My all-time favorite hip-hop producer, J Dilla, continues the slew of posthumous releases since his passing in '06, with Jay Stays Paid. I shamefully grabbed J$P online, heedless to the financial implications on Dilla's family. I urge any fan to purchase this album (which I will be doing tomorrow), to help ease the burden of "Ma Dukes" (Dilla's mother, and the executive producer of this record) having to foot the innumerable medical bills from Dilla's Lupus treatments.One thing Pitchfork reviewer Nate Patrin (who is usually somewhat tolerable) failed to address in his exhaustive review is the fact that many of these beats have not been "unearthed" as he claims so. Some have been taken off of (and out of context) beat CD's (read: CD-R's with on average 30 short beat snippets--used to shop around to rappers) circa '03-'05, pre-Donuts. Stylistically, the lead up to Donuts is demonstrative here, and yet somehow, the album is nicely rounded-out despite having tracks from the artist's other more strait-forward beat crafting periods as well. Dilla, like close friend/collaborator Madlib, always had a knack for choosing off-beat samples to work with, but the incipient works pre-Donuts found the artist experimenting, soon unafraid to break convention entirely (see the tempo change of "Time: The Donut Of The Heart" on Donuts, for example) . This new LP is important for the canon of indie hip-hop in that Dilla himself, single-handedly inspired new movements in Avant-garde hip-hop, that resonate internationally.
