Oct. 16, 2026
A Quick Salute To 30 Years Of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing
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Castro The Questlove Show hoped to record an episode with DJ Shadow while he was on the East Coast for the 30th-anniversary tour of Endtroducing….., but scheduling didn’t work out this time. Instead, Open Mike Eagle—who is performing on some of Shadow’s current tour dates—and Cousin Jake celebrate Shadow’s landmark debut, its lasting impact, and more.
They talk about crate-digging in dollar bins, Shadow’s little-known production work for Paris, Gift of Gab’s verse on “Midnight in a Perfect World,” and the difference between a beatmaker and a producer. They also explain why Shadow’s music demands active listening—not background or the dreaded “beats to study to.”
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:00:00
Speaker 1: The Questlove Show is a production of iHeartRadio.
00:00:16
Speaker 2: What's up, Open Mic Eagle?
00:00:17
Speaker 1: Man, I'm chilling. How are you, Cousin Jake, Cousin Brother Jake?
00:00:21
Speaker 2: I mean, we were talking about it a minute ago. I think it is that season of fatigue. No one's going to notice that today.
00:00:26
Speaker 1: No, never. We shouldn't even have brought it up.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: Are you a caffeine consumer?
00:00:33
Speaker 1: Oh, gosh. I am mostly caffeine. I don't even have blood anymore. How do you take your caffeine? I'm not sophisticated. So I have, you know, like a regular coffee maker.
00:00:44
Speaker 2: Drip coffee?
00:00:45
Speaker 1: Drip coffee. And I don't even put fancy stuff in it. I just buy ground stuff that smells good to me. Yeah. And I make a big pot of it every day and I drink it all by myself.
00:00:56
Speaker 2: Whole pot? I mean.
00:00:59
Speaker 1: So luckily, I don't have the sort of coffee maker that keeps it warm. Okay. Because if I did, then I probably would drink the whole pot. But after like cup three, it's like it starts getting lukewarm and I'm like, okay, I'm okay.
00:01:12
Speaker 2: So you're like on a ticking clock. You like got to consume it before it gets cold.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it takes, you know, because it's like a thermal sort of pot. So it keeps things relatively warm. But I like it hot. I like hot coffee.
00:01:26
Speaker 2: Like, is that the first thing you do?
00:01:28
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:01:29
Speaker 2: Nice.
00:01:29
Speaker 1: Wake up, put my coffee on.
00:01:32
Speaker 2: Just like in the commercials.
00:01:33
Speaker 1: Melon through the house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The best part of waking up, all of that. You know what I'm saying?
00:01:38
Speaker 2: And I do think that I do my best work. I have been somebody without an office for almost all of my life. So my office, it can be a crazy Dunkin' Donuts in Philadelphia with folks doing things they shouldn't in the bathroom. It can be a very styling and profiling boutique coffee shop.
00:02:05
Speaker 1: I like it all.
00:02:05
Speaker 2: But when it comes to stuff at home, I like the house to smell like it did at my grandfather's house. He was drinking that big plastic. He was even the type That would put the stuff that you just stirred into the coffee.
00:02:21
Speaker 1: The crystals? Yeah. Like Senka?
00:02:25
Speaker 2: I always laugh at that line in Fast Times at Ridgemont High where he says, I switched to Senka, so have a heart.
00:02:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, man.
00:02:33
Speaker 2: But I'm with you. I'm a classic person. I did have a strong cup of leftover coffee, like 30 minutes. So yeah, no one's going to know we're tired.
00:02:42
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:02:43
Speaker 2: Because we're both here and... to talk about DJ Shadow and the 30th anniversary, which has already happened, of introducing his debut album. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you're doing some touring work with Shadow right now.
00:02:58
Speaker 1: I am. I am on shows with DJ Shadow, two shows in Chicago and one in Nashville all next month. Wow.
00:03:06
Speaker 2: Have you ever worked with Shadow, performed with Shadow before?
00:03:09
Speaker 1: I have not. Never worked with him, never met him. This will all be a first.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: Awesome.
00:03:14
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:03:15
Speaker 2: Are you out there alone or is Kenny with you?
00:03:18
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm out there alone.
00:03:19
Speaker 2: Got you. That's really exciting. And to have, um, I would venture to bet that you probably started listening to DJ shadow at a time when you were living in Chicago.
