Dillatronic drops October 30th. Dillatronic, for all of you that don’t know is a new postmortem instrumental album from now legendary producer J Dilla. Ma Dukes ( J Dilla’s Mother) and Vintage Vibez Music Group are putting together various packages to release these new instrumentals to the public.
I have mixed feelings about this project. I love J Dilla he is definitely in my top five favorite hip-hop producers of all time. On the one hand I’m thinking, I would love to get more Dilla. Its temping to think that if some Dilla is good than more must be better. On the other hand J Dilla died in 2006, and since his death his catalog of unreleased instrumentals have been mined by various artists. To illustrate this I want to list for all of the new projects, re-releases, and remix albums that have been released in Dilla’s name since 2006.
J Dilla – Jay Love Japan – 2006
Karriem Riggins – The Shining – 2006
J Dilla – Rough Draft – 2007
J Dilla and Madlib – Champion Sound(re-release) – 2007
Illa J (Dilla’s Brothter) – Yancey Boys – 2008
J Dilla – Jay Stay Paid (instrumental album) – 2009
Slum Village – Villa Manifesto – 2010
J Dilla – Rebirth of Detroit (instrumental album) – 2012
J Dilla – The Diary(Shelfed Album) – 2014
Slum Village – Yes – 2015
Without even adding this new project Dillatronic, this is already a ridiculous amount of post mortem material. I Listened to a stream of the album on Pitchfork. I couldn’t help but thinking, I shouldn’t be listening to this. After literally a decade of mining the catalog of unreleased instrumentals this is starting to feel like leftovers.
I get the impression that the reason a lot of these instrumentals were unreleased to begin with was because they were either incomplete or not to Dilla’s standards. I feel like we aren’t getting “Fall in Loves” or “Runnins”. Out of this grouping of tracks rather we are getting a lot of lo-fi rough tracks with short run times.
Although J DIlla did pioneer this sound, the legacy of J Dilla has been so large and so far reaching that I can listen to producers on soundcloud who are making more polished versions of this style of instrumental. I’m not saying any of this to devalue J Dilla, or imply that he isn’t anything short of one of the most amazing producers ever. My issue here is that we need to stop this. We need to let J Dilla stay dead.
The first few projects like “The Shining” and “Rough Draft” I could understand those releases. Clearly J Dilla was working on those albums, and although they might not have been completed we at least had his directions and his intent to get the project out. This new project feels bad because of the fact that it’s too far removed from Dilla.
We need to respect the dead and I don’t know if Dilla would want us to be listening to this.This wasn’t a project that Dilla himself slated, and honestly this feels like they are just packaging Dilla’s in progress or incomplete work.
If your into Dilla you might enjoy this review Buster Wolf Vejigante – Review
See you in space cowboy.
