Jay Stay Paid

Dilla will always be with us. I don't mean that in just the spiritual sense, or in the way that people are going to be feeling his legacy for a while, though god knows I must've reviewed a dozen albums over the past year that were either in tribute to him or featured some of his beats or both. What I'm talking about is that he'll always be with us in the sense that the amount of material he recorded over the decade-plus before his death was completely overwhelming. When Los Angeles blogger and music journalist Jeff Weiss interviewed the Pharcyde back in May, Imani mentioned that when Labcabincalifornia was being recorded, Dilla gave them "hundreds of beats" to choose from. And since Donuts became the last album issued in his lifetime, it's been followed by a flood of releases-- sanctioned and otherwise-- that've raided his archives and spilled forth a flood of previously-unheard detritus that rivals the early-1970s post-mortem output of Jimi Hendrix.

Posthumous albums, especially in hip-hop, get a bad rap (no pun intended). And 99% of the time, there is a great reason for that. Just look at 2Pac’s after-death legacy, though it’s tough to call it a legacy considering how tarnished it’s become. While it’s obvious he recorded hundreds of hooks and verses in his shortened existence, he kept those unreleased because they were likely not up to snuff. But they were released anyway. And ver y few of those tracks were worth listening to more than once, if at all.