It must be hard being an artist who peaks early. What do you do? You want to keep making and playing music; it’s your life. You try new things, you keep discovering new sounds. It’s rewarding. But you have this little feeling, this little voice that tells you it’s going to be next to impossible to make anything anywhere near as good as your previous work. And then you’ve got the expectations of your fans.
I think it’s fair to say a lot of people at DJ Shadow’s All Basses Covered gig at Prince last week wanted to hear some of the old stuff. Like the fan up the front who called out two-thirds through the show — I didn’t hear exactly what she said — only have to have Shadow lash back sarcastically, “Oh, you want to hear more old stuff? Yeah, let’s hear more old stuff! I love living in the past!”
Shadow started things off with a good old-fashioned soundcheck before greeting the crowd. “So what I’m gonna do tonight is share with y’all what’s going on in the California beats scene. The year is 2014. I’m gonna play a lot of the new [silence from crowd] and a little bit of the old [cheers from crowd].” After adding that he would put down the mic and let his music do the talking (an outright and disappointing lie), Shadow began with his classic cheeseball MC sample, “Are you ready?”, scratching over the sample and repeating it a couple of times to the cheers to the cheers of the crowd. When I heard the opening vocal from What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4), my heart leapt for a second. Maybe this was going to be really good.
Nope. What followed was an hour and a half of fetid trap music, interspersed with the odd bit of interesting footwork or drum ‘n’ bass, a couple of originals (Six Days, Organ Donor plus a decent remix of The Number Song) and regular and varied interjections from Shadow — “There’s no laptop up here”, “Only the sickest beats”, “A lot of this is unreleased shit me and my buddies have been making”, and several references to the music being not only new but “scary”.
While DJ Shadow wanted to try out his new stuff on the fans, the fans it appeared wanted the old stuff and ended up leaving fairly empty-handed.
BY MORGAN RICHARDS
Loved: Some of Shadow’s improv MPC drumming was actually pretty cool.
Hated: A lot of his new stuff.
Drank: A whiskey dry and a couple of draught beers.
