J Dilla - Motor City

Pitchfork 68

We’re not remotely likely to get another Donuts out of the J Dilla archives. But even with the one-a-year pace we’ve been getting posthumous releases—the floodgates opening in earnest around 2012, concurrent with the release of embattled mixtape Rebirth of Detroit—one can’t help but wonder if there’s something deeper hiding in his vaults. We keep getting new fragments of Dilla’s work, and we try to piece together a narrative that makes sense. Each collection adds another layer. The music might not tell us much, but it does provide a nice reminder of his impact and hopefully some funds to keep the bills paid for the Yancey family.

Through the seams of their after-the-fact assemblages, these releases cull styles from a decade or two ago, shaped into an approximation of the art Dilla was aiming for. On the all-instrumental Motor City, all 19 rare and unreleased tracks were picked by Dilla’s mother herself, with Ma Dukes including a letter to her son in the artwork. Still, for every fleshed-out beat that would make for the backbone of a solid deep hip-hop album cut, there’s a piece of scrap music that barely registers as an interstitial. For every track that points to a certain highlight of Dilla’s idiosyncratic griminess, there’s another that comes across like something he kept filed away because he didn’t feel it was ready for the public.

There’s a few highlights on Motor City, even if the untitled nature of the tracks and the individually-wrapped, flat sequencing don’t do much justice to Dilla’s history of focused vibe-building. “Motor City 13” glows with Dilla’s late-’90s clouds-of-bass warmth, and “Motor City 8” goes woozy with garage soul that feels at once delirious and peaceful. Some of the beats are audacious in their experimentation, even if the execution’s a little dicey. It takes some real razor-walking finesse to try and chop such an instantly recognizable piece of Creedence like he does on “Motor City 7,” turning the familiar swamp-trudge groove of 1970’s “Run Through the Jungle” into the jumbled rhythmic gait of someone trying to jog on ice.

As the tracks go on one after another, the jarring moments and back-to-the-drawing-board segments jump out as mood-breaking nuisances. Even though we get Dilla in most of his stylistic phases—from Detroit boom-bap to Soulquarian meditations to the choppy rawness of his final L.A. years—you can hear a couple dead ends. Some are not-quite-right precursors to more familiar tracks, like “Motor City 9,” a less-immediate alternate version of future Mos Def The Ecstatic beat “History.” Others seem directly at odds with his production personality, like the hokey “Motor City 12.” And as is the fate of a lot of stand-alone hip-hop instrumentals, some of the longer cuts—which is to say, ones more than 90 seconds—fall into a sort of simple-loop stasis. They feel intended for a particularly animated MC to complete them. The briefly stirring “Motor City 4” makes 1:40 feel like an hour and 40 minutes.

The best context for a collection of tracks like this does play out. James Yancey’s close friend J.Rocc—a World Famous Beat Junkies vet and Stones Throw labelmate—has built a strong history of Dilla dedication mixes, particularly the one he released three days after Dilla’s passing. And Motor City includes a worth-the-admission mix of the album’s material, sewing it all together into something that feels more profound. He drops sharp-timed vocals and classic rap verses into the fold to breathe deep life into the tracks, switching up and distorting beats just as you’re lulled into thinking you know where they’re going. So even if you don’t know what to do with the collection of cuts on Motor City, it’s at least a relief to know what Dilla’s family and friends are capable of doing with them.