00:03:28
Speaker 1: Well, I was living in Southern Illinois at the time. Okay. College is when I believe I was in college when introducing came out. I remember hearing it a lot in college. And it's funny because the thing that I remember most about it and, and, Follow me here, folks. Don't take this the wrong way. My main memory was being annoyed by it. Okay. And the reason was I and most of my friends were big freestyle rappers. And what this album sounded like to me at first was just a bunch of beats with no rappers on them. And so we would just rap over it all the time. We would just have it on. People would put it on and we would just rap and rap and rap and rap and rap. And I remember thinking of these beats, these pieces of music as beats that needed rap verses on them. Like I wanted to hear this as a rap album was like my main takeaway from the first time I was hearing it. But I was also a crazy person back then. Like I didn't I didn't. I was very dismissive of a lot of things very quickly if they didn't suit my very specific hip hop needs at the time. And so in looking back at the album now, I just see it so differently. I see it so different now. And it's like, I think I started to get it long before now. But in listening to it again now, I'm like, oh, right. I can see why this was as impactful as it was and see what I was missing about it. in that time because my needs were so specific.
00:05:09
Speaker 2: Interesting. And I mean, at that point, and I should say this, one of the reasons you and I are talking about it, we wanted to have Shadow on the Questlove show. And Shadow is West Coast based. He's on tour right now. I'm going to try to see him in Philly. Again, that's totally up to childcare and things going on, but we weren't able to make it happen. Amir was emphatic. He wanted Shadow on. Shadow was was adjusting things in his schedule and it just couldn't it couldn't happen. One of the things we've been trying to do, you know, on the full length episodes of the Questlove show is have them in studio. There are times I mean, you last year did yours virtually. We had Pasta Noose and George Ann and a few Manny Fresh that have been virtual. Whenever possible, we really try to wait till folks are in either New York or L.A., wherever the show is.
00:05:58
Speaker 1: To do these.
00:05:59
Speaker 2: And I couldn't let the anniversary slide, nor could you without talking about it. But my question to you is, when that album came out, were you up on Blackalicious or up on Soul Sides or any of that?
00:06:11
Speaker 1: So I was up on Blackalicious. I had heard some singles. So the majority of my rap listening at that time was either albums that I bought with my own money or friends of mine bought. And I had some DJ homies on campus too, because remember, this was all in college. And they would make tapes. And sometimes their tapes was just my listening diet because the only radio station around that played hip hop was me and my friends. We had a show on the campus station and we could, we would just play whatever we had in our collections. It didn't have curse words in it. That was everybody's hip hop diet came from us, except for the DJs. We knew who made tapes. So the DJ homie would put black delicious songs on tapes and literic songs. So like, you know, we'd hear that stuff and, and, That stuff was so thrilling. I mean, I came to be a part of the L.A. underground scene later, but really, aside from what I'd heard earlier with AC Alone and Micah 9 and Abstract Rude, the next wave that I heard, even before I heard of MERS and the Living Legends, I heard Blackalicious and Leterix. So I thought that stuff was mind-blowing to me. And then the same DJ homie would be the one that put uh, put shadow on the tables, you know, and, and he wanted us to just listen to it, but we were, we were knuckleheads. We were knuckleheads. We didn't have time to sit and listen to beats.
00:07:35
Speaker 2: Man, that's, uh, that's pretty cool. So with that album, I mean now, and you said that over the years, it's, it's like, I think any body of work should, I mean, things evolve our relationships with albums and songs and artists evolve, but how do you, um, How do you process it now?
00:07:54
Speaker 1: Well, it was a little bit after that time in my life because during that time in my life, generally, I had a hard time with any real instrumental music. I hadn't even really gotten deep into jazz yet at that point. It was like my listening diet was underground hip hop and like alt rock. And that was pretty much it. So my horizon started to expand a little bit after that to where I would discover a band like Stereolab, for instance. And I fell in love with Stereolab immediately just because their sense of melody just grabbed me by the shirt collar from the start. But I can listen to introducing now and hear like, oh, these are similar. You know, this blend of like orchestral jazz, almost breakbeat, like drum and bass. They're painting in a similar way as Stereolab. I just couldn't see it because the needle on introducing was a little bit more towards hip hop in a way where I was just hearing it as beats. But now I can hear it as, oh, these are dope compositions and really take them in that way.
