From Listening To Records, I Just Knew What To Do

I've listened to Dan The Automator’s Bombay The Hard Way: Guns, Cars and Sitars enough times in my life that I should've caught this a hell of a lot sooner.

It was right there all along on "Inspector Jay from Delhi," not far past the album's halfway mark, where I belatedly spotted the sample that connected this 1998 Kalyanji–Anandji remix project with 50 Cent's 2005 LP The Massacre. The spoken phrase this is $50,000, extracted from Bollywood movie dialogue, was abruptly truncated into a new, singularly useful one for the popular Queens rapper: this is 50.

The roughly seven year difference between these two instances speaks to hip-hop's ongoing process of sonic rejuvenation, a reminder that sampling as an art form has served the genre remarkably well, a reminder that served me well en route to a DJ Shadow concert.

Cranking Bombay The Hard Way in my headphones on the near-hourlong journey between my place and Manhattan's rightfully maligned Terminal 5–not to be confused with JFK airport's human holding pen back in my home boro–was, of course, a strategic choice. Though Shadow's involvement in the making of that album was famously overstated, his profile at the time was elevated in the wake of Endtroducing....., released some two years prior, and amid the buzz around UNKLE's 1998 full-length Psyence Fiction. Still, that ephemeral connection was enough to justify it as a soundtrack to my subway ride / on foot slog to the remote Midtown West outpost where some of your favorite artists regrettably end up performing.

As Automator's plunderphonics wriggled into my ears, I dodged a stream of gaudy, faux-neon-lit pedi bikes, all aggressively trying to lure Columbus Circle rubes with the siren song of ABBA and, when things got really desperate, "Empire State Of Mind." Once past that particular avenue of bright lights and tourist tumult, I began to appreciate how objectively less desolate this walk was compared with the last time I dragged myself so perilously close to the Hudson River for a Terminal 5 show. The food options, while not exactly thrilling, had at least progressed enough to include Subway and Starbucks, stores that would have been considered oases here back in 2015. Along the way, enjoying the crisp autumnal evening air, I tried to forget the time I saw Flying Lotus live at this venue on a rainy night where the indoors proved so wet that I took a hard, bruising tumble down a flight of stairs.

Lurking in the shadows next to the stage was Prince Paul, just minutes before his warm-up set would commence, his fashionable De La Soul sweatshirt illuminated by the glow of his phone screen. “Can I Kick It,” a song he produced, played low over the PA system as he took his place behind the decks. “I was in Philly last night, so I couldn’t say this,” he told the sold-out crowd, “Knicks in 5.”

From there, the legend ran through a set of '80s and '90s hip-hop throwbacks, starting with a heavy opening run of Native Tongues material, inclusive of Black Sheep's "Flavor of the Month." After a proper reprise of "Can I Kick It," he continued with a whirlwind of selections including Beastie Boys' "Brass Monkey," Souls Of Mischief's "93 'Til Infinity," and the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air theme. For the finale, De La Soul's "A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays," Paul's Handsome Boy Modeling School cohort Dan The Automator stepped out on stage to vibe with his longtime friend, further validation of my choices from the universe.

In the lull between the opening and headline sets, a question arose in my mind: is DJ Shadow even a possibility without Prince Paul? Obviously not, duh. The New York progenitor of multi-faceted, elaborately layered, sample-based hip-hop had to exist before a kid from California could emerge from the underground to create what is arguably the greatest instrumental hip-hop album of all-time.

Shadow more or less said so himself during one of the handful of chat breaks during his crowd-pleasing 30th anniversary retrospective performance of the 1996 record for the gathered Terminal 5 faithful: "People ask me, what inspired you to make Endtroducing.....? What were you ingesting? THAT!"

Donning a signature San Francisco fitted ball cap with sizing sticker intact, he powered through essentially the entire album, inventively augmenting its contents rather than engaging in rote re-creation. Sometimes this manifested via modern bass deployment, the wobbly wub wub that became so prevalent mid-dubstep. Case in point: "Organ Donor" just throttled the room with low end, before he busted out drumsticks and played along with a few percussive pads. Even when a touch of footwork came into play, none of the musical modifications lessened the impact of his classics like "Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt" or "Midnight In A Perfect World," Endtroducing..... gems that reliably moved the room.

"I'm never just gonna play the record as it is," he said. "I'm a DJ; I wanna have fun, play with it, mess with it."

Part of how Shadow achieved this live would be revealed in anecdote, calling back to how different things were in the '90s. "Stage shows like this really didn't exist then," he said, reminding the audience that the role of the hip-hop DJ in concert was to support the emcees. "There was no avenue to do something like that." He credited Jeru The Damaja for taking him out on a national tour in 1997 and letting him play beats off his Akai MPC60 for 30 minutes, something audiences were not at all accustomed to.

Logistically speaking, getting a fresh Endtroducing..... set together was ultimately the product of serendipity and dumb luck. The aforementioned Akai sampler Shadow primarily used to make the album changed hands over the years as loaners, and he eventually lost track of this once-critical piece of gear. "Around February of this year, I actually located it in storage," he said. "I had found the receipt [from] when I bought it back in 1993, and I matched up the serial numbers on the receipt."

Still, the MPC60 needed a refurb in order to operate, to say nothing of him needing to track down the original floppy disks with the sampled material. "There's no such thing as a true master tape for the album," he explained. "It was all just done fly-by-night, piecemeal. I just wasn't thinking ahead." In the three weeks it took for a friend of his to clean up the machine, he miraculously rediscovered the physical media. "So I popped in a disk and pressed play–and 'Midnight...' started playing."

Despite some apparent AI presence in the background visuals, which inadvertently rolled the audience down the hill to the uncanny valley on more than a few occasions, the show's inorganic elements were countered by superhuman moments as the screen overlay showed live shots of Shadow's nimble hands scratching and crossfading. The nostalgic melange of photos and flyers from the Mo'Wax era was a nice touch as well.

As if the concert itself weren't testament enough his predecessors, Shadow exhibited profound reverence for both Prince Paul and Dan The Automator, referring to them as his older brothers while recalling how he recorded the album at the latter's studio space. Yet he reserved the lion's share of his gratitude for the fans, assembled and otherwise, for making Endtroducing..... such a phenomenon and allowing him to play it in this way three decades later.

"This set is as much yours as it is mine."

Three new tracks to snack on...

Camden Malik, "What U On"

Che Noir, "Blood Bath"

Shaykh Hanif & TOP HOOTER, "Book About It"