Endtroducing...

1	Best Foot Forward 0:48
2	Building Steam with a Grain of Salt 6:41
3	The Number Song 4:38
4	Changeling/Transmission 1 7:51
5	What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 4 5:08
6	[Untitled Track] 0:24
7	Stem/Long Stem/Transmission 2 9:22
8	Mutual Slump 4:03
9	Organ Donor 1:57
10	Why Hip Hop Sucks in '96 0:41
11	Midnight in a Perfect World 5:02
12	Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain 9:23
13	What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 1: Blue Sky Revisit 7:28

Barnes & Noble

Hip-hop started with the cult of the DJ -- young turntable wizards playing records at block parties and in parks throughout Harlem and the Bronx. Those early DJs not only made the crowds dance, they laid the foundation for the lyrical exhortations of the MC, by extending certain parts of a record -- drum breaks, instrumental riffs, vocal snippets -- to create a whole new song. Yet, despite the earth-shattering innovations crafted by everyone from Grandmaster Flash to Large Professor, few DJs had recorded a fully realized full-length disc of their own. DJ Shadow (a.k.a. Josh Davis) changed all that, creating a sonic soup that perfected mid '90s abstract hip hop by taking the intoxicating sound of his 1994 "trip-hop" dreamscape "In/Flux" in directions no one could have imagined. Endtroducing segued from breakbeat beatdowns like "The Number Song" to coolly atmospheric sound suites like "Changeling." This was mutant funk, a sublime experimental weird-hop mindbender littered with hilarious, nonsensical spoken-word bits. (If you can figure out what the sampled beatnik comedian in "Mutual Slump" is rambling on about you're some kind of sleuth.) Endtroducing confused bodies and warped minds all over the hip hop world, and its influence on the DJ underground is still being felt in likeminded contemporaries from Mix Master Mike to Cut Chemist. Yet, to this day, no one has topped it. Martin Johnson

All Music Guide

As a suburban Californian kid, DJ Shadow tended to treat hip-hop as a musical innovation, not as an explicit social protest, which goes a long way toward explaining why his debut album Endtroducing... sounded like nothing else at the time of its release. Using hip-hop, not only its rhythms but its cut-and-paste techniques, as a foundation, Shadow created a deep, endlessly intriguing world on Endtroducing, one where there are no musical genres, only shifting sonic textures and styles. Shadow created the entire album from samples, almost all pulled from obscure, forgotten vinyl, and the effect is that of a hazy, half-familiar dream -- parts of the record sound familiar, yet it's clear that it only suggests music you've heard before, and that the multi-layered samples and genres create something new. And that's one of the keys to the success of Endtroducing -- it's innovative, but it builds on a solid historical foundation, giving it a rich, multi-faceted sound. It's not only a major breakthrough for hip-hop and electronica, but for pop music. Stephen Thomas Erlewine