00:09:18
Speaker 2: You know, Amir talks a lot on QLS about, you know, when It Takes a Nation of Millions came out and he realized the incredible added value of his parents' extensive record collection because, you know, of the samples, both, you know, first with Public Enemy and then a year later with Three Feet High and Rising and Paul's Boutique. And I had kind of a similar epiphany of like, you know, even the first time I heard Can I Kick It, like, My mom and my dad weren't Velvet Underground fans, but they had radio on where I knew Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side. So to hear that show up in a rap record was amazing to me because it just showed me of this connection of the music I grew up with and this whole vocabulary. And with Shadow, learning years later that, you know, Introducing is not an album comprised of samples that he was traveling the globe for. A lot of it was just sort of like you see him in the film Scratch in the basement. You know, I think at one point in that movie, in that documentary, he says like, One time I'm digging and I found some animal, like a dead bird down here. He is in the catacombs of record stores pulling from the dollar bin, so to speak, to grab these sources and give them new life. And I don't want to say forgotten records. And then when you see that film later and you understand, Shadow gets kind of deep with it. But he does so, and I really commend this, he's not pretentious about it at all. He didn't market it. It's like, I'm doing this. Just the album is made the way that it's made. And my appreciation, that idea of recycling sound into something new is brilliant. And I certainly didn't catch Introducing in 96. But I would have caught it in like 98, 99. That's around when I would have heard it too.
00:11:08
Speaker 1: I didn't realize it. Yeah, 96, right? 30 year anniversary. So I would have heard it around 98, 99 as well. Exactly.
00:11:13
Speaker 2: And it's funny because I was, you know, in a different way than you, but like I was that guy who was buying a lot of my first CDs and vinyl literally out of like the 50 cent dollar bins. And there's an album. You remember the artist out of San Francisco, Paris?
00:11:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:11:30
Speaker 2: I've interviewed him over the years. I always thought, you know, history doesn't give him the credit he deserves.
00:11:34
Speaker 1: I agree.
00:11:35
Speaker 2: But Shadow did a lot of programming on Paris' second album.
00:11:38
Speaker 1: I did not know that.
00:11:40
Speaker 2: And, you know, to learn that. And then again, I mean, you and I had a recent conversation about Vince Staples and these kind of pockets and compartments that people put things in. But to know that a producer like Shadow, who's, you know, working with Leterix and Blackalicious and the Soul Sides crew, is also doing things with an artist like Paris in the Bay. again, just shows that these boundaries don't exist. But I was a huge fan of that album. And then to see him making this very instrumental art stuff really grabbed me. And I always held The Gift of Gab as one of the greatest MCs. Oh, my God.
00:12:12
Speaker 1: Rest in peace, Gift of Gab. One of the most incredible. Yeah.
00:12:15
Speaker 2: And Midnight in a Perfect World, to me, even before the anniversary was upon us, I played that whole album. And it's one of the newer editions that has the remixes and the B-sides. But even my wife, who is not the biggest hip hop head, was like, this is incredible. The poetry and the layers of these sounds. And it's an album that has held up so well. And I have to say, first of all, have you ever seen Shadow live?
00:12:40
Speaker 1: No, I've never seen him live.
00:12:42
Speaker 2: I have wanted to every time. I've seen Cut Chemist a number of times.
00:12:46
Speaker 1: I've seen Cut Chemist quite a few times, too.
00:12:49
Speaker 2: I want to see this tour. I hope I can pull it off. And I wish you were part of the Philly date.
00:12:54
Speaker 1: I wish I was, too.
00:12:55
Speaker 2: But what do you... I mean, now... There's all these terms that didn't exist in the 90s or didn't seem to at least of trip hop and down tempo. And I'm sure they did, but they weren't in the lexicon where they are now. Instrumental hip hop. But like, what do you see as the impact of introducing on a genre or subgenre?
00:13:15
Speaker 1: Well, I think if you fast forward 20 years at least, like, I don't know if you get a flying lotus if there's no introducing. What it also made me remember was LP's Little Johnny from the Hospital instrumental album, which I also actually, even beyond this, I actually ignored that project at the time because I just wanted to hear a company flow. I didn't want to hear- For the same reasons, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Scratch Pickles were becoming very popular at that time. She had wave twisters and stuff.
00:13:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, Mix Master Mike had all those albums.
00:13:51
Speaker 1: Exactly. And so that was stuff that I was like, oh, I could get that because I was into the performance aspect of it. But when you listen to Shadow, what you hear is like instrumental music put together by somebody who is in hip hop, but like it's being put together with the care of like a film score. You know, like that level of attention brought to each song and then brought to the interludes between each songs. I mean, I don't think Prince Paul put out his first instrumental album until after this that came out.
00:14:28
Speaker 2: He might have the psychoanalysis, you mean?
