Collection: 7. DJ Shadow - ...Endtroducing

Sampling was by no means 1996's innovation, and certainly wasn't anything new to hip-hop by the middle of the decade; one could state accurately, in fact, that sampling lies at the core of the genre's very musical foundation. But that's just the thing about ...Endtroducing: Though Shadow still insists otherwise-- to the point that he is said to have made a habit of moving this very record from the "electronic" section of his local record store to the "hip-hop" section-- the album is effectively genreless. It may rely on hip-hop technique, but Shadow mined the dankest of this nation's record bins to unearth for himself an entire sonic spectrum that melded jazz and funk loops with forgotten horror movie samples with layers of ambient noise, to create one of the most dark, foreboding, and original musical statements ever. To date, the album still sounds like no other.

Across the board, tracks like "The Number Song", "Organ Donor", and "Midnight in a Perfect World" became curious points of intersection for listeners of otherwise disparate music, and one can't help but think ...Endtroducing brought the possibility of hip-hop to die-hard rockcentrics. "Organic" is an understatement; ...Endtroducing is living, breathing Weltgeist, its form self-determined and unusually cohesive, given its vast breadth and bottomless well of innovation. With DJ Shadow's debut, other hip-hop in 1996-- no, other music period-- couldn't help but "suck." --Nick Sylvester / Pitchfork.com