Order the remastered vinyl edition of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing here. In this article, we’ll answer a few questions about why the album remains such a touchstone. It was a construct that DJ Shadow helped deconstruct one sample at a time. Endtroducing was a hip-hop record that irrevocably blurred the lines between genres, exposing the reality that genre never really existed. Hip-hop, electronic, ambient, jazz, rock, classical, and more coalesce. In the expansive, ethereal, and meditative world that is Endtroducing, The Meters coexist with Tangerine Dream (“Changeling”), Pink Floyd plays on the same bill with Jimmy Smith (“The Number Song”). ![]() ![]() The fact that Shadow was able to keep every musical fragment in his brain almost makes him seem more like a conduit than a composer. Producers had sampled for years, and perhaps the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique rivals the number of sources on Endtroducing, but nothing before Endtroducing had its sonic scope. After years of bending over record crates and inhaling dust from decades-old vinyl in the basement of the Sacramento record store, Joshua Davis pulled hundreds of samples together to create a record that reimagined and expanded the possibilities of the art form. To listen to DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing is to hear sampling approached as a spiritual practice, an aural document of one man’s lifelong reverence for hip-hop and his communion with the history of recorded music.
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