Way back when, my freshman year roommate in college (who had been assigned to me, not chosen by me) had the CD. I didn't much care for it at the time, mainly because he’d gotten into the habit of playing it after I'd gone to bed, which is when he'd decide to stop playing video games or playing the same three-note ska riff on his electric bass and finally crack a book.
If you hadn't already figured it out, my freshman year roommate was a jerk. First words out of his mouth after move-in: "You in-state kids barely have to write your names to get into UNC. I had to work a lot harder than you to get here."
I usually give people the benefit of the doubt when I first meet them. But this lanky Buckeye hayseed had crossed a line.
Rule of life: never think you know the whole story unless you know the whole story.
He knew nothing about what it took me to get there: the hours of study; hours of hard work; hours of paperwork for scholarship applications; hours of worrying if I was going to be able to pay for an education; hours driving myself to writing competitions and then cranking out essays to try and win some scholarship money; hours spent sitting at the hospital with my Parkinson's-stricken dad in the middle of the night because he was having (yet another) depression-fueled panic attack--only to have to get up the next morning and go to school, exhausted, and not being able to tell anybody because dad was afraid of losing his job if people found out he was sick; hours (years) of listening to my parents argue, followed by hours of ghostly silence, and knowing that it was only a matter of time before the whole thing imploded--which it did, nastily, and with relatives involved who only thought they knew the whole story—all happening days before I was set to enter my freshman year at Carolina.
He only thought he knew.
As for the roommate, we didn't interact much after that. It was a rough year.
But if the whole experience taught me anything, it's that we humans are resilient creatures. When life gives us coal, God willing, we’re going to turn it into diamonds.
(I ended that year with a 4.0 and a full-ride scholarship.)
I revisited this album years later after a client wanted to use “Midnight In a Perfect World” as backing music for an online commercial I was scripting. I told him that we couldn’t use the song (copyrights and all that), but I might be able to write something that had a similar feel.
As I listened to the song for inspiration—the same music the roommate had once used to torment me, I began hearing it with new ears. It was pure genius.
While the song is primarily built on a sample from the 1975 recording “The Madness Subsides” by Finnish jazz-fusion multi-instrumentalist Pekka Pohjola, it contains tons of snippets (sometimes less than a second long) of obscure vocals, instrumentals, sound effects, etc., that were sampled, chopped up, and reassembled into something new, cohesive, and exhilarating. (Case in point: the entire drum track was built from a 2-second sample from Marlena Shaw's "California Soul.") Created all by using the limited tools of a sampler, one turntable, and a digital recorder, and nothing more.
More or less, DJ Shadow was taking these odd, mismatched pieces that would make no sense on their own and giving them context and meaning while overcoming--even utilizing--the limitations of the resources he had.
That's pretty much the definition of life.
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