Tripping on terms

DJ Shadow Entroduces new music. Just don't call it trip hop

by MIREILLE SILCOTT

In 1997, no one is trip hop, everyone is hip hop or at least abstract hip hop. It's a long stretch from '95-'96, when British magazines searched for the clever rascal who coined the term and everyone wanted to put trip hop on compilations.

DJ Shadow wasn't the first person to abhor the title, but he did hate it from the first time he found it next to his name. He says he makes hip hop, and he doesn't even use the word "instrumental" before it. He scratches. He did demos for Profile and Tommy Boy and Afrika Bambaataa is his mentor.

"Mantronix was doing instrumental hip hop in '85," says the 23-year-old DJ Shadow, a California native who was born Josh Davis. "2 Live Crew were doing it in 1984, Bambaataa was doing it in '82 and '76. Hip hop is an instrumental genre. Rap is just hip hop with added vocals."

This is the proper verse for 1997. England's DJ Vadim and Herbaliser's Ollie Teeba (British also) say it, too. But Shadow, with his shining American passport and the monstrous success of his debut album, Entroducing, literally brings the argument home.

"I grew up knowing where I stood within hip hop culture," says Shadow. "I know I'm white and that hip hop wasn't invented by Europeans. I don't have a complex about it, so nobody tries to check me."

James Lavelle, 23, is the president of a label called Mo Wax: he's a hot-headed Oxford-born kid who got into acid jazz and had his own label by the time he was 18. By '93, Lavelle's vision had turned experimental: he saw skaters and hip hop, Beastie Boys Americana and a Star Wars aesthetic. He signed Shadow that year, and though he would soon be living in a shag-piled penthouse in Ladbroke Grove, he also hates the words trip hop--although he probably loves what it did for the now A&M-backed Mo Wax.

Shadow's Mo Wax releases like the EP What Does Your Soul Look Like? and the hugely popular scratchy/swooshy critic's-choice-of-the-year Entroducing album have opened North America's floodgates. Love it or leave it, that sticky term trip hop did serve a purpose--it made America understand something that had previously seemed foreign.

"Downtempo" or "left field" music would have never cut it here, and "jazzy breaks" aren't intelligible to those who don't know what a break is, never mind a jazzy one. Trip hop sounds like hip hop that is trippy, and now that people get that, the music the term greedily envelops can be absorbed. Or as Shadow himself said in one interview, "B-boys can go from playing Space Invaders to Nintendo 64."

DJ Shadow performs at Groove Society on Sunday, April 20 with guest Jeru the Damaja