00:14:30
Speaker 1: I guess there were a couple instrumental pieces. You're right, though. Like, yeah, you made me on psychoanalysis. Right. That could sit, that sits next to this. Right. You know what I'm saying? And you're right. It's like, there's a feeling. These pieces are put together with feeling and emotional intentions. to where you sit and listen to this thing like an experience. In a way that I can see now, I didn't have the attention span for then, but this is reflective of a ton of music that I love now. Like I said, not only Stereolab, which is something that developed on the other side of the world, which I don't know how direct the connection would be, but specifically like Flying Lotus and a lot of like the low-end theory LA beat scene and the jazz level attention to detail that they bring into instrumental albums that have jazz aesthetics, but still have this almost unspoken hip hop undercurrent. I feel like that points back to this. I don't know if there's anything earlier than this that would fit the bill.
00:15:38
Speaker 2: No, that's a really good point. It's so interesting to hear your perspective of wanting you know, A, wanting to rap on it, but B, at face value, wanting raps on it, you know? And what's interesting is, you know, I mentioned Gab on Introducing, and I think of like, you know, Blueprint and Copyright on RJD2' s Dead Ringer. And it's funny how these guys, and I know, you know, that was an album that I think was a next tentpole, you know, five or six years later in the space. But what's interesting when you mentioned that intentionality and liken it to jazz, it's almost like that era of jazz in the sixties where you might have a vocalist on one or two tracks as you're listening, it hits extra hard and shadow definitely with his crew, with Lateef and lyrics born and yeah, the whole crew, they, they did that. And it really like when you're listening to that album, you hunger for the raps, not because, but like the, the words hit different when you've just had 30 minutes without. And I think there's something to be said for that. And, definitely in these days where everything, we live in a shuffle culture. I know people aren't carrying iPods anymore, but everybody's playlisting. So to have a lean back experience, and I know you make lean back albums, but I'm curious of like, and I know you don't know, but I mean, is this one of those scenarios where he plays the album in sequence on tour or not?
00:17:01
Speaker 1: That's a great question. And I'll be really interested to see that. I feel like whenever I go see artists play their classic album and they don't play it in sequence. I'm always a little surprised. And this is a case specifically where because there's not many words on it, I don't know if people are going to hunger to hear it in sequence in the same way. I think he might have a little more room to not disappoint anybody if he played it out of sequence for this one. But it is put together so intentionally that it might be hard for him not to.
00:17:42
Speaker 2: You know, I always, I, and it was one of the questions I was going to try to nudge Amir to ask. I, there was that period of time. I mean, you know, where shadows did some stuff with deaf jokes, you know, he's done some stuff with Fonte. I mean, on his own albums, he's had albums that have had more vocal guests, but I hunger, um, for some more MC collaborations and shadows and shadows, uh, career. Not to say that he hasn't given us enough, but I'm always curious what he's up to, especially in the wake of a tour like this.
00:18:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, because I think, and this might be what I've been trying to say, and I think I might have actually just figured out how to say it, is that these are instrumentals that feel like songs to me. And that is why I wanted to hear lyrics on them when I first heard them, because they felt like songs without lyrics. And so in his ability to craft pieces that are that song fertile, you know what I'm saying? Cause not everybody does that. Like it's the difference in a lot of senses between a beat maker and a producer, right? Like sometimes a beat maker will make a loop that's dope, right? But then that's just all the beat is. That's all the piece is. But a producer knows how to make it move and make it have an intro and a bridge and, you know, rising action and falling action and Shadow's capability of that. It does make you wanna hear more songs with lyrics.
00:19:10
Speaker 2: Yeah you connected it to some of the beat movement that you've been a part of in la but i never i never put shadow in that like beats to study to that's one of my biggest beefs with like with modern day like instrumental culture there's no beat to study to you can put something on a lot of that stuff is hypnotic and designed to just let you focus and be background yeah with somebody like a shadow is always active listening and that's where the beauty is, you know?
00:19:37
Speaker 1: So it's not, it's not made to be ignored in any sense.
00:19:41
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. Well, you've incentivized a lot of folks in the Midwest, please see shadow, but wherever he is, and I hope to manifest, uh, a proper, I just want to be a fly on the wall, DJ Shadow and Questlove conversation. I can only imagine the records and the influences and the things that those two guys would talk about. And now I'm just realizing, you know, the Roots and Shadow were label mates for that weird window at MCA when Blackalicious was there. Everyone ended up like mca was the ultimate team for one minute and then you know.
00:20:14
Speaker 1: Everything had common and everything so yeah.
00:20:16
Speaker 2: Yeah dilla and all of it so but um man it's always a pleasure i encourage everyone you know please you know stay in touch with the show whatever you got to say please hit us up in the dms uh for the qls dms or drop us a line through the contact us on questlove supreme but Open mic. This is the last thing I'm doing this week for work. It's always a pleasure to rap with you.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: Jake's clocking out.
