Word: dj
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...between the fall of Troy and Sept. 11," he says. "These two huge events of a mythic size seem to form a span of history." Iain Banks thinks Dead Air slots into the second category, which examines the state of the world after the attacks. The story, about radio DJ Ken and his affair with a gangster's wife, begins with guests at a party merrily throwing random objects from the roof of a tall building. (Images of falling pervade the book.) Then comes the news from New York. Ken starts filling his radio airtime with political diatribes, on topics...
...didn't know Josh Davis, a.k.a. DJ Shadow, you might reasonably conclude that he belongs to an order of very hip monks. When Davis performs in concert, or does just about anything in public, he wears billowy pants, a long-sleeve T shirt or hooded sweatshirt, and a cap pulled down to eye level. He looks like one of the sand people from Star Wars, only with more sportswear logos. When Davis speaks--and he doesn't speak much--it's in a soft, measured voice, just above a whisper...
...music with samples is like putting together a puzzle with finite pieces that don't fit. Tempos clash, keys carom off each other--it can be ugly. In 1996 Davis made the pieces fit well enough to create one of the great leaps forward in contemporary pop music, Endtroducing ... DJ Shadow, an album of odd snippets blended into warm songs that serves as a kind of jumbled soundtrack to modernity. The Private Press doesn't have Endtroducing's shock of the new, but its music is just as seductive...
...local record shop, Village Music in Mill Valley, Calif., bought the entire stock of a defunct 1980s dance-music store at an auction. Davis went mad flipping through 10,000 records--mostly rare new wave European singles--that had been frozen in a storage locker for the past decade. "DJ Shadow is my best customer," says Village Music's John Goddard, who guesses that Davis has relieved him of around 7,500 pieces of vinyl over the past two years. "If there's an artist I've never heard of before, in a genre I've never heard of before...
...most pointed criticism of Davis is that his creativity, like that of Robert Rauschenberg (another pop collagist), is invested in process rather than results. Listen to his music casually, and you wonder: What does DJ Shadow have to say for himself? But focus on the voices he chooses to speak for him on The Private Press: there's the woman dictating a letter home, the giddy record collector discussing his tape collection, a kid asking to be told a story, the egoist who declares, "And now...eternity!" as somber keys take him away to some sad netherworld. Not everyone will...