On 13 September 1996, Tupac Shakur died after being shot four times during a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Gangsta rap took the music world by storm in the early ’90s and one of the genre’s biggest stars had paid the ultimate price for the violence that had spilled out of the songs and into the streets.
Just three days later, as the long search for 2Pac’s killer began, DJ Shadow – or Josh Davis as he’s known to his mum – released a record that showed a very different side to hip-hop.
While most other producers at the time were looping snippets of old records and turning them into beats for rappers to rhyme over, DJ Shadow used an Akai MPC60 MKII sampler to assemble the sprawling sonic collages that would become Endtroducing.
The result is both a landmark moment in contemporary music – it’s included in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first album to be composed entirely of sampled sounds – and one that contains some great tracks for testing your hi-fi system.
The vinyl record is very much the raw material that makes up Endtroducing so it’s only fitting that its opening track Best Foot Forward is a blur of scratches and vocal samples that introduce DJ Shadow to the world – this is, after all, his debut album.
Shadow’s collection of records is said to exceed 60,000, although considering that number has been kicking around for nearly 20 years it’s probably much more by now. Most of the samples you hear on Endtroducing come from albums he found trawling through the racks at Rare Records – the Sacramento shop seen on the album’s front cover.
Some of them are household names. Shadow’s crate-digging results in appearances on the album from Metallica (Orion from Master of Puppets), Pink Floyd’s On the Run (taken from studio footage featured in the theatrical cut of their Live at Pompeii concert film), and Bjork (Possibly Maybe from the Icelandic singer’s second album Post). But Shadow weaves them into his compositions so seamlessly that every track sounds like a completely original piece of work.
A lot of the other samples are more obscure. Building Steam With a Grain of Salt includes piano parts taken from I Feel a New Shadow by Jeremy Storch, who released a couple of albums in the early ’70s but doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page. Shadow transforms it into the basis for a slightly ominous-sounding track featuring a ghostly choir-like vocal and a stuttering drum breakdown that will test your system’s ability to stay composed when things get frantic.
There should be real depth and texture to the drone that permeates The Number Song before the rich, lively brass kicks in around halfway through, while Changeling is all spacey synths and a muscular bassline that will give the low-end something to think about.
Gently insistent cymbals should cut through the bassline on What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 4, with layers of mournful brass, subtle piano and twinkling percussion creating a dense soundscape that’ll just sound like a jumble of noise on sub-par equipment.
There should be a real sense of drama on Stem/Long Stem, which is one of many tracks on Endtroducing that wouldn’t sound out of place on a film score. Check out Shadow’s own Cops ’n’ Robbers remix of the song, which includes dialogue samples taken from Michael Mann’s Heat, to hear just how well the two go together.
Mutual Slump features a noise that sounds a bit like Chewbacca stubbing one of his big furry toes, so it’s quite apt that it also includes a vocal sample of a female voice asking if “you feel like Darth Vader”. Listen carefully and you should also be able to pick up some pretty skronky sax behind the spaced-out synths, while Organ Donor takes a Giorgio Moroder deep cut called Tears and almost turns it inside out. There should be real groove and momentum to that one when the drums kick in.
The album’s emotional epicentre is Midnight in a Perfect World. It extracts a piano part from David Axelrod’s The Human Abstract that manages to sound both melancholy and hopeful at the same time, combines it with more woozy synths, another obscure female vocal from the 1970s, and some big-beat drums to create another slice of atmospheric hip-hop that could hardly sound more different to what Biggie, 2Pac and co had spent the past few years making.
DJ Shadow called the album Endtroducing because he said it felt like he was signing off on a particular chapter in his early career, but really it was just the start of something much bigger.
MORE:
19 of the best hip-hop albums to test your speakers
Don’t Look Back in Anger at these classic 1996 tracks turning 30 this year
11 of the best instrumental test tracks to give your hi-fi a vocal-free workout
