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I would rather have 10 people working on a record that are really committed and believe in it and love it, than 50 people who have no idea who I am or what I'm for.

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
Love
Records
People
Working
Rather
Idea
Ideas
Believe
Really
Committed
Would
Record

More quotes by DJ Shadow

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I always consider every album to be a snapshot.
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I'm not going to get on any anti-corporation soapbox to an extreme level.
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My main thing is constantly looking forward and trying to make music that I couldn't have made at any other time.
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There are a lot of music startups that don't have anything to do with anyone's love for music. It has to do with them having a glorious IPO and then retiring to the Bahamas somewhere. It's important to keep that in mind.
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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.
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Anything that sparks some eight-year-old's interest in music or DJing is great.
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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.
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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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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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To be honest, I didn't really get into making music to be an album artist.
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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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When I first pursued this with Universal, they had no idea what to do. But now that we've gone through the whole process and I've signed this 60-page document that says what we can and can't do, I suppose it will be a little bit easier for the next person.
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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.
DJ Shadow
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As for my store, most artists' sites send you to a third-party storefront like iTunes, whereas we're disseminating it ourselves. I was always uncomfortable with the thought of sending somebody who came to my site to buy something to some other store. It just occurred to me, Why can't we do this?
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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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If I wanted to contribute to the hyphy movement, what good is it making a hyphy record that isn't embraced by that community?
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One of my favorite things that Yahoo does on a regular basis is this story: Wealthiest Rap Artists. That's an example of the internet just perpetuating this myth that we're all just sitting around in these mansions like Steven Tyler, bopping around in our swimming pool. It's bullshit.
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I would agree with you that there's 90% imitation and 10% innovation. That's true of any genre.
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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.
DJ Shadow