Jaylib - Champion Sound

Innovative hip-hop producer makes beat tape. Said beat tape gets passed onto celebrated left-field hip-hop mogul from Oxnard, CA. The latter raps over the former. The product goes in the vault. A track reappears on a mixtape. The producer catches an ear of what’s the rapper’s doing and they start sending beats and rhymes back and forth between L.A. and Detroit.

Thus enter Jaylib.

The range of influences that splatter the production of Champion Sound is preposterous—from electro (“McNasty Filth” and “Raw Shit”) to haunting lounge music (“Champion Sound”) to East Asian folk music (“Strip Club” and “Strapped”) to Scottish bagpipes (“Survival Test”) to the white noise often found in avant-garde music (“Raw Addict”). Traditional hip-hop sample sources (Jazz, Funk, Soul) also have their place e.g. “The Red,” “The Official,” “The Mission”; forget Kanye fucking West: this is the real shit, samples manipulated and filtered through effects of completely ambiguous origins. All of this, of course, is combined with the classic minimalist beats of J Dilla (r.i.p.), who also manages to squeeze in traditional hip-hop tropes such as scratching and AM vocal samples.

Madlib’s uniquely disjointed vocal style thus finds itself at home amongst the bricolage of J Dilla’s production; an intensely fragmented and staggered flow is merged with literary influences (e.g. poetry, spoken-word) and outlandishly hilarious voices (that would not sound out of place on an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force) as he functionally converses with himself through the duration of the record.

J Dilla is a genius when it comes to manipulating the details: intricacies that don’t come off as accessory or overdone but are instead both alienating and enthralling. Many of these details sound out of place upon first-listen, but it is precisely this “alienation effect” that demands close attention on behalf of the listener, provoking in him/her a desire to listen to this album over-and-over again to fully process these minute complexities. This is futuristic rap music that speaks to the present in a way that Deltron 3030 (with its discussion of robots, the year 3030 and computer viruses) doesn’t. That recalls the brilliance of ATLiens but with J Dilla (at his prime) behind the decks and Andre 3000 on a 5-blunt-a-day diet.

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