DJ Shadow

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It's only fitting that DJ Shadow's latest album, Private Press (MCA) should begin and end with the sound of static. After all, that crackle of dust particles and vinyl shavings is found on most of Shadow's source materials for music-making: analog LPs. With his 1996, Endtroducing . . . , Shadow made this love explicit by taking the cover photo at one of his local record spots -- the mammoth K St. Records in Sacramento, California -- a scant 20 minute drive from his childhood home: Davis, California. This is the same location that filmmaker Doug Pray filmed Shadow for the segment on "Beat Digging" for Pray's excellent DJ documentary Scratch. In it, Pray . . . er . . . shadows Shadow as he walks around the claustrophobic basement of K Street, literally caved in by stalagmites of records jutting up from the dusty floor. On camera, Shadow explains why the labor to scour through hundreds, if not thousands of useless records is so worthwhile, sharing that records represent the hopes and fantasies of many would-be stars, the vast majority of whom sink back into obscurity -- if they ever left to begin with. In Shadow's words, places like K Street represent, "a basement of broken dreams".

Don't take this the wrong way, but it's comments like this that make me more interested in what Shadow has to say than in his music. It's not that his music isn't amazing, compelling, intricate, or [insert your platitude here] -- it is. Really. Trust me. But I've found in nearly 10 years of writing on culture that no matter how articulate someone is as a musician, rapper, filmmaker, visual artist, etc., they usually have a fair amount of trouble stringing actual words together to express themselves. It makes sense -- if these people could translate their thoughts, ideas and emotions into language, they likely wouldn't need to make art. But the artist otherwise known as Josh Davis is as thoughtful and insightful as any person I've ever interviewed before and for once, I'd much rather share his thoughts on art than my own thoughts on his art.

The following was taken from a February 2002 interview with Davis at his home studio in Mill Valley, CA. Portions have been used for a cover story on DJ Shadow in the May issue of URB Magazine, but the vast majority of the following has never been printed.

PopMatters: How you been?

Josh Davis: Everything's been cool, as far as the album is concerned . . . two days ago I finished. Done. I actually ended up with about 85 minutes worth of music. But the album is about 60 minutes and I think that's just perfect for me. It's like just, just right. So, for the first time in my life I have B-sides.

PM: You didn't have extra material on Endtroducing . . . ?

JD: Not really . . . because usually, it takes me so long to do every song . . . if I don't feel like a track's going to work out, there isn't much point in me wasting a couple weeks getting it to where it might be finished. With Entroducing . . . , the only track that I started and abandoned was "Red Bus Needs to Leave" which I eventually ended up finishing after the album was done as a B-side for America and it's just a kind of a throw away little two minute thing, but, at the time, I thought it represented a different facet of all the other stuff I was doing on the album.

PM: Do you have a title picked out for the new album yet?

JD: I haven't told anybody other than the labels basically, but it's called The Private Press and I don't know if you know what Private Press Records are, but I just like the title because it . . . you don't have to be a record person to have the title mean something to you.

PM: What does it mean to you?

JD: The title to me . . . In the last few years, my listening tastes have gone off in a lot of different, interesting avenues, and it's really helped to keep me fresh. [I've been listening to] psychedelic and early '80s, new wave. Gangster stuff. What I do basically is go to Rasputin's [Record Store] and just clean out their 50 cent bins. Three records out of 50 will stick with me and I'll assimilate them into the collection and put them on tape and they just become songs I like. My average tapes nowadays will consist of about 30% funk, 35% hip hop, 25% whatever. I can't listen to 90 minutes of funk no more and I can't really listen to like 90 minutes of New Yorker [hip-hop].

So anyway, Private Press. I just started really becoming fascinated by certain type of records that are private press records. It's kind of hard to explain, but his is a perfect example of private press records. [Josh pulls a record off the shelf and hands it over]. It's a guy who wakes up one day and says, "I've really got something here, I'm gonna make myself a record, and put it out, you know, with my own little label. I'm going to put a really interesting photo of me on that."

PM: How many copies would be made of these?

JD: Anywhere from 50 to 1,000, or so. [Josh's cat wanders in, interrupting the interview by knocking over the microphone].

JD: Lots of times she's the destructive character, she's going to knock everything over, I guarantee it.

PM: Has there ever been a problem with her scratching your records?

JD: No she's pretty good about that 'cause we have a lot of scratching posts in the house. And whenever, she sort of starts to get the feeling like she might want to do it early on, I just sort of swat her. You know gently, but she got the picture. She was great, I mean she house-trained herself instantly. It was pretty amazing.

PM: You were saying, about private press records.

JD: (Fetches a small batch of 7"s) What these are are Recordio discs. And what they are is . . . they're all 78s. Bascially, you could walk into an arcade in the '30s and '40s and '50s and like, they have photo booths, you could cut your own records and so what you usually find, "hey so and so, they weather's fine, and we'll be coming home Saturday" so they're letters on wax and I became really fascinated. They're very hard to find and nobody stocks them because they don't know what to do with them. There's all kinds of labels, they're not all called Recordios. This is my favorite one of all time, it was done in Richmond, CA. [Plays "Letter From Home", the beginning of Private Press].

