To be a successful DJ you have to know where to look and how to listen. Since he first broke through with 1996’s era-defining Endtroducing....., we’ve seen many images of DJ Shadow prowling shops for records (or in the case of the album’s cover, friends of his). He’s become an authority on vinyl culture, and in films like 2001’s Scratch, the artist born Josh Davis talks about searching for lost sounds and rescuing them from oblivion. A forthcoming mini-doc, DJ Shadow: Lost and Found, fills out the picture since, showing how he transformed that record-digger impulse into a long and varied career, leading to last year’s ambitious double album, Our Pathetic Age. While these documents show what it means to spend your life scouring bins for bits of sonic gold, they can’t convey the art of listening, how Davis hears magic in a piece of music that others might have missed.
Speaking to Davis, 48, on the phone from his Bay Area home last month, I realized listening works differently for someone who has built their life around sounds found in a record groove. When he hears music, he’s not focusing on his own enjoyment; he wants to know where it comes from, how it’s put together, and how he might filter it through his own sensibility, whether in a DJ set or his own work. Listening and producing are two parts of one process. Not surprisingly, Davis took our invitation to discuss the music of his life quite seriously. “I didn’t want it to be revisionist in any way,” he said. “I wanted to try and hold to the format, at least in my mind, of picking things that were fresh and new when they came out.”
Various Artists: Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack
Josh Davis: It was a pivotal year in my family’s trajectory. After my mom divorced my dad, we were bouncing around remote parts of Northern California. Sometimes we’d be living in a house for two weeks, sometimes two months. We probably moved 11 times over the course of two years. It was dark and fraught with the unknown: Are we gonna be staying here? Are we leaving again? In 1977, we settled in Davis, California, and that’s where I ended up living for 20 years. Everything seemed bright, like we had arrived in some sort of a civilization as opposed to these tiny towns.
I remember other songs before the age of 5, and records that were in the family collection, but Saturday Night Fever was so omnipresent. I became aware for the first time of smash hit records, records that really moved the needle culturally, and you just couldn’t escape it. Kids at school were talking about it, you’d hear it in cars passing by. I remember Saturday Night Fever playing, and my mom asking me which songs I liked. I said the Yvonne Elliman track, “If I Can’t Have You.” Back then, I had no idea James Gadson played drums on that track, but when I eventually met him later on, I was a fan of his and knew a lot about his career. It just goes to show you never stop learning.
Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five: “The Message”
I had a little second-hand transistor AM radio, and I was able to get KFRC, which, in the mid- to late-’60s, slightly before FM, was king in terms of breaking music. KFRC broke all the big San Francisco records at the time, like Jefferson Airplane and Sly and the Family Stone. But by sometime in the late ’70s, early ’80s, they switched to being a soul station. They played Lakeside, Kool and the Gang, the Gap Band, Rick James. At some point, they went, “Okay, we hear this rap stuff is breaking on the East Coast, we’ll give it a try.” Because “The Message” was bubbling on the R&B chart at that time.
They played “The Message,” and I had never heard lyrics in a song talking about the reality of life in the street. It was stark and bleak-sounding. To me, it just sounded like the truth, where everything else I was listening to sounded like an illusion. It seemed like something really important. I had a little portable cassette player I’d hold up to the TV or the radio and just record music or TV shows or sound effects or whatever, and I remember reaching over to record that song when I was supposed to be falling asleep. That’s how I was able to listen to that song over and over and over again. I only heard it [on the radio] a few times. I don’t know if the Bay Area was ready for that record yet.
Where I lived in the Central Valley of California, the nearest city was Sacramento, and basically all through the ’80s it was classic rock—never-ending sludge. I was really cynical, I was raised to be suspicious of the media as it pertained to music. And probably because we didn’t have a lot of money, there was always somebody in the family who was trying to tear down celebrities or people that lived in a way that we weren’t familiar with. So I didn’t identify with rock and roll. After “The Message,” I heard “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa, and that’s when I started thinking, “Okay, there’s music out there for me, I just don’t know how to get it.” That’s when I started asking my dad to take me to Tower Records.
