DJ Shadow
I was sort of like a kid in a candy store, realizing it was fun making beats without the perceived burden that every track I did had to be a some progressive sample masterpiece. It was nice to blow off steam and work on those songs. For me, that’s what 'The Outsider' was about in general: forget everything, I’m just gonna follow my own music, and make the music I want to make.Collection: Song
Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it.Collection: Cutting
I always managed to fly a bit below the radar, but high enough to avoid colliding into anything.Collection: Enough
I still consider myself a consumer of music more than anything else.Collection: Consumers
I don't care if I get kicked out of every rich kid club on the planet. I will never sacrifice my integrity as a DJ...ever.Collection: Integrity
When I make music, it takes me two hours to get into the flow. To me it's like tapping into some kind of subconscious frequency: I just have to turn everything else off, open up part of myself, expose my fears and try to work through it in the music that I'm making.Collection: Two
So, in addition to being a full-time father of two and everything else in life, it isn't so much that I'm sitting around plotting an album. I just kinda follow my muse and wherever my interests lie, and at some point I decide, "Right. It's been a while, time to figure out how to get serious and make some music."Collection: Father
My core values are still the same about music, and my work ethic, and what I want to represent to people.Collection: People
When I'm looking for DJ sets and stuff to drop, I look for music that I feel is gonna get the reaction I want from the crowd.Collection: Looks
Frequently, when I'm compared to someone, I'm like, "Is that really what people think I sound like?"Collection: Thinking
I've always feel like it's been my place to offer an alternative.Collection: Alternatives
I don't hate what I love. I love what I love and I hate what I hate.Collection: Hate
The music that I have always liked has always been more rooted in anger or sadness or alienation or any of those inspirational factors that drove rock'n'roll, gospel, and blues. I tend not to value a more pop aesthetic.Collection: Sadness
I personally feel the need to experience life and new music and ideas before I can sit down and start writing music again.Collection: Writing
Anything that sparks some eight-year-old's interest in music or DJing is great.Collection: Eight
The reason why it is that strong, and why HipHop is so inbred, is that there is a very structured wheel, a very definable system on how to get paid in HipHop. Busta Rhymes is someone who took that road and sure enough got paid. As long people like him are allowed to continue to do that it wont change. There is a very specific sound and a very specific attitude, and it changes every year, but as long as you stay in there and keep doing it, and keep narrowing your scope, dressing the rigt ways etc. you get paid.Collection: Strong
My main thing is constantly looking forward and trying to make music that I couldn't have made at any other time.Collection: Trying
I couldn't make a real drum'n'bass or dubstep record to save my life. But I can be influenced by them in small ways.Collection: Real
When I play that music live nowadays, there's a lot of things I feel I'd like to do - even things I don't think the audience is aware of, like layering subs underneath the kicks, and layering crisp hats underneath the muddy, trashy hats of the '90s. If I tried to play the music as it was next to my contemporary music, it just sounds like you're closing up half of the sonic spectrum.Collection: Thinking
As for my store, most artists' sites send you to a third-party storefront like iTunes, whereas we're disseminating it ourselves. I was always uncomfortable with the thought of sending somebody who came to my site to buy something to some other store. It just occurred to me, "Why can't we do this?"Collection: Party
I would agree with you that there's 90% imitation and 10% innovation. That's true of any genre.Collection: Innovation
I always consider every album to be a snapshot.Collection: Albums
If I have a chance to positively impact how the populace views DJs, then I'm going to try to do my part to nudge things in the right direction.Collection: Impact
When I think about the stuff I turned down it's kind of insane.Collection: Thinking
It's satisfying to put out new music. And I think that's the context in which I'm comfortable revisiting things from the past.Collection: Past
I'm not going to get on any anti-corporation soapbox to an extreme level.Collection: Soapbox
I've always been compared to people. It's a revolving cast that comes and goes - obviously, sometimes people stay.Collection: People
If I wanted to contribute to the hyphy movement, what good is it making a hyphy record that isn't embraced by that community?Collection: Community
I remember when the big shift happened in 1996-97, when suddenly it dawned on the music community: 'We should license our music to commercials and sell out for all intents and purposes. It doesn't really matter.'Collection: Community
I realized that people don't quite understand what I do when I was the new kid on the block and a lot of Hollywood was offering me fairly cheesy projects.Collection: Block
I feel like you're being coy if you don't do something and celebrate the 20th or 25th anniversary in some way. Just as I've never, ever had any kind of embargo on playing songs from Endtroducing, no matter how much I wanted people to like my new stuff - I've never, ever stopped playing Endtroducing, for that reason as well. It's a give and take - it's a balance. If there's one theme, I guess, to this entire discussion, then it's that.Collection: Song
The story I always recite - and have had to recite so many times over the years to different lawyers and different people within Universal - is that the business end of Mo'Wax was basically, like, 'Give us the big ones samples first, and we'll see how we get on.' And I gave them the six or seven that were, to me, the ones that were the scariest, and the biggest use. It wasn't about the big names, necessarily - although that played into it a bit, with people like Bjork and Metallica.Collection: People
