DJ Shadow - Endtroducing….. (1996)

There’s a certain feeling that I struggle to describe - this hazy melancholy, a lingering, foggy nostalgia - that has wafted through the life of my thoughts for as long as I can remember. It’s as familiar as it is otherworldy, as comforting as it is disorienting, as fleeting as it is persisting. It’s as if one took the haze from an underdeveloped polaroid, or the softly crackling static from an old record, and shrouded it over all memories of the past and visions of the future. It’s a feeling, a chronic temperament of the mind, that is impossibly difficult to pin down or describe, yet unmistakably there.

For me and for many other listeners, Endtroducing is the musical articulation of this feeling. There are others in the same lineage (Eno’s ambient works, MBV, Radiohead when they’re less pouty, Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, Burial, are some that come to mind), but Endtroducing is its purest form. Just listen to the aching, forlorn vocals of “Midnight in a Perfect World,” to the lonely saxophone, resurrected from the dead, in “What Does Your Soul Look Like Pt. 1/Blue Sky Revisit,” to the spattering breakbeats on “Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain” that dissolve into those eternal soul-calming strings, seeming to guide you hand in hand from the clamor of the here and now into the bliss of the afterlife, even to the nightmarish, paradoxically soothing transmissions from outer space. Listen, and if you share my pathology, perhaps you’ll know what I mean.

Landing in 1996, Endtroducing was heralded as a musical landmark. It was presumably the first album cut entirely from samples, turning on a generation of hip-hop backpackers and bedroom producers to the infinite possibilities buried in dusty record store crates around the world (without Endtroducing, would we have albums like “Since I Left You”? Would J.Dilla have received his muse? Would FlyLo and all our modern-day beatmakers, in turn, received theirs?).

It bridged musical genres and artistic mediums; not only hip-hop, but jazz, breakbeats, sound bites, IDM, funk, b-flick horror movies, jungle, guitar-driven rock all come crashing together, miraculously finding symphony in its halls. It still astounds me that the result is coherent, let alone sublime. Perhaps I blaspheme in saying this, but it was the musical and spiritual predecessor of OK Computer and Kid A, making clear the way the coming of my generation’s definitive band (Jonny Greenwood indeed credits Endtroducing as a major influence, and Thom Yorke would go on to collaborate with DJ Shadow on UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction). The list goes on.

But at the end of the day, there’s that feeling, y'know? A feeling, shared by a legion of kindred, misty-eyed listeners hopelessly wandering record store aisles across the world, distilled so perfectly through the music. In writing this, I’ve gone back to other Endtroducing reviews and am comforted to find a familiar struggle, professional critics and casual bloggers alike grasping at the words to describe the album’s strange powers, ultimately resigned to generalities and loose anecdote.

And maybe, I think to myself, this is only right. Endtroducing found an expression for a collective experience, a dim lens on the past and future, that words on the page can only articulate clumsily, vaguely, incompletely. 

And thinking this, I wonder, can an album possibly garner higher praise?