposed artist to change this landscape.





When this album originally came out, I had my own belief of how a person who was "hip-hop" was supposed to make beats and use samples -- and endtroducing did not align to that. So it took me a while to even really like this album. Then the pendulum swung for me probably too much on the other side, and I became enamored by this lot of producers (see Krush, Herbaliser, rjd2....etc.). Making just "beats" became boring to me, and it seemed more important to see how you could flip some never heard of folk/psyche album. It lead to a lot of interesting music and discussions, but in the end was something that took me away from that original love of "hip-hop" and I then took offense to such music--again the pendulum swinging the other way.





I have since very much come to terms with where I put this album in the pantheon of importance for me, but without a doubt it was definitely one of the albums that made me think about music and how much it meant to me.

 

[Electrode]

I might be the only person here who has not heard this album in full. Even so, I like it. Obscurity kicks ass!