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Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it.

DJ Shadow

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DJ Shadow
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: June 29
Club Dj
Composer
Disc Jockey
Record Producer
Hayward
California
Joshua Paul Davis
Josh Davis
Joshua Davis
Culture
Around
Pasting
Subverting
Hops
Hips
Drawing
Essence
Cutting

More quotes by DJ Shadow

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I've always been compared to people. It's a revolving cast that comes and goes - obviously, sometimes people stay.
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When I make music, it takes me two hours to get into the flow. To me it's like tapping into some kind of subconscious frequency: I just have to turn everything else off, open up part of myself, expose my fears and try to work through it in the music that I'm making.
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The music that I have always liked has always been more rooted in anger or sadness or alienation or any of those inspirational factors that drove rock'n'roll, gospel, and blues. I tend not to value a more pop aesthetic.
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I personally feel the need to experience life and new music and ideas before I can sit down and start writing music again.
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The conventional wisdom of fandom is that you must give your fans anything they want. But I've never felt that that's a healthy attitude - and that comes from being a Star Wars fan.
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Any good album title has multiple meanings, and I like choosing titles where I find myself repeating it, almost like a mantra.
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Like a lot of other DJs, I've been wondering when the first DJ game was going to happen. Somebody even pitched me on their own idea and I thought, I'm not a video game startup I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this.
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I saw. I wanted to start my own store so people would know that what they were buying was real. There were bootlegs around at the time that had my name on the cover, but the music had nothing to do with me. I'm not trying to compare myself to [Jimmie] Hendrix, but back in the '70s, there were some Hendrix bootlegs.
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It's about respecting what I think people like about the original music. I'm not gonna ever take it to the extent that I'm kinda George Lucas-ing moments of the album over and over again, trying to get them right over the next 30 years - I don't wanna do anything like that. But, yeah - it's a... fascinating conundrum through the years.
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I couldn't make a real drum'n'bass or dubstep record to save my life. But I can be influenced by them in small ways.
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I was asked to do TV ads for Macintosh. Nowadays, I think anybody would jump at that but, at the time, it didn't feel appropriate for what I was trying to stand for.
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When I'm looking for DJ sets and stuff to drop, I look for music that I feel is gonna get the reaction I want from the crowd.
DJ Shadow
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I tend to gravitate away from the more trendy Ibiza style of dance music. It's not me.
DJ Shadow
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My core values are still the same about music, and my work ethic, and what I want to represent to people.
DJ Shadow
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I got asked to remix a lot of movie themes, like Mission Impossible, which other people ended up doing quite well. But it was just never my thing.
DJ Shadow
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There's any number of DJs who have inspired me over the years. I don't actively go out in clubs, so I can't tell you if there's some hot new talent out there who everybody's aware of but I'm not.
DJ Shadow
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I always consider every album to be a snapshot.
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I would agree with you that there's 90% imitation and 10% innovation. That's true of any genre.
DJ Shadow
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It's satisfying to put out new music. And I think that's the context in which I'm comfortable revisiting things from the past.
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My problem with iTunes is that I don't have any say in how I'm represented on the site.
DJ Shadow