Sometimes there's this balance: if you try to clear 10 things you'll probably get lucky and be able to clear most of them, or all of them; try to clear 20 things, in my mind there's gonna be at least one issue, maybe two - and then that's when it starts getting into either re-recording stuff, or you've got to take that song off.Collection: Song
I just felt, at the time, a little bit relieved, because I was kinda counting the days: 'Come on! Let's get these records into people's homes - nobody will ever be able to get them all back, and it'll be an artefact out in the world.'Collection: Home
I always like to remain a fan, put it that way: and I like to hold the idealised version of what these artists are like. Greed is one of those components of human nature that's inherent in everyone, and sometimes it is an unpleasant thing to engage in.Collection: Artist
I think one of the things about ageing is the jagged peaks become a little bit mellower...? Heheh. And I feel like I'm able to understand a little bit better where that sort of tack comes from.Collection: Thinking
I've tried to tell people that the reason I don't really get excited over good press is that I don't want to get agitated over bad press. I don't wanna get too high on good press, too low on bad press. It's just not a healthy way to engage with my own feelings about my music.Collection: People
Incidentally, the very, very first review that James Lavelle and I saw of Endtroducing was very negative! It was in The Wire, and the context of the review was that, you know, Mo'Wax was so far behind Ninja Tune. Heheheh. And people wonder why there was this sense of a feud between labels! We just kind of looked at each other and we were like, 'Oh, well, let the floodgates open!' But, not to be facile, that was literally the last bad review I ever saw for that album.Collection: People
Through it all, the words of John Peel echo strongly within me: you have support the music that's being made now. You have to continue to look forward and learn from what's happening. That's my philosophy, anyway.Collection: Philosophy
The conventional wisdom of fandom is that you must give your fans anything they want. But I've never felt that that's a healthy attitude - and that comes from being a Star Wars fan.Collection: Stars
I feel less and less like that every year, and I guess maybe even more so with every new record that I put out. I just think, as the years go by, it's harder and harder to really find a reason to be annoyed that you made something that people want to continuously talk about. Certainly there are contexts in which the record can be discussed which will get me on the defensive and make me want to put some kind of calibration or some kind of context on what the record means in relation to my career as a whole.Collection: Mean
I've said this a lot lately, too: if, 20 or 30 years down the road, when everything's said and done, I was never able to achieve that level of zeitgeist again, then so be it. I know how rare it is for anybody to do that. But I also feel like, OK, we're getting on to 25 years of putting out records: that's also kind of rare air for anybody who makes music. And I think you just end up kind of grateful for every opportunity that comes along.Collection: Grateful
I was asked to do TV ads for Macintosh. Nowadays, I think anybody would jump at that but, at the time, it didn't feel appropriate for what I was trying to stand for.Collection: Thinking
As far as the mechanics of how the music was made, there's no denying: Endtroducing was extremely simple. That's not to denigrate it - that doesn't mean I'm knocking it or I'm saying my new stuff is better, or anything like that: it just means, I literally had, what, 12.5 seconds of stereo sampling at my disposal, and some turntable overdubs... The nature of the beast back then was probably about 50% looping and 50% chopping, and that was what you could do with samples.Collection: Mean
I got asked to remix a lot of movie themes, like Mission Impossible, which other people ended up doing quite well. But it was just never my thing.Collection: People
It's about respecting what I think people like about the original music. I'm not gonna ever take it to the extent that I'm kinda George Lucas-ing moments of the album over and over again, trying to get them right over the next 30 years - I don't wanna do anything like that. But, yeah - it's a... fascinating conundrum through the years.Collection: Thinking
I almost feel like there's some kind of connection that I'm having trouble putting in to words, in the same sense that I'm learning things from my children still. I think, just like any relationship, if I choose to become twisted and bitter it can be a source of distress or discomfort. But I think I've come to terms with the fact that I would prefer to see it as a gift. And I would prefer to see it as something that empowers me rather than something that diminishes me in some way.Collection: Children
I'm trying to satirize what it's like to be a recording artist in 2011. I realize that standing on a soap box and ranting and raving about my opinions on the digital age and its effect on music is only going to get you so far.Collection: Artist
When I'm representing my music live I think of it very much in a rock band sense. When I first started doing festivals in the 90s there really weren't other DJs playing the stages I was playing. So I felt I was being afforded an opportunity to kind of make a statement about what DJ music can be live. In the 90s, if you were a DJ you were in the dance tent, and you were playing house music and techno music. There was no such thing as a DJ - a solo DJ - on a stage, after a rock band and before another rock band: that just didn't happen.Collection: Opportunity
I tend to gravitate away from the more trendy Ibiza style of dance music. It's not me.Collection: Ibiza