DJ SHADOW

I remember the first time I saw footage of Muhammad Ali fight. He wasn’t boxing. Boxing was him. He owned it-- the sport and the ring. Left hook, right hook, then dancing-- like the ground below wasn’t good enough for his feet. He wasn’t fighting. He was painting, like Picasso, or playing, like Jimi-- with uninhibited freedom, and heart.
He put his soul into the sport, and made you forget that you were standing in a smoky arena, surrounded by a few hundred people, screaming and shouting with enthusiasm. Ali let you taste what it’s like to have that freedom. And when you came back down, back to your senses, you realized you’d just witnessed something spiritual.
Like last night, when I came back to my senses, and realized I was standing in Bogart’s smoky wooden dancehall, surrounded by a few hundred people, all completely swaddled in the same blanket of sound I was.
In the ring? Josh Davis: beat conductor of his very own, one-man symphony orchestra, navigating four turntables and a sampler with the grace and focus Michael Jordan used to take to the court with. For two hours, Davis owned the ring, left-hooking us with the freedom that comes with being DJ Shadow. Letting us know that what we were witnessing was Guernica, and everything else is just Anne Fucking Geddes.