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[Music Reviews]
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***1/2 DJ Shadow

ENDTRODUCING . . . 

(Mo Wax/ffrr)

Shadow's debut album is not rap music, or pop music, or dance music. It's instrumental hip-hop made for listening, and without much mainstream appeal. More than that, it represents the ever-elusive "next level" many hip-hoppers make claim to but few actually achieve. It's hip-hop's bebop, the analogy being that if Dr. Dre sways hips like a Duke Ellington big band, DJ Shadow rattles brains like a Charlie Parker solo. In "The Number Song," for example, Shadow takes the vital core of hip-hop -- the frenetic resolution of the breakbeat, equal parts get-down and tighten-up -- and sustains it through an entire song, an impossible four and a half minutes of heightened, cut-up, one-man jamming. No room for a rap, no place for a hook.

Thank the Lord, Endtroducing can't sustain that fevered pitch throughout. Elsewhere, Shadow investigates more subtle moods and colors; it's never static, and rarely less than gripping. More than the Fugees, more than the Native Tongues, Shadow is hip-hop's great hope to bring back the real. Where he'll take it, though, is anyone's guess.

-- Roni Sarig