TIME MACHINE
Dark star: Endtroducing… sleeve, DJ Shadow, AKA Josh Davis, digs into the crates;
Getty (8), Alamy
Psyence Fiction contributor Richard Ashcroft;
Shadow with Mo’Wax boss and UNKLE collaborator James Lavelle.
SEPTEMBER 1996 …DJ Shadow intros Endtroducing
SEPTEMBER 22
The UK album charts were having a late Britpop moment. Kula Shaker were at Number 1 with K, Oasis’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was at 7, and from 15 to 18 Pulp’s Different Class, Oasis’s Definitely Maybe and Suede’s Coming Up congregated headily in a former Number 1s club. Yet, nestled between them was a very different record: DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…, a cerebral hip-hop opus of depth, mystery and infinite nuance, had debuted and peaked at Number 17.
DJ Shadow, AKA Josh Davis of Davis, California, had his hip-hop epiphany as a pre-teen hearing Grandmaster Flash’s The Message. Fast forward to the early 1990s and, inspired by such fearless rap collage-ists as The Bomb Squad, Prince Paul and Double Dee & Steinski, he was behind the decks, scratching, sampling and hunting down his own breakbeats. After some independent releases and production jobs, in late ’92 he met James Lavelle of the London-based Mo’Wax label, who encouraged him to follow his own creative path and “pursue the weird shit”. “I wasn’t just trying to make a beat,” Shadow told Wax Poetics in 2020. “I was trying to tell a story within the instrumental form… to take people on a journey.”