About

James ‘J Dilla’ Yancey leaves behind an impression on Hip Hop that will last the test of time. A bridge between Hip Hop’s underground and mainstream, Dilla’s contributions ranged from single handedly defining Detroit Hip Hop as a founding member of Slum Village to providing his production talents to Common, D’Angelo, Busta Rhymes, Erykah Badu, A Tribe Called Quest, The Pharcyde, The Roots, Janet Jackson and Macy Gray.

The Shining marked the reunion of J Dilla & BBE, who had released Welcome 2 Detroit, J Dilla’s debut album. The Shining serves as showcase of J Dilla’s talents which features him not only as a producer, but also as a rapper, singer and musician. Featured guests on this album include Busta Rhymes, Common, Pharoahe Monch, D’Angelo, Madlib, Black Thought, Medaphor aka MED, and Guilty Simpson. — (via Label)

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This posthumous release from the much-missed Detroit producer and MC was completed by Karriem Riggins and features guest spots from Common, D'Angelo, and Black Thought.

On a beat tape, you can make your point in a few bars and move on to the next boom-bap, but an album wants structure and continuity. Dilla imposed this structure upon The Shining by two primary methods, with varying levels of success. The first was by cultivating a sense of unified variety, and this is where The Shining truly excels-- it's a great digest of Dilla's various moods and modes. We get sumptuous neo-soul: "Love" recreates the Impressions' "We Must Be in Love" as a crackling swoon punched up with hearty brass, while "Baby" uses sped-up infant samples as bold, primary-color accents for its supple pastels. We get vertiginous, Madlib-esque fire: "Geek Down" weaves a sinister net of thunderclap drums, weird wavering bass, demonic incantation, and a dominant line like a sliced-up kazoo; the rock-solid stomp of "E=MC2" radiates as variegated vocoder textures swell and decay. And we get straight-up trunk-rattle: "Jungle Love" laces wowing sirens over skeletal trash-compacter percussion, while "Body Movin'" carves up a cymbal-heavy wash with off-kilter squelch and abrupt vocal drops.

The Shining's second layer of structural integrity resides in the guest vocals that dominate the album. Many of the record's guests also rose to prominence in the 1990s, though none of them remind us how much hip-hop has changed since then more starkly than Busta Rhymes: The guy who once had one of the most bugged-out flows in rap squanders "Geek Down" with thuggish, boring ad-libs that pay homage to the "fucking godfather Dilla" while contradicting the essence of his playful spirit. Common fares a bit better on "E=MC2", dropping innocuous party raps into the tight slots between the scratches and drums. He's equally passable sparring gently with the always sublime D'Angelo on "So Far to Go", which sports the sort of inventively dreamy yet perfectly coherent landscape Dilla also showed off on Steve Spacek's "Dollar", reminding us that the producer was as good with r&b atmosphere as he was with rap thwack (he makes Dwele sound way better than he has any right to on the "Dime Piece" remix). MED and Guilty Simpson spit nails that are well-suited to the junkyard jangle of "Jungle Love", while Black Thought mounts a commanding presence amid the overlapping click-tracks of "Love Movin'". Dilla embeds his own utilitarian rhymes in the deep digital swirls of "Won't Do", and while they don't add much force to the track, they pretty much stay out of the way. — (via Pitchfork)

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Label: BBE
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Gatefold
Reissued: 2023 / Originally Released: 2006
Genre: Hip Hop
Style: Conscious, Boom Bap

File under: Hip Hop
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