Another month, another meditation on the legacy of James Yancey. It's been three years since Yancey's untimely death and his grip on the imagination and inspiration of hip-hop artists still hasn't loosened-- and somehow, for the most part, hasn't crumbled into exploitative shamelessness. You can chalk that up to most of the tribute-paying artists-- Q-Tip, Common, Busta Rhymes, Talib Kweli, ?uestlove, Erykah Badu, damn near every hip-hop artist in Detroit-- having known and respected the man on a collaborative level (and, in the case of Yancey Boys' Illa J, as family). Madlib's own personal musical tribute to Dilla is particularly faithful: They were two producer-MCs who had forged a mutual stylistic compatibility, one that began with beat-tape trading by mail and resulted in the underground classic Champion Sound, and in that album's wake they both wound up inspiring and pushing each other to expanded vistas. Donuts might have sounded like a drastically different album without the choppy, grimy aesthetic of The Unseen and Madvillainy's production mind as a creative sparring partner, and Madlib's early Beat Konducta work, the creation of which ran largely parallel to the construction of Donuts, benefited greatly from his study of Dilla's meticulous drum and bassline construction. Among all the things that were lost to hip-hop heads with Dilla's passing, the possibility of future collaborations and stylistic cross-pollinations between these two beatmaking auteurs was one of the most significant.
As an elegy, a payment of a gratefully-acknowledged artistic debt and an expansion of one man's sound, the fifth and sixth volumes of Madlib's Beat Konducta series are a stirring culmination of everything Dilla did to affect Madlib as a musician. Granted, there's little mistaking it for anyone other than Madlib: There's a constant volley of vocal snippets, lyrical and otherwise, that fit his thematic blend of fragmented quasi-narrative and off-kilter humor. Plus, his restless, loop-jostling production style is instantly-recognizable here in one of its most dubbed-out, bass-heavy and atmospherically THC-soaked incarnations yet. Still, the Dilla influence is clearly evident in a number of ways, especially the way vocals are chopped and truncated to serve as melodic hook, percussive exclamations, and reconstructed grooves for several tracks, as well as the recurring presence of that weighty, synthesized bass Dilla loved to lace his tracks with. And there's a few other flourishes-- like the air-raid siren that popped up every so often on Donuts, or the "Make It Funky" clip of James Brown saying "I don't know" used on the Slum Village track of the same name-- that range from obvious nods to what seem like elaborate in-jokes between friends.
At 42 tracks stretched across 67 minutes, this looks a bit like an unwieldy collection of fleeting ideas when the tracklisting's all splayed out in front of you. And it's a bit difficult to get a firm grasp on everything, even after several listens: There's just so many ideas Madlib's managed to cram into even the shortest minute-long loop that it's hard to point to a particular track and highlight its characteristics without taking the rest of the album into account. There's some particularly inspired standout moments that'll stick with you: the soul strings that get hacked up into hiccupping, off-beat tics on "The String (Heavy Jones)"; the way "The Get Over (Move)" actually welds the guitar riff from the Buzzcocks' "Boredom" to an archetypal Yancey boom-clap and somehow makes it make sense; the muffled/smothered beats on "Smoked Out (Green Blaze Subliminal Sounds)" where nothing's clear or amplified except a persistent tambourine slap.
But this isn't an album that benefits from a track-by-track dissection or a thorough inventorizing, even if the bulk of the beats sound attention-grabbing enough when they pop up as individual moments in a divorced, shuffle-mode context. More than any other collection of semi-instrumental productions Madlib's assembled, the combined Dil Cosby Suite and Dil Withers Suite is a complete work. The best way to listen to this album is to throw it on, zone out and keep your finger away from the controls, letting the rhythmic detours and left-field segues sneak up on you before dissolving into the next beat (abetted, every so often, by some sparse but well-placed scratches from guest turntablist J-Rocc). Before long you'll click with its flood of sounds and ideas and emotions, and the everywhere-at-once scope-- mournful and celebratory, solemn and comedic, starting from soul and circulating its way through every other vein of hip-hop production structure. Three years later, after all the eulogies for Dilla, this record stands as one of the most meaningful.
