Much like his heroes, Joshua Davis, known to the masses as DJ Shadow, has been breaking ground for decades. Whether he’s making music that inspired one UK journalist to coin the term “trip-hop” or entering the Guinness Book of Records for creating the first album made entirely out of samples, he always stands defiantly outside of the box.

Now, Davis is about to bring a DJ set unlike any other to Australia. Partnering with brother-in-arms and fellow leftfield-thinker Lucas MacFadden, better known as Cut Chemist, Davis is bringing a celebration of the legacy of hip-hop icon Afrika Bambaataa, using the man’s own legendary vinyl collection to take audiences on a journey through music history.

The pair’s Renegades of Rhythm tour will see them hitting up Golden Plains as well as venues around the country, but before they touch down, along with a huge array of vinyl that now calls Cornell University in New York its home, we spoke to Davis to find out what fans can expect from the tour and what went into its creation.

Tone Deaf: What was your first experience with Afrika Bambaataa’s music?

Josh Davis: Literally hearing it coming out of my little transistor radio in 1982, the first time I heard ‘Planet Rock’. I was 10 years old and I consider it the second real hip-hop song I heard after the message. I think the very first time I heard it, it was an instrumental, because I think the DJ played the wrong side of the 12”.

That was something that used to happen back then, a lot of R&B songs and disco songs didn’t have instrumentals – it was usually one song on the A-side and another song on the B-side. But with the advent of hip-hop, a lot of people took a cue from dub records and dancehall records which would have a dub instrumental on the B-side, so it caught a lot of DJs off-guard.

TF: How did you get Bambaataa’s blessing for this tour? Did the two of you already know each other?

JD: No, I actually met him in an airport. Well, I didn’t really meet him, I could just see him coming down the concourse and I instantly recognised him. It was somewhere in the Midwest and there was nobody else around him and I just said, “Peace, Bambaataa”, and he was sort of surprised. He was like, “Oh, peace to you as well.”

But that’s the only time I had met him prior to this, although I know a lot of people that know him and actually the person who helped broker his collection to Cornell University for their permanent hip-hop archive, this person had the idea for us to do this set. So we told him, “Well, yeah, that’s an amazing idea and we wanna look at the collection but we also really wanna talk to Bam and get his blessing”, because that was paramount.

So through Johan [Kugelberg, Cornell Hip-Hop Archive Curator] and the guy I mentioned and Bambaataa’s team, the Zulu Nation guys, we eventually talked to him and it was just about letting him know what we intended to do and how we intended to honour him through this set.

It definitely needed a little bit of explaining because I think that this is the first time that, it’s not as though Bambaataa’s retired, he’s still a working DJ and I think it’s a bit unusual that other DJs were going to use that collection to tell his story. But because it had never really been done before, that was one of the things that drew us to doing it.

There were a lot of these types of acetates in the collection… including a really primitive, bedroom version of ‘Planet Rock’, it was like seeing a sketch of the Mona Lisa.

TF: How much of a logistical challenge did sorting through the collection pose? Did you have a team helping you?

JD: The only people that were really qualified to pull from the collection to build a set were Cut and I, in terms of… we knew exactly what we wanted to do, we feel like we’re pretty intimately familiar with a lot of the roots of the music and a lot of the hidden bits of knowledge in terms of this connects to this and this is the reference to that, this lyric from this Bambaataa song came from this African record, y’know?

So we went through the collection over the course of about 20 hours and we had to be efficient and we had to be speedy. But Bambaataa made it easy because we didn’t want to pull any records that he didn’t play and he didn’t love, because when you have a collection that large, there’s gonna be a lot of things that were handed to him that he maybe played once and didn’t really care about.

And we didn’t want to have a set full of those types of records even if now they’re considered rare or classic or something, we really wanted to focus on records that meant a lot to him and that he had a hand in exposing to the world.

And a lot of those types of records had a lot of crate wear and tape all over them because the jackets were falling apart so it was pretty easy to go through and figure out which records he loved and played.

