Instrumental Rap/Hip-Hop

In the beginning was the DJ, and the DJ created the beat, and the beat was good. Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, genre distinctions were incidental for most electronic and sample-based music. The music of Afrika Bambaataa (who gave hip-hop its name) has more in common with Bass or Baltimore Club Music than it does with anything that has emerged from N.Y.C.'s hip-hop scene in the past decade. Acts such as Cybertron, Mantronix, and Steinski all worked within the same template. And then, in a turn that was the modern day equivalent of the Tower of Babble, electronic music seemed to splinter into a thousands tiny pieces. Garage, Freestyle, House and Detroit Techno all emerged. Hip-hop producers slowed their beats down to accommodate the increasingly prominent role of the emcee, and the idea of "rap music" was borne.

Throughout the '80s and into the '90s, the definition of hip-hop began to narrow so that it was almost entirely defined by vocal presence. But then in the mid-'90s, things began to change again. Hip-hop began to wrest free of its bicoastal borders. The culture was becoming international, so it only made sense that the music reflected this shift. Of course, the only problem was the language barrier, so many of the first international artists to break in the U.S. were instrumentalists. Producers such as France's DJ Cam and Japan's DJ Krush were key figures in the burgeoning explosion, but the alpha and omega of modern instrumental hip-hop is DJ Shadow. Sure, there had been artists working within the medium before him, but none had been able to make much of a commercial or critical impact. With his 1996 debut, Entroducing , he culled fragments of jazz, hip hop, '60s psych, pop, rock and everything in between to create a series of desolate musical narratives that were as haunting as they were thrilling. It was a dark detour through the back roads of modern music, where the lush ambience of Davis' samples was undermined by a gathering storm of blistering breakbeats and chopped vocal snippets. It remains the top selling instrumental hip-hop album in the genre's history, and it effectively opened the floodgates for an entire generation of producers.