The Arrival: DJ Shadow

This is a series of interviews with our favorite electronic music artists, celebrating the Arrival of THUMP, and made possible by the new Heineken Star Bottle. In this edition: DJ Shadow. For more arrivals check here. 

DJ Shadow won’t admit to being DJ Shadow. Every time I mentioned his fame or critical acclaim, the soft-spoken producer would look sheepishly down at the table, letting his baseball cap shade his eyes. He wouldn’t even say the word “success,” instead preferring to use the phrase “contributions.”

And yet, Shadow is an undisputed veteran—an expert archeologist who’s been digging up lost sounds from forgotten records, and assembling them into complex (and catchy) aural collages for the last two decades. In 1996, his seminal album Entroducing….. entered history books as the first album made from pre-existing recordings. It also became an immediate hip-hop classic—although some purists got their panties in a bunch about whether you could even call it hip-hop.

Today, everyone can tell you their favorite DJ Shadow story, whether it was making out in the backseat to “Building Steam With A Grain of Salt,” or getting stoned at sunrise to “What Does Your Soul Look Like.” And that’s one of the best things about Shadow: that NoCal turntable nerds and Southern frat boys alike get little hearts in their eyes while talking about his impact on their lives.   

But appealing to a mass audience is the least of DJ Shadow’s concerns, as he revealed during our hour-long conversation before his recent show at Brooklyn venue Output. We discussed what he actually cares about… and why he has such a hard time hearing nice things about himself. 

THUMP: How did you first get started?
I didn’t get into DJing because I wanted to entertain. I still don’t really consider myself an entertainer.

Why not?
I feel like entertainers are beholden to the whims of the audience. Pretentious or not, I consider myself an artist. I’ve always linked performing with a jazzercise party, where the DJ has to lead the audience in this [gestures around wildly] way. I can’t do that. I was a bedroom DJ. It took me a long time to get over the nerves and lack of self-confidence. I tried to avoid playing live for as long as I could.

How long were you able to hold out for?
The first time I ever played in front of an audience was in 1987. I was fourteen, and was invited by one of my mentors—a guy named Oras Washington—to do a scratch exposition at a Black Family Day.

Were you nervous about messing up?
The record I was trying to cue was skipping in the groove, and in the meantime, Oras’ record finished. So my debut was marred from the very beginning.

What happened next?
He was like, “Step aside, let me handle this.” And once he got it going again, I started scratching on LL Cool J’s “Rock the Bells”. You just never know what will happen when you’re playing live. I was playing at the Shrine Auditorium in LA recently, and I don’t think it was used to the kind of bass that contemporary music has. Because pieces of plaster were raining down from the roof.

But that’s pretty epic though. You literally brought the house down. If you dread performing so much, what do you do to get into the right mindset?
As I’ve gotten older, it’s all about energy conservation. Before, I’d rent a car and drive to some other city to look for records before driving back. So I’d be tired from doing all that. But now I just rest as much as possible. It’s not very glamorous, but it’s essential for survival.

What else do you do before a show?
Sometimes circumstances can make you frustrated, like maybe you didn’t get to eat that day because someone fucked up. But I’ve always thought it was misguided to get angry with the audience. That’s not to say that sometimes you have to yell at them to do what you want them to do.

What do you want them to do?
Sometimes you’re at a show dropping new music, and the audience will look around like, “Am I allowed to be into this?” And you just need to get on them, like “This is what’s happening. This is why you should care. Whatever bullshit you’re on, join me, and lets have fun.”

When did you realize that you had to communicate with your audience in order to this kind of reciprocal energy out of them?
It changed when I started doing big festivals, like Radiohead’s OK Computer tour in ’97. It was unusual back then to have a DJ like myself on the bill—and I wanted to compete with any band, so people wouldn’t have reduced expectations. I also wanted to give more of a context to my music.

And now you have people like Dan Deacon who actually gives the audience very specific instructions on what to do, like “Form a circle!”
It’s funny, I was talking to Davey D, who was one of the first to write about hip-hop in the Bay Area, about Consolidated, who do punk, techno and hip-hop all mixed up together. And he said they used to just stop and talk to the audience for an hour. That kind of harkens back to punk days, where a lead singer will address a political issue in the middle of the set. You get a genuine, unscripted moment, which is nice.

Were there any DJs who helped shape your collaborative attitude towards live performances?
My style is a composite of everyone I’ve seen and played with. I’ve on tour with people like DJ Krush who had a completely unique perspective. He was in Tokyo, looking into LA and New York. He was an outsider like I was.

Do you still feel like an outsider?
Sometimes, but not in a “woe is me” way. I try to be different, and sometimes people aren’t aligned with that. It’s in those moments that your resolve is tested. It’s like, damn, I want people to like me, but at the same time, I want to stay true to my views on the discipline. If you don’t have true conviction, you’re just like everybody else.

I’m actually the same age that you were when Endtroducing….. came out. Do you remember what your mindset was like back then?
I was living in London just before Endtroducing…..came out, but a week before the album came out, I went home. So I was back in my crappy apartment, where people didn’t know anything about me. It wasn’t an instantaneous thing. It was actually a slow burn.

Why do you think that album did so well in the UK?
It’s such a small country, and the impact was so profound that it was like a generational thing, where everybody of a certain age group was involved. In the States, just a segment of the population was interested. That’s why I think my music will always resonate more in the UK. It was a moment that you can’t replicate.

Do you get nostalgic about those early days?
What I miss most about that time is we all felt like we were doing something. There was a lot of attention on the Bay Area back then, whether it was Dan the Automator, the Invisible Skratch Piklz, Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples, or myself. We all felt like we were trying to make a difference.

When you saw how much of an impact Endtroducing….. was making, did you feel like, “Hell yeah, I’ve made it”?
For every compliment, I’m waiting for the insult. There’s no such thing as figuring it all out. That’s the only truism I’ve learned over the years.

Did you at least feel like you’d accomplished something significant?
At that time, hip-hop was trying to protect its “pure core” against the onslaught of corporate money, Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer—all this stuff was perceived as a threat. So it was a difficult time to do something different.

Dude, stop being so humble. There must have been a moment when you looked around and realized that your life had changed.
Obviously it’s ridiculous if you don’t recognize your suc-… what you’ve contributed. But I have a built-in mechanism that doesn’t allow me to… okay, there this one time, in the late 90s, I was in East London, leaving the studio, and this guy stopped and was like, “You’re DJ Shadow right?” And I said, “Nope.” And he goes, “Oh, but you are. That’s a shame.” And he kept walking, as if to say, “I liked your stuff, but you come off as a prat.”

You have no way of knowing that’s what he meant.
I feel like I know the type of dude he was. And I don’t want to feel that again—like I wasn’t as cool or down to earth as I should be. I’d let it get to my head for the briefest of moments, and I regretted it. It’s not for me anyway.

What’s not for you?
I do what I do because I genuinely want to be a part of creating something that affects people.

And you have.
In some instances, I mean…

Just accept it! Just say, “Yes, I have.”
Yeah, but…[sighs]. Okay, yeah. I have.

Thank you.

The Arrival series is made possible by the new Heineken Star Bottle