Ask the NoCal turntable nerds, the trip-hoppers, the frat boys, the hippies or the ravers stoned on the beach at sunrise: Endtroducing... is deeply spiritual. Not in the conventional sense, but in the spirituality of the soul that lives in your chest and got there from the ether and returns to the collective unconscious-- the one you feel when you feel things. That's the spirit that saves us from being fleeting and disposable: If I necked with that one girl that one sunset, with Endtroducing on the car stereo, then no matter who else did the same thing, I'm me and that moment's still mine. Dig?
Endtroducing taps that inner-whatever better than most of the albums of its day, and it swims so easily that it established an entire genre of instrumental hip-hop-- count how many records come out every month and are dubbed "Shadowesque." Building the album from samples of lost funk classics and bad horror soundtracks, Shadow crossed the real with the ethereal, laying heavy, sure-handed beats under drifting, staticky textures, friendly ghost voices, and chords whose sustain evokes the vast hereafter. Even the "look at me" cuts like "The Number Song" didn't break the mood; the album was so perfect and the technique, so awesome that it's still definitive today, and Shadow has yet to top it. (Never mind that if Four Tet could swing a record as proficient as The Private Press, we would throw him a parade.)
For this Deluxe Edition, Endtroducing hasn't been enhanced or remastered, but it now comes with a bonus disc of remixes and singles, including Cut Chemist's fantastic "party mix" of "The Number Song" and Gift of Gab's rhymes on "Midnight in a Perfect World", as well as alternate versions that give a useful perspective on the album. For example, "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt" and "Mutual Slump" omit the overdubbed speech, and without it, the samples seem naked and duller-- which highlights one of the album's subtler strengths.
But Shadow can't avoid the irony that this is a revival of an album that revives other albums. We could be hearing this music, not for the second time around, but for the third and maybe the fourth. The buzz of these dug-up sounds infuses the texture of the album; focusing on it reminds me of the few times that I've heard an album by a deceased performer and actually realized he had passed-- like the time I listened to Kind of Blue the night that Miles Davis joined three of its personnel in the grave, and felt their absence, even while their solos hadn't lost a shred of vitality.
Shadow clearly gets that. In the documentary Scratch, Shadow takes us to the record store where he found most of the vinyl used on Endtroducing. Upstairs we see the regular shelves and bins, but downstairs, in the basement, are tens of thousands of old albums stacked or dumped all over the room, barely lit by a few light bulbs and littered with dust and dead bats. Shadow patronized the store for five years before they let him in this crypt, and as he says in the documentary, "Just being in here is a humbling experience for me, because you're looking through all these records and it's sort of like a big pile of broken dreams...Whether you want to admit it or not, 10 years down the line you'll be in here. So keep that in mind when you start thinking like, 'I'm invincible and I'm the world's best,' or whatever. Because that's what all these cats thought."
We usually dismiss reissues of CDs as the ultimate cash-in-- the most cynical way for artists like Elvis Costello to charge us again and again for the same album. We think this because we assume that once you commit music to a disc and put it in a store, it's immortal. But without new attention and rereleases, albums can drift off the radar. Today, Entroducing may be a legend of the 1990s, but the world of beat-driven music regularly throws away old milestones to make room for new ones. How do we know this album will impress-- let alone connect with-- anyone 10 or 20 years down the road?
So you could call this rerelease Shadow's first bid for a legacy, and his admission that no matter how many fans called Endtroducing a masterpiece, someone else needs to slap that word on the cover for the next batch of kids. Yet even more than the first time, this is also a meditation on mortality. Shadow knows what it's like to wander through that basement, find some buried treasure-- some sax riff like those immortal notes on "What Does Your Soul Look Like, (Pt. 1 - Blue Sky Revisit)"-- and resurrect it for millions of listeners, like an irrational God on beats 'n breaks Judgment Day. And he also knows how it feels to be in that bin, like all of us on the way to our own graves, where we'll be trapped with all the other goners-- hoping someone will see something a little different and special in us, that might pull us out of the pile.
