💿 How Good Is It Really 💿 Endtroducing.....

[Severed799]

How did that work out for him? bar that one track with RTJ the guy has been irrelevant for almost 20 years now

[Severed799]

A landmark album at the time which hasn’t aged that well if you weren’t around to have nostalgia for it, prefer Private Press personally, but a solid 8/10 all the same.

[daggers]

@Severed799

hasn’t aged that well if you weren’t around to have nostalgia for it,

why? I only heard it late 2000’s and I still like it now

[littlebirds]

Hip hop definitely didn’t suck in 1996, but it’s always been a thing in rap to look back with nostalgia on the years before, so I don’t judge DJ Shadow too much for it, just find it amusing. I mean, Common lamented the state/demise of hip hop on ‘I Used to Love H.E.R.’ in 1994, as a 22 year old man during arguably the creative peak of the genre.

[1101010]

@anon9806217

@EVI

I’m also knocking off a point for the smug, self righteousness of 'Why hip hop sucks in ‘96’. Loads of great hip hop released that year

Yeah. I love Endtroducing and it still stands up imo, but always hated this. Seems even more ridiculous now he’s spent the next two decades moaning how he hates modern music even more. As you say, there were so many ridiculously good hip hop albums that year too. ATLiens is aeons better than anything DJ Shadow ever touched

I assumed it was aimed at the fact hip hop was becoming a very big MTV genre with the likes of Puff Daddy and the big money side rising up. It would be weird for him to be claiming all hip hop was shut because of ‘the money’ when not all of it was making huge bucks.

That said, I checked and I’ll be Missing You first assaulted our ears in 97 so maybe confusing the periods.

[anon9806217]

Yeah, the nostalgia thing is fair enough to a point, but I’ve always thought I Used to Love H.E.R. was shite as well though for what it’s worth and I can’t think of that many other examples - Sittin’ In The Park by Nas is probably the best one and that’s more nostalgia for a specific time in his life than purely the music.

Not so much my issue with it as much as I’ve always felt the ‘money vs art’ argument is so reductive and basic. Have to say as well (and without wanting to step into a minefield) it’s always sat a bit uneasily with me that a white artist from a relatively affluent background is effectively chiding a bunch of other artists for ‘selling out’ when the majority of those artists were black and from entirely different backgrounds

[anon9806217]

Yeah the whole ‘Jiggy Era’ stuff was slightly later. Even if he was having a crack at this though, still thinks it’s bollocks really. It’s not my favourite era for sure, but there were still plenty of decent records.

[noise_ramones]

pretty good, haven’t listened to it for awhile. will revisit before voting. a shame heavy sampling isn’t allowed these days

prefer christian marclay of course… philip jeck… nicolas collins…

[Ilovetoast]

it’s alright

6

[colon_closed_bracket]

I’m a student of the drums

But I’m also

a teacher of the drums too

[Wheaty]

It’s a 10 from me.

[Severed799]

music’s moved on, it’s not as timeless as it felt at the time.

[Elights]

…and actually Dead Ringer has been mentioned upthread, which features the absolutely glorious FHH. 5 minutes of relentless ‘hip hop is shit at the moment except me’ obscenity.

[maggieloveshopey]

Groundbreaking at the time, very dated now. Don’t know what to score it, 8 is too generous, 7 is always the most wishy washy of all scores, and 6 seems too harsh.

[Jamos]

the more of these that get added to the leaderboard the more apparent it becomes that lozza hill is badly underrated here

(endtroducing 8/10)

[CHAIRMAN_LMAO]

@EVI

'Why hip hop sucks in ‘96’

Huge bugbear of mine. I could kind of see where he was going with it, but nah. I’m sure even he probably cringes about it now.

An OK album. I agree with a few others in that I don’t think it’s aged all that well. Interesting you mention Deadringer - I guess it was probably a descendant of Endtroducing… but 5-6 years of advances in tech must have been a lifetime back then as it sounds a lot better.

5/10

[CHAIRMAN_LMAO]

Although interestingly he’s going after the “real hip hop heads” on that track so it’s kind of gone full circle.

[noise_ramones]

isn’t why hip hop sucks in 96 like less than a minute?

[danny.dee]

Not sure I get all the ‘sounds dated’ comments… it has a certain nostalgic atmosphere to it that I love. And I first got into it about 10 years after it was released.
Looking at the top albums in the original list you could make a claim for many of them sounding dated.

Anyway top class album. TENtroducing.

[littlebirds]

@daggers

I have no idea why there aren’t hundreds of clones out there. Is it something to do with music licensing?

Think there’s a bunch of reasons. But for sure, Endtroducing is bordering on a “plunderphonics” type record, which means it was technically difficult to make at the time, and pretty much a dead artform due to copyright issues since the 2000s. Hasn’t lent itself to huge waves of output as a result.

I think instrumental hip hop is a bit of an oxymoron anyway. The music was invented to be rapped over and requires space for that, most of the genres best producers aren’t in it for making instrumental music (though you do get stuff like the Petestrumentals LPs by Pete Rock). A lot of the best instrumental hip hop albums are probably the instrumental versions of rap albums that I’d almost never recommend over the real thing (the instrumentals to, say, Aquemini or The Cold Vein are incredible but offer little over the actual albums). Most of the stuff on Endtroducing wouldn’t make for great rap music, and DJ Shadow has always struggled making great music for people to actually rap over IMO.

There are plenty of great examples of instrumental hip hop albums form the likes of J Dilla, Madlib, Nujabes etc., and some producers’ beats sound great when isolated on instrumental LPs – like Clams Casino or El-P. There are also countless examples of electronic music that fuses in hip hop and breakbeats. But as soon as you start to diverge too much from rap, it starts to sound like or be labelled as something else (Endtroducing often has as much in common with coffee table Trip Hop type stuff to me).