Music Arcades: DJ Shadow: Endtroducing

Music about collecting music. Kind of. Shadow shows off the arcane corners of his vinyl collection. Wikipedia lists some of the samples. I thought I heard something from Forever Autumn in there, but I guess it must have been something much hipper that just sounded like Forever Autumn.

Shadow compiled this by spending a lot of time in record shops and then stitching little pieces of these records together in ProTools, with help from his friend Dan. That's what I read in Eliot Wilder's book about the album. Yep, I know, you're not supposed to find out about music by reading books. Scouring crates of vinyl is OK if you're a music nerd. Picking things up from radio, TV, or — best of all — via your friends is the most socially acceptable way. But reading book is only one step short of doing a Further Education course on record collecting.

Still, that's my main — my only — source. Endtroducing didn't register on my radar when it came out, and didn't until nearly a decade later when the the book and the 'deluxe' two-CD issue came out. I got them both around the same time, hoping that each would inspire me to explore the other further. The book starts very poorly, though: until last weekend I hadn't got past page 33. There's some tiresome autobiography — the kind of thing that's irritating on a blog, but in a book?! Then there are those references to Burroughs, Derrida and Baudrillard that are intended to portray the book's subject as culturally and intellectually radical, but serve only to betray that the writer hasn't referred directly or at any length to Burroughs, Derrida or Baudrillard. Having skimmed further to page 78, it gets better, by virtue of switching to an extended interview with DJ Shadow (Josh Davis). This covers the lead up to Endtroducing, and then to a track-by-track account, which I'm still only part-way through.

[During that paragraph, our Prime Minister resigned. Over the past few days, I've come round to thinking that a Liberal-Conservative tie-up was the best option — hoping that the former will save us from the ugly bits of the latter, but won't actually save the latter, come the next election. From where I'm looking, politicians of all parties have acted responsibly these last five days; the media have not.]

Wikipedia says, slightly confusingly, that Entroducing "is noted by Guinness World Records for being one of the first instrumental albums created entirely from samples of other records" (my italics). That's now a little micro-genre of its own. Contrary to what Eliot Wilder would like to us to believe, Entroducing's approach to sampling has none of the subversive intent that Plunderphonics has. Neither does it have the subtle intricacies of John Wall's work (which predates Entroducing by a few years). But it takes a few hip-hop beats and presents them in a context that middle-aged white folks with rimless glasses find palatable — and worthy of reading books about.