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.
Sadly, not all of that detritus has resulted in James Yancey's bills getting paid. His mother's been infamously entangled in rights issues with the executor of Dilla's estate, who has blocked the releases of more than a few projects that might've helped his family financially and brought some of his vault material to light. But Jay Stay Paid should hopefully circumvent that, since it puts a new piece of Dilla's musical legacy in good hands and creates a life-spanning statement in a way that previous memorial assemblages like 2006's The Shining could only hint at. Jay Stay Paid isn't a cash-in piece of vulturework, but a labor of love executive produced by his mother and assembled, arranged, and mixed by Pete Rock, one of Dilla's greatest influences. You couldn't come up with two people more qualified to help turn the DAT-stored scraps and sketches of Dilla's ideas into a full-fledged work of art.
The source material on Jay Stay Paid runs the gamut from 90s Ummah-era loops to beats Dilla was putting together from his hospital bed, but it stylistically falls in a general area that fits best between the dense but crisp boom-bap of his early-aughts material (i.e., Welcome 2 Detroit and Slum Village's Fantastic, Vol. 2) and the grimier, more frenetic beat-tape rawness of his Jaylib/Donuts L.A. phase. That latter aesthetic tends to permeate the surface here, filtered through a loose radio-show concept that interjects some actual disk jockey shoutouts, comedic asides, and brief interjections from the man himself. That bugged-out hyperkineticism keeps things moving, but it doesn't reduce the beats to ADD afterthoughts: Early scene-setting moments like the stuttering elasticity of the organ-riff loop in "King", the glowering Minimoog g-funk retrofuturism of "I Told Y'all", and the Morse-code keyboard of "Lazer Gunne Funke" don't run too long, but they sink in deeply.
Like The Shining, Jay Stay Paid breaks up the instrumental passages with a number of guest appearances by various MCs, most of whom either worked with Dilla in the past or otherwise have some level of simpatico compatibility with his aesthetic. Raekwon, whose upcoming Only Built for Cuban Linx II will also feature a repurposed Dilla production, teams up with Mobb Deep's Havoc in a pairing that might seem at odds with Dilla's conscious-rap-friendly Ummah/Soulquarian rep, but the skittering beat, skulking bass, and late-night creeping atmospherics in "24K Rap" fit them perfectly. And the usual suspects-- DOOM muttering acerbic wordplay on "Fire Wood Drumstix", Black Thought throwing around reality show namedrops on the Latin guitar-driven bump of "Reality TV", a host of raw-spitting Detroit cohorts from Frank Nitti to Phat Kat to Dilla's own brother Illa J-- come at it with the reverence and enthusiasm of longtime friends and admirers who fully understand the gravity of the project they're doing.
But Jay Stay Paid's biggest strengths don't lie in its guest roster, impressive as it is. It's the way these reconstructed, reassembled beats so vividly show off how left-field he was willing to get in the service of finding new ways to make a beat knock. Hearing "Make It Fast Mega Mix" turn the spooky burble of David Essex's "Rock On" into a sinuous players' anthem for up-and-comer Diz Gibran makes it sound like an obvious idea turned novel, and anyone who's paid attention to what Donuts brought to the table should find some welcome familiarity in the vintage 60s and 70s electronics that flicker across large swaths of the album; "Spacecowboy vs. Bobblehead", "In the Night (Owl N Out) - While You Slept (I Crept)", and "On Stilts" provide the brightest examples. But even for diehards, there's something on nearly every track here that gives his production some strange, intriguing angle: swooping astral choirs ("Milk Money"), a bizarre, fuzzed-out and pitched-up mutation of the Mothers of Invention's "Oh No" in "9th Caller", and the closing statement of "KJay and We Out", one of Dilla's characteristic glowing boom-clap beats overlaid with a faint psych-soul guitar that might be the most elegiac beat dropped since his passing. This may not be the last we hear of some long-lost, recently-unearthed material of Dilla's, but you can consider this the most heartfelt eulogy Pete Rock's had a hand in since "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)", and the definitive document so far from the family that misses him.
