Ever wonder what you're favorite rock radio deejay's favorite album of all-time is? Well, guess what? I'm telling you anyway, smartass.
This isn't one of those pieces where I make you suffer through like three paragraphs before I actually give you the goods, though. My favorite album of all-time is Endtroducing..... by DJ Shadow, released on September 16, 1996; 25 years ago today. But the crazy thing is, I don't think I even knew the album existed for about a year after it came out.
Discovering music was different in the '90s. If you grew up around that time, you know what I'm talking about. Napster wasn't around yet, and file sharing on the nascent internet was a thing only the nerdiest of nerds were hip to. Those of us who craved new music were still listening to the radio, watching MTV, and hitting local record stores for our fix.
I'd started working in college radio at Northeastern University's WRBB in the summer of '96. I couldn't believe the massive amounts of music I now had at my disposal: boxes and boxes of new CDs and records were coming into the station every week, ripe for the picking. Rock, hip-hop, metal, reggae punk...you name it. I was spending as much time pouring over new releases as I was on my studies. And while I'd love to tell you that's where I discovered DJ Shadow, I can't. I mean, he ended up there, eventually (and all over my radio show). But it was my friend Chris who gets the credit here.
Chris, like me, loved discovering new music. He also worked full-time at Prince Pizza on Rt. 1 in Saugus, so he had some of that mythical "disposable income" that was a thing back in the '90s. He'd go to Strawberries on Rt. 1 or Newbury Comics outside the Square One Mall and he'd pick up new CDs when they came out. He'd also "blind buy:" pick up something from an artist he'd never heard, just because the cover looked cool. Entroducing..... was a blind-buy, and it changed our musical landscape.
I remember the first time Chris played it for me. We were in his Mercury Cougar with the tinted windows. All the music I'd ever loved was on this CD. There was rock and jazz and hip-hop and trip hop and metal and samples and beats, beats, beats. You see, DJ Shadow created Entroducing..... by sampling old records he'd collected over the years. He chopped and programmed and layered all those samples to make brand new tracks. An entire album of new material created solely of samples of obscure old songs from albums long forgotten. Today, we take creativity like this for granted. A quarter of a century ago, it was groundbreaking.
I'd never heard someone create new music using pretty much every genre of music that I adored before. Hell, there's even a sample from my all-time favorite TV show, Twin Peaks, as the album is ending. It was as if DJ Shadow crafted his entire debut album just for me. 25 years on, I still feel that way every time I put it on.