Public Enemy: “Rebel Without a Pause”
From sixth grade on, I was doing odd jobs and paper routes. I wanted money to buy comic books and baseball cards—I was a collector from day one, basically. By the time I was 15, I would have $10 a week to spend, and I could get two 12-inches or one LP. My friend Stan had a similar budget, so we would coordinate with each other: “Let’s make sure we don’t buy the same record so we can dub them off each other. I’m gonna get this, you get that.” My dad had visitation every two weeks on the weekend, so I would go to San Jose and be privy to a different distribution network of records. Since it was much closer to the Bay Area, San Jose had bigger stores, more demand for hip-hop. I remember coming back from visiting my dad one time and talking with Stan on the phone. He bought the 12-inch for Public Enemy’s “You’re Gonna Get Yours,” and “Rebel Without a Pause” is on the B-side, and he’s like, “Wait till you hear it.”
I went over to his house and it was that moment*—*when you hear a record that ignites something in you that never dies. When I heard the intro, I think it’s Jesse Jackson talking and it goes into the [screech]—we didn’t know what that sound was at that time. We couldn’t tell it was a saxophone, we didn’t know about the J.B.’s “The Grunt.” We just knew it was noise. Within the first five seconds of it playing, once the beat dropped and Chuck D is like, “Yes,” we were like, “This is us. I don’t know what all these other kids want, but this is what we want. This is our shit.” It was this feeling of validation. We were fans of the first album [Yo! Bum Rush the Show], but we felt like it went over everyone’s head. I knew they were going to get it right. And to this day, I call it my “Public Enemy feeling.” That’s what I’m always searching for when I’m listening to music or looking for stuff to DJ. I ask myself: “What do I want to represent? What do I feel comfortable getting behind?”
Gang Starr: Daily Operation
It never came out of my tape deck. Me and my man Stan were huge Gang Starr fans from the beginning. [By the early ’90s] you were starting to sense the wheels coming off a little bit with New York hip-hop. But I knew Gang Star weren’t gonna throw some shitty hip-house song on the end of their record, or do this ultra-fast, dance-y-dance-y rap stuff that everybody else had started to do. I know they’re not gonna let me down. Hearing “Take It Personal” and the whole mood of it, it was again that sense of validation, after all the energy I put into following these guys and defending them. No, Guru isn’t boring—that’s his style. Everything about it is just confident, it’s different but it’s super dope. And you know that Premier is gonna come with it.
For about the next four years, [DJ Premier] just couldn’t miss. Everything he did for everybody else—Group Home, Jeru, everybody—I wouldn’t even need to hear it, I’d just buy it, and not only that, buy two. Out of all the records that came out in 1992, Pharcyde’s [Bizarre Ride II the Far Side] and Gang Starr were the two where I went, “Okay, if I’m gonna go out, I’m going out holding these two records.”
Radiohead: OK Computer
I was living in England part-time and doing all this production and having some notoriety. And I had met Radiohead in late ’96 or early ’97 when we both ended up doing a free gig for this magazine, Dazed & Confused. I didn’t really know much about Radiohead other than hearing a couple of their songs from The Bends in the air, and really liking them. I had seen the video for “Creep” and really liked that, too. When I met them, they told me they were really huge fans of Endtroducing....., and that was surprising to hear, because at that time rock and whatever we were doing didn’t mix all that much.
James [Lavelle] and I were already working on the UNKLE record [1998’s Psyence Fiction], and he really liked Radiohead. I remember us driving from Davis to the Bay Area and listening to this advance cassette of OK Computer, and we both were like, “Oh, this is it. This is what we want to do.”
They started doing interviews and going on record saying they were inspired by Endtroducing..... and then they asked me to open for them in the UK. So when I think of 1997, I just really think of that album and what it meant to James and I. It gave us this aspirational challenge: Can we make music and videos that are this evocative? For a few years there, it felt like a genuine camaraderie between what we were doing and what they were doing.
DJ Shadow: “Six Days”
To this day it’s difficult for me to grasp how much of a mark my music left or didn’t leave, but I knew there were people ready to receive whatever I put out next, and I never saw it as a burden. I went from doing Endtroducing..... to doing the UNKLE thing to doing a ton of production and just following what seemed interesting to me at the time. And it didn’t seem interesting to me for quite a while to sit down and do another album.
And then it felt it very important, and I put everything I had into it. [After absorbing] these incredible influences from living in the UK and doing these tours, now it was time to make music. By 2002, when I was wrapping up that album [The Private Press], it was the first time I noticed that I had no desire to seek outside influence. I need tons of inspiration during certain times, and then other times I need to just put it all back in the closet and get to work. I really lived and breathed working on that record for nine months.
