The Shining : J Dilla : Review : Rolling Stone

As he lay in a hospital bed last year dying of lupus, underground hip-hop giant J Dilla spent days fiddling with computers, samplers and turntables, trying to create one more album, something to remember him by. The result is The Shining, most of which was completed shortly after Donuts. This posthumous disc pairs Dilla's atmospheric sample-based backdrops and vocal snippets from The Shining (the movie) with generous vocal contributions from Common, D'Angelo, Madlib and other high-performance MCs to the left of hip-hop's center. The result is lush and layered: "So Far to Go" could be a classic soul ballad -- it features Common's love-child verses, D'Angelo's sex-drenched falsetto, a jazzy bass line and piano twinkles -- but Dilla uses background hiss, vocal effects and the stark, hushed movie clips ("You're distracting me! And it will then take me time to get back to where I was. Understand?") to inject a sense of foreboding. Dilla was never one to give himself a shout-out on the work he did for A Tribe Called Quest and others, so it's welcome that his peers showed up on this dark, magnetic opus to lay down appropriate eulogies, as Black Thought of the Roots does on "Love Movin' ": "My man Dilla do it without even tryin'/The greatest hip-hop producer of all time."