#018

I've been sitting on the idea that I have to say *something* about DJ Shadow for a long time now. It's an obligation I entirely put on myself, stemming from the fact that Endtroducing was a pillar of music discovery for me, and what I still consider one of my favorite albums. Back when I was a teen surfing forums and boards, I'd find myself in the YouTube playlists of random, anonymous people I knew nothing about and had no connection to. I think this had a lasting impact on me, as this is still my favorite way to discover music— no strings attached, no former knowledge, and no expectation placed on it. This was how I first heard Midnight In A Perfect World, and I was *immediately* converted to a fan of the guy. Picture me at 13? 14? listening to this on a cold mid-winter day, staring out my bedroom window behind my monitor. I felt like a true hip hop head, a stoic, a lone wolf against the world. The rogue white boy who would change everything.

Luckily, I can't say anything about Endtroducing that hasn't been exhaustively restated in Pitchfork reviews and r/hiphopheads posts for the last 15 years. So, here goes: Action Adventure is where I finally realized that Shadow really just wants to make trip-hop movie soundtracks. Should this have been pretty clear to me since The Mountain Will Fall? Definitely. Should it have been clear that the embarrassingly titled "Our Pathetic Age" would have been just OK? Totally! Do I keep coming to these releases like I'm about to hear Mutual Slump for the first time again? For some reason!

There's this false sense of security I fall into during the first ~20 minutes of any one of Mr. Davis' albums— I hear decent beats, I hear some interesting quirks, and then the track is over. It feels like these promising ideas just sort of slink out of view right as I think they're going somewhere. "Time and Space" is this album's worst offender of this for sure, at 8 minutes of a simply OK, spacey beat, but even then I can't really say I hated it. That's the problem: every single one of these albums have just sort of washed over me. It's all still sampled in interesting ways, (You Played Me and Free For All are huge standouts to me and will absolutely be going in this month's playlist,) but altogether these albums bleed into something really unmemorable.

favorite tracks: you played me, free for all, reflecting pool