00:20:39
Speaker 2: Well, not entirely.
00:20:40
Speaker 1: Oh, okay.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: Last thing for today.
00:20:42
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: I wish you safe travels, man.
00:20:45
Speaker 1: We're going to talk soon, okay? All right, man. Take care, brother. Peace. Questlove shows a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: The Questlove Show is a production of iHeartRadio.
00:00:16
Speaker 2: What's up, Open Mic Eagle?
00:00:17
Speaker 1: Man, I'm chilling. How are you, Cousin Jake, Cousin Brother Jake?
00:00:21
Speaker 2: I mean, we were talking about it a minute ago. I think it is that season of fatigue. No one's going to notice that today.
00:00:26
Speaker 1: No, never. We shouldn't even have brought it up.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: Are you a caffeine consumer?
00:00:33
Speaker 1: Oh, gosh. I am mostly caffeine. I don't even have blood anymore. How do you take your caffeine? I'm not sophisticated. So I have, you know, like a regular coffee maker.
00:00:44
Speaker 2: Drip coffee?
00:00:45
Speaker 1: Drip coffee. And I don't even put fancy stuff in it. I just buy ground stuff that smells good to me. Yeah. And I make a big pot of it every day and I drink it all by myself.
00:00:56
Speaker 2: Whole pot? I mean.
00:00:59
Speaker 1: So luckily, I don't have the sort of coffee maker that keeps it warm. Okay. Because if I did, then I probably would drink the whole pot. But after like cup three, it's like it starts getting lukewarm and I'm like, okay, I'm okay.
00:01:12
Speaker 2: So you're like on a ticking clock. You like got to consume it before it gets cold.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it takes, you know, because it's like a thermal sort of pot. So it keeps things relatively warm. But I like it hot. I like hot coffee.
00:01:26
Speaker 2: Like, is that the first thing you do?
00:01:28
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:01:29
Speaker 2: Nice.
00:01:29
Speaker 1: Wake up, put my coffee on.
00:01:32
Speaker 2: Just like in the commercials.
00:01:33
Speaker 1: Melon through the house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The best part of waking up, all of that. You know what I'm saying?
00:01:38
Speaker 2: And I do think that I do my best work. I have been somebody without an office for almost all of my life. So my office, it can be a crazy Dunkin' Donuts in Philadelphia with folks doing things they shouldn't in the bathroom. It can be a very styling and profiling boutique coffee shop.
00:02:05
Speaker 1: I like it all.
00:02:05
Speaker 2: But when it comes to stuff at home, I like the house to smell like it did at my grandfather's house. He was drinking that big plastic. He was even the type That would put the stuff that you just stirred into the coffee.
00:02:21
Speaker 1: The crystals? Yeah. Like Senka?
00:02:25
Speaker 2: I always laugh at that line in Fast Times at Ridgemont High where he says, I switched to Senka, so have a heart.
00:02:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, man.
00:02:33
Speaker 2: But I'm with you. I'm a classic person. I did have a strong cup of leftover coffee, like 30 minutes. So yeah, no one's going to know we're tired.
00:02:42
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:02:43
Speaker 2: Because we're both here and... to talk about DJ Shadow and the 30th anniversary, which has already happened, of introducing his debut album. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you're doing some touring work with Shadow right now.
00:02:58
Speaker 1: I am. I am on shows with DJ Shadow, two shows in Chicago and one in Nashville all next month. Wow.
00:03:06
Speaker 2: Have you ever worked with Shadow, performed with Shadow before?
00:03:09
Speaker 1: I have not. Never worked with him, never met him. This will all be a first.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: Awesome.
00:03:14
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:03:15
Speaker 2: Are you out there alone or is Kenny with you?
00:03:18
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm out there alone.
00:03:19
Speaker 2: Got you. That's really exciting. And to have, um, I would venture to bet that you probably started listening to DJ shadow at a time when you were living in Chicago.
00:03:28
Speaker 1: Well, I was living in Southern Illinois at the time. Okay. College is when I believe I was in college when introducing came out. I remember hearing it a lot in college. And it's funny because the thing that I remember most about it and, and, Follow me here, folks. Don't take this the wrong way. My main memory was being annoyed by it. Okay. And the reason was I and most of my friends were big freestyle rappers. And what this album sounded like to me at first was just a bunch of beats with no rappers on them. And so we would just rap over it all the time. We would just have it on. People would put it on and we would just rap and rap and rap and rap and rap. And I remember thinking of these beats, these pieces of music as beats that needed rap verses on them. Like I wanted to hear this as a rap album was like my main takeaway from the first time I was hearing it. But I was also a crazy person back then. Like I didn't I didn't. I was very dismissive of a lot of things very quickly if they didn't suit my very specific hip hop needs at the time. And so in looking back at the album now, I just see it so differently. I see it so different now. And it's like, I think I started to get it long before now. But in listening to it again now, I'm like, oh, right. I can see why this was as impactful as it was and see what I was missing about it. in that time because my needs were so specific.
