[on Endtroducing] It is an album that sits with you and lingers. It’s an album you can return to and discover whole new areas you hadn’t been aware of, like finding a room in your house you never knew was there. Or like the time you spied your dusty copy of The Catcher in Rye on the shelf and, after reading it for the first time in years, thinking, I didn’t know it was about that. But what draws you to Endtroducing time and again is that Endtroducing never fails to deliver emotionally on so many levels. Despite its melancholic atmosphere, there is something uplifting at its core. “If I were to find one word that resonates more than anything within Endtroducing, it would be ‘hope,”‘ Josh has said.
But there is something about Endtroducing, which often ranks high on critics’ best-albums-of-all-time lists, that always brings me back to it. There is something about a record that questions, “What does your soul look like?” There’s something about a record that, although it provides no answers, still acts as a soulful balm in our volatile, postmodern age.
Postmodernism is tough to define because it gets attached to so many aspects of our culture. In art, it is a broad expression for those movements that followed modernism, which, in the early 20th century, was a rejection of antiquated Victorian values and traditions. Many of the first postmodern proponents were the post-structuralists of the ’70s, French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, all of whom espoused themes of uncertainty and dislocation that mirrored what they felt was the disintegration of society’s moral, political and economic bases.
Modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf believed that art could provide coherence and meaning in meaninglessness. But postmodernism, says professor Mary Klages of the University of Colorado, doesn’t lament the idea of fragmentation or incoherence, but rather celebrates it. Klages says that according to Baudrillard, in postmodern society there are no originals, only copies. You might think about painting or sculpture, for example, where there is an original work (by Van Gogh, for instance), and there might also be thousands of copies or reprints, but the original is the one with the highest value.
What resonated about Endtroducing when it was released nearly 20 years ago, and what makes it still resonate today, is the way in which it loosens itself from the mooring of the known and sails off into an uncharted territory that seems to
exist both in and out of time. Davis is not only a master sampler and turntablist, he is also a serious archaeologist with a world-thirsty passion (what Cut Chemist refers to as Josh’s “spidey sense”) for seeking out, uncovering and then ripping apart the discarded graces of some other generation – that “pile of broken dreams” – and weaving them back together into a tapestry of bleakness and beauty. Piano notes drop like rain. Drums crackle with a terrible momentum. A burst of guitar grates nastily. An unrelenting tension thrums throughout. It wrangles your emotions. It is soundtrack music to a psychological horror film that even David Lynch might have a hard time dreaming up. It is the score to that nightmare you can’t put your finger on.
From the article: "How DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing turned forgotten vinyl into a postmodern masterpiece"
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