J Dilla - Jay Stay Paid FLAC

I was excited about this release ever since it was announced. When it finally came out I was disappointed a bit however. Musically it is pretty much what I expected, a collection of mostly unreleased Dilla beats with some dudes rapping over them occasionally. Some of the beats were already making the rounds on beat tapes but most of the material was at least new to me which I liked very much. The beats seem to come from all eras, there are some "traditional" sounding beats from the Ummah era up to more recent experimental stuff, so there should be something for everybody. However the thing that strikes me most is the at times very questionable sound quality of some of the songs. Unfortunately this applies to some of my favorite tracks off the album, namely "Reality TV" and "24K Rap". Those beats were ripped from really low quality mp3's (probably 96 kbps or even lower). While it does happen occasionally that music does get mastered from mp3, the sound quality of especially those two songs is so low that you notice right off that something is wrong. I'm sure the mastering engineer tried to make them sound as good as possible but with such low quality you can't really expect miraculous results. It's sad because the sound is so bad you can't even play these songs out. I don't understand how this could happen when the people that put this project together had access to Dilla's material and his mother was also involved in the making of this release. It kind of leaves a sour taste towards Dilla's legacy to release such low quality material, even some of the bootlegs that came out after his death are in better quality. One could think that all they had was mp3's downloaded from a blog.
All in all I can recommend this release for the music but certainly not for the sound quality which at times is very bootleg-like despite this being an official release.

This album is all about a bunch of beats, and tracks C6 and D1. A lot of people make a lot of beats, but then you get these beats and Diz, Havoc and Raekwon smash these beats. Those are the moments of 2009 that are most significant.