00:05:09
Speaker 2: Interesting. And I mean, at that point, and I should say this, one of the reasons you and I are talking about it, we wanted to have Shadow on the Questlove show. And Shadow is West Coast based. He's on tour right now. I'm going to try to see him in Philly. Again, that's totally up to childcare and things going on, but we weren't able to make it happen. Amir was emphatic. He wanted Shadow on. Shadow was was adjusting things in his schedule and it just couldn't it couldn't happen. One of the things we've been trying to do, you know, on the full length episodes of the Questlove show is have them in studio. There are times I mean, you last year did yours virtually. We had Pasta Noose and George Ann and a few Manny Fresh that have been virtual. Whenever possible, we really try to wait till folks are in either New York or L.A., wherever the show is.
00:05:58
Speaker 1: To do these.
00:05:59
Speaker 2: And I couldn't let the anniversary slide, nor could you without talking about it. But my question to you is, when that album came out, were you up on Blackalicious or up on Soul Sides or any of that?
00:06:11
Speaker 1: So I was up on Blackalicious. I had heard some singles. So the majority of my rap listening at that time was either albums that I bought with my own money or friends of mine bought. And I had some DJ homies on campus too, because remember, this was all in college. And they would make tapes. And sometimes their tapes was just my listening diet because the only radio station around that played hip hop was me and my friends. We had a show on the campus station and we could, we would just play whatever we had in our collections. It didn't have curse words in it. That was everybody's hip hop diet came from us, except for the DJs. We knew who made tapes. So the DJ homie would put black delicious songs on tapes and literic songs. So like, you know, we'd hear that stuff and, and, That stuff was so thrilling. I mean, I came to be a part of the L.A. underground scene later, but really, aside from what I'd heard earlier with AC Alone and Micah 9 and Abstract Rude, the next wave that I heard, even before I heard of MERS and the Living Legends, I heard Blackalicious and Leterix. So I thought that stuff was mind-blowing to me. And then the same DJ homie would be the one that put uh, put shadow on the tables, you know, and, and he wanted us to just listen to it, but we were, we were knuckleheads. We were knuckleheads. We didn't have time to sit and listen to beats.
00:07:35
Speaker 2: Man, that's, uh, that's pretty cool. So with that album, I mean now, and you said that over the years, it's, it's like, I think any body of work should, I mean, things evolve our relationships with albums and songs and artists evolve, but how do you, um, How do you process it now?
00:07:54
Speaker 1: Well, it was a little bit after that time in my life because during that time in my life, generally, I had a hard time with any real instrumental music. I hadn't even really gotten deep into jazz yet at that point. It was like my listening diet was underground hip hop and like alt rock. And that was pretty much it. So my horizon started to expand a little bit after that to where I would discover a band like Stereolab, for instance. And I fell in love with Stereolab immediately just because their sense of melody just grabbed me by the shirt collar from the start. But I can listen to introducing now and hear like, oh, these are similar. You know, this blend of like orchestral jazz, almost breakbeat, like drum and bass. They're painting in a similar way as Stereolab. I just couldn't see it because the needle on introducing was a little bit more towards hip hop in a way where I was just hearing it as beats. But now I can hear it as, oh, these are dope compositions and really take them in that way.
00:09:18
Speaker 2: You know, Amir talks a lot on QLS about, you know, when It Takes a Nation of Millions came out and he realized the incredible added value of his parents' extensive record collection because, you know, of the samples, both, you know, first with Public Enemy and then a year later with Three Feet High and Rising and Paul's Boutique. And I had kind of a similar epiphany of like, you know, even the first time I heard Can I Kick It, like, My mom and my dad weren't Velvet Underground fans, but they had radio on where I knew Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side. So to hear that show up in a rap record was amazing to me because it just showed me of this connection of the music I grew up with and this whole vocabulary. And with Shadow, learning years later that, you know, Introducing is not an album comprised of samples that he was traveling the globe for. A lot of it was just sort of like you see him in the film Scratch in the basement. You know, I think at one point in that movie, in that documentary, he says like, One time I'm digging and I found some animal, like a dead bird down here. He is in the catacombs of record stores pulling from the dollar bin, so to speak, to grab these sources and give them new life. And I don't want to say forgotten records. And then when you see that film later and you understand, Shadow gets kind of deep with it. But he does so, and I really commend this, he's not pretentious about it at all. He didn't market it. It's like, I'm doing this. Just the album is made the way that it's made. And my appreciation, that idea of recycling sound into something new is brilliant. And I certainly didn't catch Introducing in 96. But I would have caught it in like 98, 99. That's around when I would have heard it too.
