Review Summary: Very nearly as good as its more famous predecessor, The Private Press is one of the more essential hip-hop documents of the 21st century.
6 years. 6 years is how long it took for Joshua Davis to follow up his genre-defining masterpiece,
Endtroducing.... Faced with a choice between rushing out a follow-up to capitalize on the sleeper success of his full-length debut, or wait it out until he had an album of original material worthy of following it, he chose to wait. And wait. And wait.
It was a long, long wait.
Endtroducing... had, along with Massive Attack's
Mezzanine, effectively killed trip-hop by being so perfect that most realized it would never be bettered, and those who didn't were ignored by a market that refused to settle for second-best. It was, of course, also the first ever album made completely from samples (or at least the first to chart), which was a major wake-up call to the DJ community.
Endtroducing... was such an event that not even projects like UNKLE's
Psyence Fiction and
Brainfreeze (with Cut Chemist) were enough. We needed another Shadow album.
But, like the Grolsch man says, good things come to those who wait. So when, in 2002,
The Private Press appeared, it was a big deal. MoWax had long been usurped as the coolest record label in the world, but Shadow's name still had a great pull. Here he was, returning to save the genre he'd both defined and destroyed.
Except it didn't quite work that way. If there's one thing
The Private Press isn't, it's
Endtroducing.... Part 2 - which, in retrospect, was a very good thing. Many were shocked at just how playful and indebted to the 80s a lot of this album is - "Right Thing/GDMFSOB", "Mashin' On The Motorway", and "You Can't Go Home Again", for instance. They go right back to the roots of the art-form we now call hip-hop. After the dense, intensely emotional, almost progressive
Endtroducing..., tracks like that were total leftfielders. And yes,
The Private Press initially had to face criticisms of not being a 'proper' successor to
Endtroducing.... No, it's not as good as the debut. But who gives a sh
it?
Endtroducing... was a one-off. You know that, I know that, DJ Shadow knows that.
The Private Press is about moving on.
And yes, the dense, emotional tracks have changed, too. "Blood On The Motorway" is the track that sounds closest to the material on Shadow's debut, being a sparse piano-driven ballad that picks up speed and texture as it goes along - before stopping at the 4 minute mark, and returning for another run-through, this time with vocals, something Shadow avoided on
Endtroducing.... It sounds and feels like a soul ascending to heaven, and is the most perfectly realized track DJ Shadow has ever worked on. When I die, I want this played at my funeral. Seriously.
Aside from that, the single "Six Days" is an Eastern-flavoured rumination on the passing of time, warning that 'tomorrow never comes until it's too late'. It bears almost no resemblance to Shadow's earlier work, except in the overall mood. (It also bears no resemblance to the other version of "Six Days" - the mash-up of "Walkie Talkie", "Six Days", and Mos Def's guest vocals that became a radio staple for about 3 weeks back in '02.) Neither do both "Letter From Home" tracks, which bookend the record and suggest some sort of concept to the record.
The biggest shocker, though, is "Walkie Talkie". Shadow had never bragged before, but here's a track telling us 'I'm a bad, buh-buh-BAD motherfu
ckin' DJ. This is why I walk and talk this way!' It's loose. It's funky. It's fun. It's still mindblowing. He's entitled to brag, obviously, but it's still not something you would have expected Shadow to do.
Maybe Davis felt
Endtroducing... wasn't direct enough, or that it was too uptight and serious. In any case, it definitely feels like he set out to make a record that would connect on a more simple emotional level, while not taking itself too seriously. He succeeds on both counts.
The Private Press doesn't quite hang together as a record as well as
Endtroducing... does, but it's still DJ Shadow operating at his peak, and it's still an essential album.
