It was a music unto itself, with its own stars and rules and boundaries. DJs went off and formed their own subculture, one that had precious little to do with what rap music had become. But sometime in the ’90s, it broke off and became its own twitchy, insular thing.
(The album turns 20 tomorrow.) It had been a part of rap before rapping was a part of rap. DJing, of course, had been a vastly important part of hip-hop for decades before 1996, the year DJ Shadow released Endtroducing…. It’s more of a shock that it produced only one masterpiece. Looking back a couple of decades, it’s not that much of a shock that turntablism produced a masterpiece.
