THE SET LIST:SIX DAYS

Day 11. A Song From Your Favorite Band.
Six Days, DJ Shadow.

There was a piece in SPIN about Soundboys, a late-90s strain of music hipster slightly more anal than trainspotters, whose fixation was to forage for and voraciously consume the strange, the esoteric, the obscure, from French pop to Japanese noise to No Wave and whatever else lay inbetween. Packrats of odd pop. An impulse after my own heart. I dug it, nursed it even, but lacked perhaps the stamina and certainly the access and the means to pursue it with any degree of vigor. Soundboys prefer their hoard in vinyl, for starters. I dabbled, of course, but within my means and the pace which it dictated, which makes dabble a bit of an understatement. Torrents cranked things up a little but we all know how downloads are not the same thing.

Josh Davis a.k.a. DJ Shadow was like some proto-Soundboy. And all those pictures of him trawling through stacks of vinyl was a soft-sell with traction. I was terribly attracted, at first, to what he was, more than what he sounded like. I wanted to be trawling through those stacks of vinyl myself. I'm not sure if it colored the way I listened to his music, not that I cared if it did. I doubt, though. Endtroducing, and subsequently The Private Press, has its own sonic mileage, a sui generis double-whammy. The subtext of what he was pulling off, which would occur to me much much later of course, was really a subversion of the God/Man schism between the pop star (they who make records) and the pop fan (us who buy the records) reverting the power back to us. And DJ Shadow is, technically, one of us, a nonmusician taking musicmaking into his own hands. It’s a will to power as pro-active, as exciting, as Eno’s pop oeuvre , as punk, as hip-hop. Which is what Davis has always insisted he's doing. Abstract hip hop, he calls it, but that's really only in aura. Try David Axelrod for a more accurate referent. Try Ennio Morricone. Were I to humor him, and if De La Soul's 3 Ft.High and Rising was the record I popped my hip-hop cherry with, then Endtroducing was the fuck of no return. New adventures in hi-fi, indeed.

The title of Building Steam From A Grain of Salt, from Endtroducing, could be a precis of his process - - -the hearing of new worlds in the mashing up of old ones. Fragments - - - random vinyl arcana, forgotten pop, abandoned rhythms - - - that don't come off fragmentary, but rather, cohesive and whole. But its catharsis relied on knowing that this cohesive whole was made up of disparate, and sometimes opponent, parts, if not necessarily how or even what. Process is product something like that. It's more or less the same thing with Gregg Gillis a.k.a. Girltalk, except it's easier to recognize the parts that make up his mashups, and that recognition is crucial to his manifesto, to his aesthetic. With DJ Shadow, it was the reverse. SIx Days, from The Private Press, mashes up Colonel Bagshot’s Six Day War with riffs from Dennis Olivieri’s I Cry In The Morning. It's magnificent. Ominous, exotic. And possibly my favorite DJ Shadow track barring Midnight In A Perfect World and Organ Donor. Having Wong Kar Wai direct the video sweetened the deal. More than that, though, I had stumbled on Colonel Bagshot because of it, and it was almost as if I'd been trawling through those stacks of vinyl myself. This is how it always is for me with DJ Shadow. Knowing there's a dearth of good shit sharking under my radar is my giddy music geek thrill. And his work really is the most intoxicating distillation of the whole Soundboy dynamic. Has fuck-all to do with hipster elitism and everything to do with the unique ecstasy of digging up buried treasure in my own backyard.