DJ Shadow, the turntablist don and electronic experimentalist born Josh Davis, helped to invent a new genre when his debut album Endtroducing…’s distinctive brand of instrumental hip-hop and adventurous sampling came to be known as trip-hop. Soon, the term was being applied to anything that was vaguely chill-sounding and down-tempo, the sort of music you might hear in Costa waiting for your chai latte, and DJ Shadow was not too happy about it.
As he told this writer a few years ago, he can recall the point when he first began coming across the term used to describe genre he had birthed. “When I would be in London, all of us in Mo’ Wax would be together,” he said, referring to the groundbreaking label that released Endtroducing…. “We’d looking at the music press that had come in that week. We saw ourselves as upstarts, we didn’t want to fit into any scene, we didn’t want to make it easy for our listeners, or our fans or followers. We didn’t want to do the predictable thing. And when trip-hop became a term, we all derided it and turned our nose up at it and just thought it was not anything we wanted to be a part of.”
Soon after, he continued, the watered-down copycats arrived. “When you started seeing compilations come out like This Is Trip-Hop or The Sound Of Trip Hop or whatever, and we play it and just kind be like, ‘This is embarrassing, this is just terrible.’ I was just reviled by it and I don’t know how much of it was inspired by my stuff. I usually heard stuff that, frankly, reminded me more of maybe Massive Attack or Portishead or maybe Nightmares On Wax or something and that’s not to denigrate any of those groups because I like all of them. But I feel like I can’t really sit here and claim that a lot of people were listening to my stuff and making generic versions of it.”
It’s better to go back to the source. Here’s a trip-hop cut (sorry Josh!) that was never topped, one of the best tracks from DJ Shadow’s gamechanging debut:
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