How DJ Shadow went from crate digging to becoming a genre-defining hip-hop artist

The release of DJ Shadow's debut album Endtroducing..... in 1996 is considered a monumental moment in electronic music history.

Without knowing it, Shadow — whose real name is Joshua Paul Davis — would create a seismic shift in hip-hop.

Endtroducing..... broke a Guinness World Record as the first album created entirely from samples, and it's featured on Rolling Stone's list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

But for Shadow, the recognition of his debut was a slow process — even in Britain, where the American artist had crafted the record.

"Endtroducing..... is the type of record that I think probably feels, in retrospect, like this really big, massive release, [where] the response was immediate and it was a big seller," he tells Q's Tom Power. "It was a slow burn even in the U.K. and then, once the record came out … I moved back home to California in the same kind of not very glamorous apartment where I had been living….

"I was essentially a foreign artist in my own country."

Now, the DJ and producer has emerged from the post-pandemic world with a new project called Action Adventure, which creates new music from an eclectic set of tapes. 

Normalizing nostalgia

During the pandemic, Shadow struggled to listen to music, let alone make it. 

"I made a double album [and] it came out ready at the end of 2019. Then I never got to tour to support it because of what ended up happening with the pandemic," he remembers. "So I was feeling just really hollowed out. I didn't feel like I wanted to work for a long time."

"I didn't find myself wanting to listen to a lot of music during that time because I'm the type of person that imprints the music I listen to on what I'm experiencing, a time and a place in an emotional context."

But Shadow began to push past his sense of stasis after a friend pointed out an eBay auction online — up to 200 assorted cassette tapes from an old radio station that serviced the D.C./Baltimore area. 

For someone used to digging through record crates, the prospect was irresistible. 

"The person who had owned the tapes clearly had an affection for them, but basically said what a lot of people say at a certain point, which is, 'It's time to move them on,'" he recalls. "I couldn't confront the idea of making a new record after what happened to the last one until pouring myself into these tapes and being reminded of a time that just seemed a lot more simple."

"I'm never the type to only lean on nostalgia — I think it's a little bit seductive and a little bit corrupting. But in this case, it provided a link to a relationship with music that allowed me to move forward."

Embracing limitations

Now, Shadow is considered a rap and hip-hop pioneer, and has worked with acclaimed acts like Run the Jewels. But when he was growing up in the 1980s, the genre wasn't part of a mainstream music conversation.

"I think growing up in the suburbs, [I was] not very close to a major city and certainly not anywhere close to the epicenter of hip-hop culture all the way on the East Coast in New York and Philly and all these big cities," he says. 

Despite his limited means, he was able to piece together what this culture meant to him. 

"The mainstream music press despised it and refused to cover it, and there was, of course, no internet and very few books, very few resources," he remembers. "When I was able to get my hands on the music, it was this genuine just electricity, and I'm really grateful that I had to work so hard to find the music and to define scraps of the culture."

A lot of Shadow's work is famed for its prolific use of sampling. He's still a prolific record crate digger, but he maintains that it's a meditative state for him. 

"I think for me, and a couple of people that I'm really close to that occupy a similar space, the digging thing isn't something that we really like to jump up and down and talk about," he says. "In the early days, I didn't really have any peers that I could share information with or knowledge with.

"Even though that's changed … it's a personal space, and that's how I choose to interact with it."

The full interview with DJ Shadow is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with DJ Shadow produced by Lise Hosein.

Q28:37DJ Shadow: Endtroducing....., Action Adventure, and the joy of digging for records