J Dilla - Anthology Volume 1.rarl
Vladimir Stringfield
You know the routine by now: Here's a greatest-hits compilation, sourced from a bunch of different albums with a couple of odd singles mixed in, which doesn't have much use to diehards and tells only part of the artist's story to curious newcomers. That was roughly the case with the first volume of the Dillanthology series, one of those technically good but still somewhat redundantly inessential compilations whose omissions defined it just as much as its inclusions. And that problem was easily solved by the rarities-packed Volume 2, which did its part by containing a whole bunch of unreleased remixes that were actually worth unearthing.
With the knock on Jay Dee new jacks being that they came to his stuff only through his early-mid-2000s releases, a Volume 3 weighing heavily on that material seems even more pointless. Most of Dillanthology 3 is sourced from four albums from this decade-- Welcome 2 Detroit, Donuts, The Shining, and the recent summer release Jay Stay Paid-- as well as a track from the Ruff Draft EP and a couple of Jaylib's Dilla-produced selections from the Madlib beat-trading collaboration Champion Sound. And make no mistake, they're all good tracks from great albums. But they're great albums that the vast majority of people with at least a passing interest in Dilla already own at least one of.
Odds have it that the album in question would be Donuts, his final, sprawling sample-collage work and one of the most definitive recent examples of albums that really work best as a whole. If there's one piece of work that shouldn't be broken up into component tracks and sprinkled across a collection of other stuff, it's that one: "WorkinOnIt" (which opens the compilation) and "Anti-American Graffiti" jump out like non-sequitirs without the surrounding context of their album and get abruptly cut off with a couple of added seconds of post-track silence tacked on at the end. It feels like watching a YouTube clip of half of a dialogue scene in a feature film and then being expected to recognize how great the movie is.
Granted, there are only two dismembered pieces of Donuts on Dillanthology 3, with Dilla's more single-friendly albums taking up the bulk of the tracklisting. And there's a good cross-section of music that runs a pretty wide gamut of his production techniques over the last six or so years of his life: glimmering keyboard-drenched soul (The Shining's lush Common/D'Angelo feature "So Far to Go" and the Isley'd out "Won't Do"), ultra-taut funk (ranging from Welcome 2 Detroit track "It's Like That" to Jay Stay Paid's "Glamour Sho75 [09]"), blown-out psychedelia (Ruff Draft EP highlight "Nothing Like This") and manic jeep beats (Jaylib cuts "Raw Shit" and "The Red"). If this compilation has a real purpose, it does so by acting as a condensed proof that Dilla's career post-majors was stylistically liberating in a way, even as it ensured that his transition to the underground vanguard was a natural one.
But what will buying and owning this collection actually mean to the uninitiated once they finally realize how vast Dilla's career was? Dillanthology 3 is an adequate primer, but a transitory one; the music on here should be plenty to convert the unconverted, but not enough to monopolize their attention once they realize just how start-to-finish great the albums these tracks came from actually are. A good solution would have been to extend this compilation past its paltry 47 minutes, get these tracks (including the Donuts selections) to flow and segue into each other, make a genuine mixtape out of it. Maybe then it could've brought some new context to some familiar tracks-- instead, it just leaves everyone who listens wanting more.
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New Chronologies Of Sound (Life Is A Vic Nic, 2021)
Only a year has passed since the release of this compilation, part of a multi-media project that includes essays, an exhibition and a sound bank. Yet we are quietly confident that its historical significance will enable it to stand the test of time. While many compilations were released during the pandemic, New Chronologies of Sound looks both forward and back, remembering lost sounds while taking inventory and imagining possible trajectories. Field recordings and soundscapes form the basis of these works, posing questions of how humans experience and process what they hear. Now that we are no longer in forced isolation, are we paying as much attention to sonic cues? This priceless project is a score to an altered aural environment, one that we are still struggling to comprehend. (Richard Allen)
Dear Listeners. Joseph again. I promised some lists coming up, and the season deluge has now begun. We\u2019re currently in the middle of our ACL Fall Previews, always a much loved feature. I\u2019ll collect those in the next installment, after all the categories have been published But just a few days ago, ACL co-founder Jeremy Bye compiled our staff picks for the \u201CThe 40 Best Compilation Albums of All Time.\u201D This was really fun to put together, both making my own list, but especially seeing what my colleagues thought to include as their picks. What makes a great compilation anyway? Of course, the answer to this is going to be somewhat subjective, and Jeremy identifies a number of different categories that speak to the spirit that animates ACL.
