Culture Blues

Very Bad Things: DJ Shadow – The Outsider

Even good musicians make bad mistakes. In "Very Bad Things" Chris Dorsey investigates the massive miscues from some of music's most respected artists.

"The Outsider"

Rewind to late summer of 2006. The music community is chewing its collective nails to their nubs in anticipation of the first new full-length of material from Josh Davis—aka DJ Shadow—in over four years. The attention is justified, as the Bay Area-bred turntablist had essentially redefined instrumental music through 1996’s groundbreaking Endtroducing, followed six years later by his cut-and-paste masterpiece, The Private Press. His work had lent a new credibility to the title of “DJ” and birthed an entire generation of head-bobbing imitators in the process.

Davis clearly didn’t have any problem taking his time in between efforts, and his pace had paid off in the past. In the case of The Private Press, the music had undergone a shift from Endtroducing’s somber, drum-driven ambiance to a kaleidoscopic world fueled by dust-covered samples, orchestral arrangements, and bone-jarring beats. It sounded both vintage and contemporary at once, and it begged the question: “What’s next?”

There was much speculation as to which direction Davis might head, and in interviews he promised (or maybe warned) fans that The Outsider would see him returning to his roots—that it was never his intention to create another Endtroducing just to please the masses. Boy, he wasn’t kidding. One spin through The Outsider makes it apparent that Davis’ goal was not only to avoid catering to the larger crowd, but to avoid catering to anyone outside of a 50 square mile hunk of the SoCal coastline. The Outsider is a disorganized love letter to the Bay Area scene where Davis cut his musical teeth, but it’s a mess of an album, crammed with lackluster guest appearances and generally undercutting the high-minded approach he had taken in earlier Shadow material.

Make no mistake: this is a hip-hop album. And it’s not a good one. Davis shows a clear infatuation with the in-your-face “hyphy” sound that was spawned from and popularized in the San Fran region, and a majority of the tracks feature its characteristically hyperactive beats and barked vocal deliveries. Davis’ trademark patience for drawing out a beat or a melody and allowing it to evolve and devolve throughout the course of a song is rendered useless. The incessant toughguy posturing rings hollow for the first 30 minutes of the album, and due to the nature of hip-hop, where the MC tends to suck up the spotlight, any quality instrumental work is relegated to the background. It’s disappointing when the album jacket reads “DJ Shadow,” yet the man himself ends up playing second fiddle to such musical luminaries as Keak Da Sneak and Animaniaks.

When the music does get the rare front-and-center treatment, it sounds forced into an already cluttered playlist. “Artifact” comes across as nothing more than an aimless exercise in drum machine madness, and while a few instrumental cuts, such as “Triplicate/Something Happened That Day,” are injected with a bit of the moody, Shadowesque tone, it’s hard not to hear them as mere throwaways swept up from the cutting room floor of the Private Press sessions.

One of the most glaring downsides to The Outsider is that, from our convenient vantage point five years later, the album now sounds horribly dated. This stems from not just its trendy and localized sound (who the hell “Turf Dances” anymore?) but from its lyrical content. David Banner’s anti-Bush rhetoric in “Seein Thangs” may have been a fresh attack at the time, but any jabs at W. now elicit more of a “well, no shit” than they do a “right on!” Similarly, melodramatic tributes to lost loves (“Backstage Girl”) and Hurricane Katrina victims (“Broken Levee Blues”) seem oddly juxtaposed with such moronic quips as Phonte Coleman blurting “I gotta stop fuckin’ with these hoes off of Myspace, dawg!” If Davis’ goal was to be taken seriously, he picked the wrong cast and the wrong setting with which to do so.

Not that there’s any denying the man’s talent for knob-twiddling; the production values of The Outsider are just as crystalline as anything he’s ever put his name to. A vinyl-only instrumental version of the album was released in 2009 (which I have admittedly never listened to) and it’s easy to imagine that it captures the intended essence of the piece more appropriately—perhaps with a bit more cohesion—once the volume levels on everyone else are turned down. But unfortunately, because those levels are jacked to eleven, and because 99.9% of the world doesn’t own a voiceless copy of The Outsider, Davis’ ingenuity is trampled and lost in a chaotic parade where musical ideas shoot off in every genre direction, never to return.

If the timeline were jostled, and The Outsider placed at the onset of the DJ Shadow canon, it probably would have been heralded as a unique and eclectic take on the world of hip-hop—a new musical voice that was certainly interesting, just not yet fully developed. But in 2006, with an impressive body of work already attached to his resume and expectations higher than ever, Josh Davis simply looked like an artist who’d run out of new ideas. The disappointing part is that Davis has yet to clear his good name of this catastrophe. Fans are left enduring yet another multi-year musical hiatus, and in the mean time, might be slowly forgetting what made DJ Shadow such a visionary name in the first place.