From the moment you start working on a song to the moment you finish a song, you probably have to make a thousand decisions. At any point in the process, if you make the wrong decision, it’s gonna send the track in a different direction. It could be an arrangement decision, a mix decision, should this hi-hat be panned at 7 o’clock or 10 o’clock? “Six Days” was the first time I ever made a song where I played the song back, front to finish, and there was not a single thing I would change. And it was a really exhilarating feeling, because it definitely doesn’t happen often.
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UGK: “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)” [ft. Outkast]
I remember where I was on the freeway when I heard it. At this time I was listening to a lot of radio—I wanted to know what the local R&B and rap stations were playing. I had kids now, my personal situation had changed a lot, and I wasn’t going out to clubs as much. I wasn’t doing as many tours where I was being exposed to new music. So, it became really important to me to not lose touch. This song represents something that had been bubbling really since the end of the ’90s for me, since like the first time I heard Juvenile and Hot Boys and all the Cash Money stuff.
My first cross-country road trip to look for records was in ’93, and I went to New Orleans. I went into a couple of mom-and-pop shops and saw all these rap tapes by people like DJ Jimi, and I just remember being like, “Goddamn, what is all this stuff?” I didn’t recognize a single name. People were coming in every 30 seconds and being like, “Let me get that DJ Jimi!” And that was really the first time I became aware that the South, they have their own thing going on, they can supply their own music. I became enamored with the Southern rap sound—groups like Three 6 Mafia; the crunk era, like Lil Jon and David Banner. When Three 6 Mafia came out with “Stay Fly,” me and a couple of friends were like, “This is as good as it gets. Incredible writing.”
So when “Int’l Players Anthem” came on the radio, I had been a UGK fan for a hot minute. I had no idea that DJ Paul and Juicy J produced it, but what was so crazy about it—I thought the version that they played [on the radio] was some kind of weird bootleg. It was the weirdest arrangement to me. André 3000 raps for two minutes without any drums, and then the song comes in. To me, this is the last great Southern rap anthem of that era. They’re all in the video—Three 6 Mafia, 8Ball & MJG, UGK—and it has that sound, which I love, where it’s like sweet classic soul but with those drums. I did a song with Run the Jewels called “Kings and Queens” and it’s very much inspired by that Three 6 Mafia production sound.
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Flosstradamus: “Rollup (Baauer Remix)”
Between 2008 and 2012, I was working on music and mostly only hearing my music, it was like being caught in a feedback loop. I wasn’t into rock stuff at this point. I was aware of dubstep, but it didn’t feel like my thing. I went out to a club in San Francisco and was hearing stuff for the first time that I was into. My friend would be like, “Oh yeah, that’s Hudson Mohawke,” or whatever. What struck me was the production—I would hear these big monster dubstep records and think, I don’t know how to do this. How are they doing this? It freaks you out a little bit, when you pride yourself on keeping up with techniques. It had come into its own as a vocabulary and a language all its own.
I heard somebody play “Rollup (Baauer Remix)” maybe in June of that year, and like everybody else I thought, I gotta get that. By the time Christmas came along, I got asked to play right before Diplo at this giant warehouse party on New Year’s Eve, and having that song, I was like, “No matter what I do, when I drop this, it’s curtains.” It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it, or what experiences you’ve had—when you are in front of thousands of kids and you drop a record and the entire place goes batshit crazy, it’s such a feeling of power.
DJ Shadow: “Systematic” [ft. Nas]
The last four years have seemed like such a blur. I basically went from one album into an EP right into another double album. And anytime I wasn’t working on music I was on the road. When I think about 2017, I think about forcing myself not to get stale production-wise. I was on Mass Appeal—still am—and Nas is a co-owner of the label. Based on the reception The Mountain Will Fall got, he was like, “Okay, do something for me.” I know Nas well enough to know that if he’s not feeling it he’ll just be like, “Nah.” Sometimes as a producer you need a challenge, and I took it seriously and I spent a month or so putting this track together. I didn’t want to send it unless I was at least 75 percent sure that he was gonna fuck with it and, fortunately, he did. It’s another one of those rare songs that I play back and I really wouldn’t change anything.
