By Vincent PollardDJ Shadow (aka Joshua Davis), now a household name, started out in the California hip-hop scene as a campus radio DJ, remixer and later a key member of the Solesides crew with artists such as Blackalicious and Lyrics Born. Shadow secured the world's attention back in 1996 with the release of his highly acclaimed debut album Endtroducing and went on to collaborate with several more major players in the trip-hop and hip-hop scenes, including helping Mo Wax label boss James Lavelle revamp his UNKLE project, a superb film score for the documentary Dark Days, as well as countless other side projects. Having just released The Less You Know, The Better, his fourth studio album as DJ Shadow in 15 years, we talk to the legendary DJ about touring, the response to his new album, digging for samples and more.
You've been on tour now for quite a while, now. It sounds pretty intense. Yeah, it is! Pretty solid now for six months. I'm still touring. I just have a few dates in the U.S., then a couple in Mexico and then a few weeks off and then one last roundup of the UK.
It sounds like you've been getting a really good response at your shows, especially in Japan. Yeah, Japan was really good. You know, Japan has had kind of a lot of ups and down in terms of their participation in Western music. In the last ten years it's gone very, um, everybody supports Japanese music within Japan which is, on one level, as it should be so I wasn't sure what the response or how attendance was going to be but it was kinda faith restoring. It was good.
Where have you had the best response so far? It totally varies. The response overall is pretty consistently good I think. My mind goes back to these two dates from a couple of months back ― Glastonbury was really important, it's the main festival in the UK. It needed to be good and I felt that it was good and then the very next day we had a city festival in Belgium, like a festival that the city puts on and I think it's a free show for the people who live there and I wasn't really expecting much as it was something that already came in after I had started touring and I didn't really know if people were going to know who I was but the audience was amazing. It was one of the best shows of the whole tour so it goes to show you can never predict which ones are gonna be strong or kind of weak.
I want to ask you a bit about the response you've been getting for your new album. You've been getting quite a bit of criticism, especially from Pitchfork, and you've been responding to it publicly on Twitter. There's nothing really much I can say. It's sort of a trap, isn't it ― if I address it then I'm paying it lip service and I'm drawing attention to it and if I ignore it then it seems as though I'm tacitly inviting anybody to come beat me up whenever they like. You really can't do anything as an artist. You have no control over the situation and you have to just endure it. If I react in any way you're accused of being defensive or thin-skinned and I can only say that I think my resume speaks for itself. I don't do this for money, I don't do it to be famous, I don't do it to be loved. I've been a DJ for 27 years. I know what I'm doing. I think my music has value but if people disagree or if it's fashionable to think that "if this type of music is good then this type of music must be bad" and the games that people play with that then there's really nothing I can do. The perception, I think, among a lot of the press is that I had a really long honeymoon phase and now it's time for the pendulum to swing the other way and it doesn't matter what I do or say. I don't think it even matters much what my work says or does. That's not to say that I don't own the criticism or think people are wrong. I think that when people have an opinion on something it's foolish for me to say that they're wrong; they may have very valid points but nonetheless I'm not ready to quit and I'll just to continue to do the best work that I can.
Ultimately you're just making the music you want to make and what people make of it is out of your control, I guess. Well, I can gather a consensus of all the people that hate the album and hire them and have a panel of people that I run all my decisions past and that may be a good way to do things in the future but for now I have to just go on my own gut and my own instincts about what I think my music is trying to do. I can't worry too much about that. And unfortunately sometimes these sorts of comments get painted as I don't care about my fans or what other people think ― that's certainly not the case, but again I have to forge ahead. Sure, it's uncomfortable, it's embarrassing; I'm a human being and I have very little success as it is and when you get the rug pulled out from under you by a very influential blog, sure it's damaging, completely and that's if that's what they'd like me to come out and say, sure, I'll say it.
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