Oh dear, his blog seems a bit prickly: ‘Repeat Endtroducing over and over again? That was never, ever in the game plan. Fuck that. So I think it’s time for certain fans to decide if they are fans of the album, or the artist.’
And that’s the way it all starts. You build something up, you play with it a while, you do it all again, you bathe in the glory, you take the bows, you please your label and your market and then you screw it all up and start all over again. And there’s nothing wrong in that. If the artist can’t tear up his own rulebook, who can? But why be so prickly about it? You can no more challenge the fan for swapping allegiances than you can the artist. If you don’t like Shad’s new album, ‘The Outsider’, it doesn’t mean you’re not a fan of the Shad’ it just means your chin stroking, intellectual white-ass has little or no chance of wiggling along to the crunky, hyper beats of the San Francisco Bay Area ‘Hyphy’ culture to which this new album non-too-gently subscribes. It isn’t a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just different.
Whereas ‘Endtroducing’ and ‘The Private Press’ were forged entirely from samples, ‘The Outsider’ sees Davis wrap his scratchy, keys heavy bells around some fairly aggressive hardcore rap brought to the boil by a core team of gangsta favourites like Keak Da Sneak and Nump, in a way that’s actually more akin to something like the funky dystopia of Dan The Automator and Mr Homosapien’s ‘Deltron 3030’.
Fortunately or unfortunately, though, ‘The Outsider ‘also finds Shadow also having a go at several other styles. There’s the thrashy, instrumental rock of ‘Artifact’, the strait-laced new age mysticism of ‘What Have I Done’ and the Coldplay inspired rock of tracks like ‘You Made It’. And get this; he even invited Kasabian to make ‘The Tiger’. It’s confusing, but it’s not unpleasant.
Still having none of it? Then ladies and gentlemen, let me entroduce, Mr Kid Koala….