TF: Was there a “handle with care” mentality about this tour? Were you and Lucas worried about damaging these important records?

JD: Well, the important thing to know is that in that era, in the era that he was coming up in and when he hit the peak of his mainstream popularity, vinyl was still very plentiful, I mean, there were literally thousands of record stores in New York City, and the mentality back then was that as long as you had the knowledge of what the record was, it could be obtained and you were never gonna pay a lot of money.

It’s not like now where people are DJing with records that are worth a thousand pounds of something and you might not ever see it again if it gets lost or damaged. Back then, records were still very plentiful. So the records are, even though what the music symbolises was treasured by DJs, the records themselves were just seen as, I think by and large, just vehicles that contained the information. So records got beat up, y’know?

Records got scratched, records got crushed, records warped, records got damaged, I play one Funkadelic record that literally has a piece of the middle missing, there’s a giant hole in the middle, but fortunately I don’t have to play that part of the record. So there’s nothing we’re gonna do to the records in the course of playing them that’s going to compromise their intrinsic value.

And fortunately, Cornell, who now own the collection, Cornell University in upstate New York, their philosophy was actually by you guys using the records it adds to the significance of the records and what they wanna do is keep our set intact once we send it back. They wanna keep it in the same order as we played it as a continuation of the legacy of the records.

TF: Was there a view to making the set more relatable for contemporary audiences, considering you’d be playing a lot of obscure and unheard hip-hop?

JD: Well, it’s not just hip-hop. I mean, we literally play everything from dub music, to Public Image Limited, to krautrock, to classic breaks. And that’s the thing that we really wanted to express in the set is something that I think a lot of the mainstream doesn’t quite comprehend about hip-hop and that’s that it’s extremely inclusive. Through the DJs like Bambaataa, the rule back then was that anything can be hip-hop as long as it’s viewed through a hip-hop lens, and as long as it’s contextualised in a hip-hop way.

I mean, you can really hear it in the records that he made famous, whether it’s Liquid Liquid or Sly Stone, from the mainstream pop, almost like crossover pop like James Brown, to extreme obscurities, it was all music that he played and it was the music that blew the minds of people like, for lack of a better example, Deborah Harrie and the people that used to see him in the early ‘80s. That’s what blew their minds and attracted them to hip-hop was how it was just this incredible collision of different cultures and sounds.

Something that I think a lot of the mainstream doesn’t quite comprehend about hip-hop and that’s that it’s extremely inclusive… anything can be hip-hop as long as it’s viewed through a hip-hop lens.

TF: Were there any “holy grail” records that had you and Lucas pinching yourselves?

JD: Certainly, I mean there were… one of the things that, um… well, it’s a long story, I’ll cut around that, but there were a lot of acetates and acetates are basically one-off dub plays that are cut usually in the studio as a reference for the artist to listen to at home and kind of go, “Oh, that works, that doesn’t, maybe I can do an edit there.”

And there were a lot of these types of acetates in the collection, not only by him, including a really primitive, kind of bedroom version of ‘Planet Rock’, which was obviously way before the involvement of Arthur Baker and John Robie, who ended up kind of taking Bambaataa’s vision and crafting a genuine song out of it, which was really incredible to hear, it was like seeing a sketch of the Mona Lisa or something.

And in addition to that, he had acetates of other artists, including some really seminal hip-hop artists. There was an acetate of an unreleased track by the Funky Four Plus One, there was an unreleased track by the Infinity Rappers, stuff that we just kind of looked at each other and went, “Holy shit, this is really historically important and nobody even knows they exist.”

DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist ‘The Renegades of Rhythm’ 2015 National Tour Dates

Wednesday 4th March: Transit Bar, Canberra
Thursday 5th March: Adelaide, TBA
Friday 6th March: The Forum, Melbourne (Tickets here)
Saturday 7th March: Golden Plains Festival, VIC
Sunday 8th March: Odeon Theatre, Hobart
Thursday 12th March: The Hi-Fi Bar, Sydney
Friday 13th March: Family, Brisbane
Saturday 14th March: Metro City, Perth

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