College Rock’s New Wave
Sitting on the patio at Grilly’s, a restaurant in Mill Valley, California, Josh Davis, a.k.a. DJ Shadow, and his cohorts, Tom Shimura, a.k.a. Lyrics Born, and Lateef Daumont, are reminiscing about their days as undergraduate record moguls. “We wanted to learn from the ground up,” says Lyrics. “We wanted to find out what it was like to press up records.”
This was back in ’91, when Shadow and Lyrics were communications majors at the University of California at Davis. Along with rapper Lateef and two other pals, Xavier Mosley, a.k.a. Chief Xcel, and Jeff Chang, they were part of a multiracial crew that congregated around the campus radio station, KDVS. With money drawn on credit-card accounts and from part-time jobs, parental generosity and student loans, they founded SoleSides Records and began releasing their own singles.
“Things started cranking up in late ’93 – we were leaving school to tour for weeks on end, so I was DJ’ing at night and then borrowing some computer to fax a paper in,” Shadow says of his first European tour. “And, you know, the keyboard in Germany is backward, so all the letters are in different places.”
The hard work paid off. The SoleSides sound – filled with dense beats, obscure samples and intelligent rapping – caught the ear of James Lavelle, head of Britain’s influential Mo Wax label. Lavelle began licensing SoleSides’ releases in Europe and Japan in 1994, and his relationship with London Records helped spawn the 1996 major-label release of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, which sold more than 150,000 copies in the U.S.
But if SoleSides (which now exists in a new incarnation called Quannum Projects) is best known for spearheading the current renaissance of independent hip-hop, it also represents the vanguard of another movement: the shoestring entrepreneurship of starting your own record label in college.
“I think forming our own label prepared us to take it to the next level,” says Lyrics. “Now I know how distribution works, manufacturing, merchandising – the whole thing.”
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