In going through the process of compiling my favorites, however, there were a number of personally important compilations that just didn\u2019t feel appropriate for ACL. That said, we all have to start somewhere, and hopefully these off the cuff reflections may be of interests to readers of this newsletter. I certainly didn\u2019t grow up listening to John Cage and Morton Feldman. I had never heard to Stockhausen until after 9/11. My earliest musical memories was making my parents put Bon Jovi or Michael Jackson on the turntable again. (It was the late 1980s\u2026) Like many kids of my generation, I bought Green Day\u2019s Dookie and The Offspring\u2019s Smash in 1994, when I was ten years old. I didn\u2019t have money then and my family was never very well off, so I acquired new CDs very slowly in those days. Then in 1997, I bought a copy of Epitaph Records Punk O Rama Vol. 2. I\u2019m pretty certain this was the first label sampler I ever came across, and in a very serious way it changed my life and influenced how I continue to discover new music to this day. I honestly can\u2019t remember what drew me to it, but it may very well have just been the artwork. I doubt very much that I was aware then that this was the same label who released Smash, but maybe I was. I must have seen Rancid\u2019s video for \u201CRuby Soho\u201D by that point, but I don\u2019t think any of the other bands on here would have rung any bells. I still remember the feeling of hearing Descendants, Pennywise, Pulley, Millencolin, NOFX, and Bad Religion for the first time, and more than any other single experience, listening to Punk O Rama Vol. 2 changed the course of my life for the next few years. It also matters that this was the second volume. There was more to go back and discover, all these bands with histories stretching back a decade or more, so many records to discover that would lead to other bands and other records. I can only compare it to randomly picking up a comic book on a spinner rack at the drugstore or the newstand; there\u2019s this disorientation that happens, but it is exciting because that small glimpse of a larger world leaves you wanting more.
By 1998, I was an angsty eighth grader and was primed for hardcore. Pop punk was beginning to lose my interest, and groups like Pennywise and Bad Religion had instilled in me some expectation of politics from punk that seemed foreign to groups like Blink 182 and MxPx. And so somehow Chicago\u2019s Victory Records found me the same as Epitaph, and in fact there was a direct connection. Epitaph released Refused\u2019s magnum opus, The Shape of Punk to Come in the fall of 1998, which I bought immediately after hearing \u201CSummer Holidays vs Punk Routine\u201D on Punk O Rama Vol. 4 in June 1999. But then I learned that Refused had broken up mid tour the previous year, sending me digging for their earlier records. I suspect that\u2019s what brought Victory Style II to me, though I may be misremembering, maybe I heard this first and that tipped me off to Refused\u2019s record on Epitaph. In any case, Refused was probably the first band I had to search for to find their records, to mail order their old CDs, to scrape the then-relatively sparse Internet for any and all information about this band from Sweden.
Besides Refused, that Victory compilation introduced me to Earth Crisis, Strife, Snapcase, and Integrity. Going to see such groups was a revelation, especially Snapcase. Earth Crisis\u2019 militancy was interesting but ultimately didn\u2019t appeal to me, while a Snapcase seemed to suggest a way to make heavy music that eschewed tough guy posturing and mindless aggression. It was at hardcore shows that I got introduced to contemporary political struggles, from fights against police brutality to environmentalism and animal rights. Victory\u2019s aesthetic would shift over the years, and I was there for a lot of it, from seeing Boysetsfire and Thursday in a New Jersey firehouse in the summer of 2000 up to Taking Back Sunday headlining massive venues just a few short years later. Right, so we\u2019re rather far from the ACL aesthetic, but I can still see an important throughline. The experimentation that Refused displayed on The Shape of Punk to Come made a lasting impression, and I continued to hunt for new and surprising sounds after that, even when it led to genres I may not have anticipated. But style aside, sampling a label\u2019s catalogue remains one of my tried and true methods of discovering new music. And that all began with my first compilation.
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