J Dilla

The title of J Dilla's partially posthumous final effort (25 percent of it was recorded after his recent passing due to kidney failure) is eerie if fitting: Stephen King's novel The Shining and the Stanley Kubrick film that made it a phenomenon is all about withstanding soul-searing visions of death. Sound samples of the chilling film litter Dilla's effort like so many reminders that he worked every day knowing the reaper was at his door. That he settled on such a violent if loaded cultural standout like The Shining is what gives his last release an otherworldly existential fear, like the last scenes of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, where Fosse's doppelganger (played by Roy Scheider) experiences his shattered life in real-time flashback as a full Broadway complement of dancers, musicians and actors, with Ben Vereen himself singing "Bye Bye Life" as his farewell song.

So yeah, the layers in Dilla's Shining are deep, and as a result the whole disc practically boils over with material on each song, whose conventional structures struggle to surge past all of the ephemera (and what are we, but ephemera?) into shape, but cannot. As such, the meta (Dilla's struggles with illness, his death, his canonization) and the material become one, and knowing about Dilla and his life becomes as important as loving laid-back hip-hop that rolls with ease forward into the sunset.

It's obvious Dilla didn't want to go gently into that good with The Shining's first track "Geek Down," a machine-gun blast of noise and Busta Rhymes' barked warnings, which blend masterfully into the lead-footed bass drums of the stomper "E=MC2." Common's battle rap, while powerful, still shrinks beneath the samples of Jack Nicholson going mental in The Shining, if only to remind everyone why they came to the joint in the first place. Those samples, taken mostly from the scene where Nicholson terrorizes Shelley Duvall after she interrupts his work, reappear on almost every track, as do sound snippets of Scatman Crothers and other Kubrickian characters. It's their turmoil, and Dilla's intertextual connection to it, that gives his last effort its visceral punch.

That said, The Shining alternately bounces and chills just as finely as anything Dilla has ever done, from De La Soul's smart "Stakes is High" to his last solo effort Donuts. Pharoahe Monch's head-bobbing rhyme schemes overtake the nu-soul lean of "Love," and the raps of the always laid-back Madlib helps rhymer Guilty Simpson turn the instrumental repetitions of Dilla's "Baby" into a strolling thumper. Things get hotter when Stone's Throw regular J.Rocc and Dilla's good friend and session musician Kareem Riggins, who took over production on The Shining when Dilla passed, team up for the blazing "Body Movin'." But they chill just as fast when Dilla's Slum Village collaborator Dwele shows up to croon some silk into a remix of "Dime Piece," before giving way to The Roots' Black Thought and the percussive swipes of "Love Movin," the fourth title on The Shining with the word "love" in it.

Which is as instructive as the title of Dilla's poignant disc, because the guy had more love than anyone for the world and the people within it. And so we arrive finally at the double thrust of The Shining, a musical effort as steeped in love as it is sure that death is just around the corner. How the two can coexist in art if not in life cannot be answered. It can only be acknowledged. Same with Dilla: With The Shining under wraps, his musical legacy is cemented at last. - Scott Thill, Morphizm.com

Months before he passed away, J Dilla asked fellow Detroiter and longtime associate Karriem Riggins to help him complete The Shining. With the album apparently 75 percent complete, Riggins -- an accomplished multi-instrumentalist and producer in his own right -- was handed the masters and went about the completion of the album as if he were inside the mind of Dilla. Though it's disjointed, a little bumpy, and -- in places -- perceptibly unfinished-sounding, The Shining is a very worthy addition to Dilla's discography. A slightly more in-depth synthesis of studio creations and live instrumentation when compared to the productions that have trickled out during 2005 and 2006, the album is drenched in soul -- save for a couple space-age basslines and other fleeting forms of alien synthetics -- and features an impressive raft of Dilla's favorite MCs and singers, big names and relative unknowns alike. And though it's less than 40 minutes in length, Dilla was always about brevity, which means the meandering is kept to a minimum. On "Baby," Dilla swaps lines with Guilty Simpson and Madlib in what amounts to an amusing locker-room boast fest. (Simpson, apparently a fan of The Surreal Life, claims he'll "Beat your dog like Flavor Flav.") The shamelessly gooey "So Far to Go," featuring Common and D'Angelo, expands Donuts' "Bye" to six minutes, allowing wide shafts of light to pour through the spaces between the subtle backbeat. "Dime Piece" is some prime 21st century quiet storm, a Dwele feature that coasts through twilight. Fittingly, the closing "Won't Do" is all-Dilla, from the beat to the nasty MCing to an impressive vocal hook that's nearly as dapper as anything delivered by Dwele. (Dilla's not given nearly enough credit for being a top-flight R&B producer from the very beginning; compare the Pharcyde's "Runnin'" to Mya's "Fallen," or check the instrumental versions of just about any one of his tracks.) It's impossible not to wonder exactly what this album could've been, or where Dilla would've gone with his skills after its release. But it's just as easy to marvel at the amount of quality music he generated while he was on this planet. ~ Andy Kellman, All Music Guide