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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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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
True
Would
Imitation
Genre
Innovation
Agree

More quotes by DJ Shadow

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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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I've tried to tell people that the reason I don't really get excited over good press is that I don't want to get agitated over bad press. I don't wanna get too high on good press, too low on bad press. It's just not a healthy way to engage with my own feelings about my music.
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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 always like to remain a fan, put it that way: and I like to hold the idealised version of what these artists are like. Greed is one of those components of human nature that's inherent in everyone, and sometimes it is an unpleasant thing to engage in.
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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 always consider every album to be a snapshot.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I'm not going to get on any anti-corporation soapbox to an extreme level.
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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.
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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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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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My problem with iTunes is that I don't have any say in how I'm represented on the site.
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Through it all, the words of John Peel echo strongly within me: you have support the music that's being made now. You have to continue to look forward and learn from what's happening. That's my philosophy, anyway.
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I tend to gravitate away from the more trendy Ibiza style of dance music. It's not me.
DJ Shadow