J. Dilla Tribute...

Orizio

Lest we forget, as most of the Hip-Hop world seems to have done, a legend passed away during the year,an artist with so much potential that surely with another decade under his belt he would have a true Hip-Hop legend.Here's an excellent article on him...

Producer, bandleader, and composer James Yancey—better known as Jay Dee or J. Dilla—died of kidney failure and complications from lupus at his home in Los Angeles on Feb. 10, age 32. Over the past few years, he had been confined to a wheelchair, even while still performing. Since underground label Stone’s Throw was heavily promoting his new album, Donuts, word was that his health, though generally kept under wraps, was getting better. His unexpected death deprived hip-hop of a quiet innovator whose signature—an unassuming funkiness—belied his stature and his reach.

If Dilla wasn’t quite a household name like the Neptunes, it wasn’t purposeful obscurantism. In fact, Dilla’s aesthetic revealed the supposed differences between mainstream and underground rap as partisan bull****. It wasn’t about how “innovative” or “futuristic” his beats were, or fidelity to a true-school sound that supposedly disappeared during Bill Clinton’s second term. It was about a hip-hop producer’s prime directives: bringing the funk and making rappers sound their best. And his beats turned average MCs into poets, great MCs into prophets.

Dilla’s first major production, the Pharcyde’s “Runnin’,” was a life-changing song for a young rap fan in 1996, and its smooth-but-pensive power has not diminished with age. (Proven when Mya used it almost wholesale for her own gorgeous 2003 hit “Fallen.”) After crewing with the producers supergroup the Ummah for A Tribe Called Quest’s classic, underrated Beats, Rhymes, and Life, Dilla cooked the enveloping beat for De La Soul’s Stakes Is High and contributed jittery funk to Busta Rhymes’ platinum The Coming. The only good spots of Tribe’s final album, The Love Movement, had Dilla’s fingerprints all over them.

Running through his accomplishments touches on many corners of hip-hop and R&B. He held down Erykah Badu’s raw Mama’s Gun and Common’s classic Like Water for Chocolate, provided guidance (though he’s not listed in the liner notes) on D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Common’s meandering Electric Circus. Evangelizing for Dilla typically breaks down into listing his productions, which is barely enough to convey the scope of his influence. Though in the last few years he was an underground fixture, he managed genuine radio hits with “Runnin’,” Q-Tip’s “Vivrant Thing” and “Breath and Stop,” Common’s “The Light,” the 1996-defining remix of Busta’s “Woo-Hah (Got You All in Check),” and more.

Link

There's a brilliant review of the Lil' Wayne album on the site as well...