00:11:08
Speaker 1: I didn't realize it. Yeah, 96, right? 30 year anniversary. So I would have heard it around 98, 99 as well. Exactly.
00:11:13
Speaker 2: And it's funny because I was, you know, in a different way than you, but like I was that guy who was buying a lot of my first CDs and vinyl literally out of like the 50 cent dollar bins. And there's an album. You remember the artist out of San Francisco, Paris?
00:11:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:11:30
Speaker 2: I've interviewed him over the years. I always thought, you know, history doesn't give him the credit he deserves.
00:11:34
Speaker 1: I agree.
00:11:35
Speaker 2: But Shadow did a lot of programming on Paris' second album.
00:11:38
Speaker 1: I did not know that.
00:11:40
Speaker 2: And, you know, to learn that. And then again, I mean, you and I had a recent conversation about Vince Staples and these kind of pockets and compartments that people put things in. But to know that a producer like Shadow, who's, you know, working with Leterix and Blackalicious and the Soul Sides crew, is also doing things with an artist like Paris in the Bay. again, just shows that these boundaries don't exist. But I was a huge fan of that album. And then to see him making this very instrumental art stuff really grabbed me. And I always held The Gift of Gab as one of the greatest MCs. Oh, my God.
00:12:12
Speaker 1: Rest in peace, Gift of Gab. One of the most incredible. Yeah.
00:12:15
Speaker 2: And Midnight in a Perfect World, to me, even before the anniversary was upon us, I played that whole album. And it's one of the newer editions that has the remixes and the B-sides. But even my wife, who is not the biggest hip hop head, was like, this is incredible. The poetry and the layers of these sounds. And it's an album that has held up so well. And I have to say, first of all, have you ever seen Shadow live?
00:12:40
Speaker 1: No, I've never seen him live.
00:12:42
Speaker 2: I have wanted to every time. I've seen Cut Chemist a number of times.
00:12:46
Speaker 1: I've seen Cut Chemist quite a few times, too.
00:12:49
Speaker 2: I want to see this tour. I hope I can pull it off. And I wish you were part of the Philly date.
00:12:54
Speaker 1: I wish I was, too.
00:12:55
Speaker 2: But what do you... I mean, now... There's all these terms that didn't exist in the 90s or didn't seem to at least of trip hop and down tempo. And I'm sure they did, but they weren't in the lexicon where they are now. Instrumental hip hop. But like, what do you see as the impact of introducing on a genre or subgenre?
00:13:15
Speaker 1: Well, I think if you fast forward 20 years at least, like, I don't know if you get a flying lotus if there's no introducing. What it also made me remember was LP's Little Johnny from the Hospital instrumental album, which I also actually, even beyond this, I actually ignored that project at the time because I just wanted to hear a company flow. I didn't want to hear- For the same reasons, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Scratch Pickles were becoming very popular at that time. She had wave twisters and stuff.
00:13:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, Mix Master Mike had all those albums.
00:13:51
Speaker 1: Exactly. And so that was stuff that I was like, oh, I could get that because I was into the performance aspect of it. But when you listen to Shadow, what you hear is like instrumental music put together by somebody who is in hip hop, but like it's being put together with the care of like a film score. You know, like that level of attention brought to each song and then brought to the interludes between each songs. I mean, I don't think Prince Paul put out his first instrumental album until after this that came out.
00:14:28
Speaker 2: He might have the psychoanalysis, you mean?
00:14:30
Speaker 1: I guess there were a couple instrumental pieces. You're right, though. Like, yeah, you made me on psychoanalysis. Right. That could sit, that sits next to this. Right. You know what I'm saying? And you're right. It's like, there's a feeling. These pieces are put together with feeling and emotional intentions. to where you sit and listen to this thing like an experience. In a way that I can see now, I didn't have the attention span for then, but this is reflective of a ton of music that I love now. Like I said, not only Stereolab, which is something that developed on the other side of the world, which I don't know how direct the connection would be, but specifically like Flying Lotus and a lot of like the low-end theory LA beat scene and the jazz level attention to detail that they bring into instrumental albums that have jazz aesthetics, but still have this almost unspoken hip hop undercurrent. I feel like that points back to this. I don't know if there's anything earlier than this that would fit the bill.
