Rifling Through Bambaata's Vinyl

Since 1996’s Endtroducing….. DJ Shadow – aka Josh Davis – has remained at the forefront of experimental, alternative hip hop.

That album is a cultural signpost in the development of the genre, but it wasn’t the beginning. To Davis and his long-time compatriot Cut Chemist, the story of hip hop stretches back to when they were kids in the ‘70s, when Afrika Bambaataa first mixed a bunch of acetates live and produced some of the original hip hop breakbeats. Davis has always been open about how much of an influence Bambaataa has been on his music, so when he got the chance to rifle through the man’s 40,000-plus record collection, he could hardly turn it up. That opportunity came when Cornell University acquired Bambaataa’s records as part of its hip hop collection.

“A lot of colleges here have jazz collections or classical collections, but Cornell decided to go with hip hop, which is pretty significant and appropriate, I think, given hip hop’s influence on worldwide culture,” Davis explains.

“In any case, Bambaataa donated his collection, and somebody who’s basically the middleman between Bambaataa and Cornell, a man named Johan Kugelberg, had this brainstorm where he was kinda like, ‘Well, wait. Before all these records go into the vault – literally – maybe we should have someone give ‘em one last spin.’ He was already a fan of Brainfreeze [Shadow and Chemist’s epic 1999 mixtape], and we knew him pretty well, so he reached out to us.”

"Anyone can have a warehouse full of crap.”

With so much history before him, Davis made the brave decision to put together a vinyl-only show to honour Bambaataa’s legacy. “From the very beginning, what we said to everybody was that it had to be vinyl only and the set had to be 100 percent Bambaataa’s records. At one point, I was telling somebody that we pulled out four copies of Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express and they all skipped, because he played it a lot. A lot of people said, ‘Why don’t you just use your own copy, or buy one on eBay?’ I sort of was like, ‘What, are you kidding me?’ Because that’s the whole point; we have to be able to convince audiences that these are, 100 percent, Bambaataa’s records.”

Rifling through Bambaataa’s records, to Davis, was something akin to a revelation. “It’s not about numbers; anyone can have a warehouse full of crap,” Davis laughs.  “But the focus of the records was what was so amazing. I mean, it was just epiphany after epiphany after epiphany going though that collection. So many times going through his main set of DJ records, we were constantly like, ‘holy shit’, because we were finding these records that are like history. This is as close as you’re going to get to the birth of hip hop in one collection. It’s the beginning, you know?”