Party Politics: Musical Culture is Safe With DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist and Friends

Scott Thill

It does a body good. Shadow and Cut in their latest dynamic duo concoction.

As much as the thorough body search at the entrance to Hollywood's Knitting Factory might give one the impression that the Product Placement party put on by Cut Chemist, DJ Shadow and their various friends in the hip hop industry might be a sketchy affair -- you know, one with manhood tests, fights here and there, maybe even a drawn weapon -- one look at the multiracial, good-natured crowd inside the club would shatter the conventional image of hip hop concerts as cheap places to buy ringside seats. That was only one of many stereotypes broken by the addictively energetic event; further were to come.

Such as the assertion that hip hop DJs aren't true artists, a fallacy that has been close to fragmenting for over a decade now. Simply put, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist are not so much DJs as they are cultural musicians, mining the history of music for nuggets known and samples unknown to create their hypnotic rhythmic tableaus, riffing off of each other as beautifully as Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk, Pete Towsend and John Entwhistle, or -- getting closer to the genre -- Chuck D and the Bomb Squad might have. Except Shadow and Cut are using 45s - those small black discs that almost don't exist anymore -- as their instruments. Which is one way of saying the material they are employing for their innovative experiments in musical pastiche may be sometimes close to twenty years old, utterly unknown and even unfairly overlooked.

Placing Product Back Into Culture
Like their previously successful Brainfreeze collaboration, the Product Placement set served a dual purpose: finding unheard-of jams that would serve as a hook for their scratches and turntableship and re-presenting those 45s back into the cultural memory from which they may have -- right or wrong -- been in danger of erasure.

Soul Brother. Would anyone besides DJs remember Harold Alexander?

Like soul jazz standout Harold Alexander's catchy-as-hell classic, "Mama Soul," from his Sunshine Man LP, one of the artists you won't be able to find on Amazon these days. Or legendary West Coast bandleader Gerald Wilson's "California Soul," which you may be able to actually find on Amazon, but you wouldn't know what to do with it if you did.

That's not a problem with Shadow and Chemist, who might know that Wilson was Cali's version of Count Basie and Duke Ellington by the time the 1960s hit America, and who certainly know how to slice-and-dice his gifts seamlessly into their own. And while the Product Placement set might not be as reverential a collage as Shadow's "Zimbabwe Legit," "Basic Megamix," or Cut's fabulous "Swing Set" -- found on Jurassic 5's Quality Control-- its title interpreted differently suggests that both DJs are re-placing the products of gifted artistry nearly ignored back onto the cultural map.

Well, most of the time, anyway. One thing that Shadow and Chemist -- as well as their Placement-mates, Z-Trip, Nu-Mark, Marvski, Egon and Skatemaster Tate-- possess is a sense of humor. So when it's not all about beat mining for beats' sake, it is about having a good time and "not tripping," as Chemist explained to the Knitting Factory audience during a break between sets. Exhibit A: "Rappin' With Gas," an insanely silly Home Economics (probably) rap-by-numbers tune extolling the virtues of gas cooking backed by an old-school UTFO rip-off beat. "Rappin' With Gas" was one of many moments of light-hearted fun thrown into the mix of Product Placement the concert, as well as the disc, which you may only be lucky enough to pick up at the show. Cut Chemist spending the entirety of the early sets in a baker's hat and apron was another, as were the free milk and cookies tossed out to the crowd.

This is Called the Show
But the fun really got started when the crowd grew thick -- and maybe stoned -- enough to jump to Marvski and Egon's respective sets, both examples of old-school funk and soul that breathed life into an otherwise talkative yet dance-challenged crowd.

Hey, it was still early.

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