PM: What draws you to these?

JD: They have a really ghostly quality to them and they're just fascinating for me. They're very eerie as well. I have one that says "NTHS drinking song" and it's like all these drunk teenagers singing into this thing. You get a lot of them like, "well, you're off to boot camp now and you go show Hitler what we're made of". It's pretty ill. I always wonder how they make their way to where ever it is I come to find them because they're so personal.

PM: So much of what you seem to listen to these days -- and this is reflected on the album -- is more trippy, moody psychedelic rock and with Brainfreeze and Product Placement, you showed off your funk side. Where does hip-hop still fit into your life?

JD: It's interesting. I mean, the one thing I would say though is: hip-hop will always be my life music, and by that I mean . . . I remember hearing someone saying whatever you were rocking when you were 17 and were rebelling against the world and thinking you were gonna change the world with, whatever music you were listening to, that's your life music. Nothing will ever come close to that again. And for me that's true. I mean, the excitement of hearing, you know, like [Public Enemy's] "Rebel Without a Pause" for the first time? I almost cried. You know? There'll never be that again.

And so I'll always have that hip-hop paradigm through which I view everything. And I think that's what hip-hop is to me. That's when I finally realized when people say that hip-hop is a religion. The religion is simply what you see the world through. So in that respect, hip-hop is that to me. But I also would say, once you acknowledge that, and once that dawns on you, then I think you're sort of free to let it go and explore other things. It's sort of like reading the same book over and over gain.

PM: What got you into hip-hop to begin with?

JD: Probably Run DMC's [self-titled] first album. By that point, I knew what rap was. I knew what hip-hop was. In '83, '84, there was the initial media blitz where you'd see . . . footage of the Human Beat-box when they were still called the Disco Three, performing on the street, and this news crew filming them. I was just getting the impression that I was missing something really important, so fortunately my dad would be in San Jose, and when I went there, he took me to San Francisco and to Pier 39. Back then the break-dancers used to set up their boxes out in front of Pier 39, and people would throw change. And basically, whatever was coming out of those boxes, I ran home or ran to Tower and asked my dad to buy me two 12-inches, which at that time would've been $8 total, or $9. And I remember, that's how I first heard "Roxanne, Roxanne" -- [I] was at a Burger King on Fillmore. I was eating in there with my dad and this kid came in playing the song, and I just thought, "oh my God".

PM: Do you ever feel that way about your own music?

JD: One of my favorite things I've ever done was the "What Does Your Soul Look Like?" EP. When I finished that, I felt like "this is the best I'll ever do". And I felt sort of sad, in the sense that, I like, shit, I peaked already. That's just how I felt and I'm glad I've felt like that since.

As far as things that came out of that . . . "High Noon". I often question if I'll ever do anything as good as that in my opinion. One out of every five or ten songs I do, I feel like, "ok, that one I nailed." And one out of every five of those, I feel like is the best I've ever achieved and feel like "High Noon" was definitely one of those.

PM: I know this is an obvious question but how was working on the new album different from what you did with Endtroducing . . .

JD: I definitely avoided doing this album for a while. I could have started a year earlier than I did but I kept accepting side projects, probably as a way to avoid the inevitable. That was a source of a lot of stress because the longer I delayed starting work on it, the more your confidence starts to come into question.

When I started working on it, I told myself, "ok, I really need to change the way I do what I do, to make it sound different". I thought that would mean live instrumentation and all sorts of stuff. [But] I was staying in England, in this small flat, and I just had my MPC [sampler], a turntable and stuff that I was finding as I was living there, and in the process of coming up with stuff doing that, I realized that I did have a lot more to say with samples and I realized there was a lot of ground for me to still cover in terms of technique, sonic cohesiveness and source material and everything else. Once I got into the meat of the album, it took shape rather quickly.

PM: How long did it actually take you to complete Private Press?

JD: All the songs on this album were conceived between a six month period, between October of 2000 and roughly March or April of 2001. And then it's just been the process of finishing those songs ever since then. I forced myself to come up with new ways to do what I do and what helped was introducing some new pieces of equipment into my gear. One thing that I did was - I used to be limited by the pad space on one MPC -- so I started two, MIDI-ed together. This is not a new concept -- [Public Enemy's] Bomb Squad used to do that with SP1200s but it was just a huge leap. There's just that much more going on, that much more variety in texture and sound within each track.

PM: What can listeners expect?

JD: The theme is non-linear which was going to be the name of the album, but I thought it was too techie sounding. Non-linear was the theme that I pasted up here for a long time, that whenever I hit a wall and felt like I was covering familiar ground, I would look up and go, "ok, what's the next dimension?"

As with every record I've ever done, I just try to take a song and maximize what it's supposed to be. If I'm making a song that seems like it wants to be a sad song, just make it brutally sad. If I'm doing a song that seems kind of detached, futuristic and kooky, make it really detached, really futuristic, really kooky. That's what I get absorbed in with each song. And I think much more than with Endtroducing . . . -- and I could be wrong, only time will tell -- I do think each song is just vastly different from the last.

PM: Now that you've finished this album, are you satisfied with where your career and life are?