00:15:38
Speaker 2: No, that's a really good point. It's so interesting to hear your perspective of wanting you know, A, wanting to rap on it, but B, at face value, wanting raps on it, you know? And what's interesting is, you know, I mentioned Gab on Introducing, and I think of like, you know, Blueprint and Copyright on RJD2' s Dead Ringer. And it's funny how these guys, and I know, you know, that was an album that I think was a next tentpole, you know, five or six years later in the space. But what's interesting when you mentioned that intentionality and liken it to jazz, it's almost like that era of jazz in the sixties where you might have a vocalist on one or two tracks as you're listening, it hits extra hard and shadow definitely with his crew, with Lateef and lyrics born and yeah, the whole crew, they, they did that. And it really like when you're listening to that album, you hunger for the raps, not because, but like the, the words hit different when you've just had 30 minutes without. And I think there's something to be said for that. And, definitely in these days where everything, we live in a shuffle culture. I know people aren't carrying iPods anymore, but everybody's playlisting. So to have a lean back experience, and I know you make lean back albums, but I'm curious of like, and I know you don't know, but I mean, is this one of those scenarios where he plays the album in sequence on tour or not?
00:17:01
Speaker 1: That's a great question. And I'll be really interested to see that. I feel like whenever I go see artists play their classic album and they don't play it in sequence. I'm always a little surprised. And this is a case specifically where because there's not many words on it, I don't know if people are going to hunger to hear it in sequence in the same way. I think he might have a little more room to not disappoint anybody if he played it out of sequence for this one. But it is put together so intentionally that it might be hard for him not to.
00:17:42
Speaker 2: You know, I always, I, and it was one of the questions I was going to try to nudge Amir to ask. I, there was that period of time. I mean, you know, where shadows did some stuff with deaf jokes, you know, he's done some stuff with Fonte. I mean, on his own albums, he's had albums that have had more vocal guests, but I hunger, um, for some more MC collaborations and shadows and shadows, uh, career. Not to say that he hasn't given us enough, but I'm always curious what he's up to, especially in the wake of a tour like this.
00:18:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, because I think, and this might be what I've been trying to say, and I think I might have actually just figured out how to say it, is that these are instrumentals that feel like songs to me. And that is why I wanted to hear lyrics on them when I first heard them, because they felt like songs without lyrics. And so in his ability to craft pieces that are that song fertile, you know what I'm saying? Cause not everybody does that. Like it's the difference in a lot of senses between a beat maker and a producer, right? Like sometimes a beat maker will make a loop that's dope, right? But then that's just all the beat is. That's all the piece is. But a producer knows how to make it move and make it have an intro and a bridge and, you know, rising action and falling action and Shadow's capability of that. It does make you wanna hear more songs with lyrics.
00:19:10
Speaker 2: Yeah you connected it to some of the beat movement that you've been a part of in la but i never i never put shadow in that like beats to study to that's one of my biggest beefs with like with modern day like instrumental culture there's no beat to study to you can put something on a lot of that stuff is hypnotic and designed to just let you focus and be background yeah with somebody like a shadow is always active listening and that's where the beauty is, you know?
00:19:37
Speaker 1: So it's not, it's not made to be ignored in any sense.
00:19:41
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. Well, you've incentivized a lot of folks in the Midwest, please see shadow, but wherever he is, and I hope to manifest, uh, a proper, I just want to be a fly on the wall, DJ Shadow and Questlove conversation. I can only imagine the records and the influences and the things that those two guys would talk about. And now I'm just realizing, you know, the Roots and Shadow were label mates for that weird window at MCA when Blackalicious was there. Everyone ended up like mca was the ultimate team for one minute and then you know.
00:20:14
Speaker 1: Everything had common and everything so yeah.
00:20:16
Speaker 2: Yeah dilla and all of it so but um man it's always a pleasure i encourage everyone you know please you know stay in touch with the show whatever you got to say please hit us up in the dms uh for the qls dms or drop us a line through the contact us on questlove supreme but Open mic. This is the last thing I'm doing this week for work. It's always a pleasure to rap with you.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: Jake's clocking out.
00:20:39
Speaker 2: Well, not entirely.
00:20:40
Speaker 1: Oh, okay.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: Last thing for today.
00:20:42
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: I wish you safe travels, man.
00:20:45
Speaker 1: We're going to talk soon, okay? All right, man. Take care, brother. Peace. Questlove shows a production of iHeartRadio.