Busta Rhymes sat down with Anderson .Paak for a Q&A at Los Angeles' Grammy Museum last night to break down his new album "Dillagence II," released in August, which builds entirely on unreleased beats from the late producer James "J Dilla" Yancey, who died in 2006. The evening closed with a 30-minute performance of his catalog, including a guest appearance from Common.
Rhymes opened the conversation visibly moved, telling the crowd, "I'm emotional tonight. Shed a little tear backstage. To be able to be in this room tonight and know that I'm being given this opportunity to share and to articulate and to be vulnerable, it's a fucking amazing feeling." Among those in attendance were Dilla's mother, Ma Dukes, music executive Sylvia Rhone, manager Mona Scott-Young and musician Jimmy Jam.
.Paak, who appears on the album alongside D'Angelo, Ludacris, Lil Wayne and Jon Batiste, asked Rhymes about hearing Dilla's unreleased instrumentals and executive producing them into the final record. Rhymes explained that Dilla used to hand him beat CDs containing 25 tracks at a time, often with sounds that faded in and out, which made looping them difficult. He recalled visiting Dilla at his mother's Detroit home during his health struggles, where Ma Dukes effectively became his engineer. "Ma Dukes is Ma. And then Ma Dukes is also Busta Rhymes' Ma in their home," he said, describing how she cooked for them, retrieved sample records from an alphabetically ordered collection kept in a coat closet, and helped Dilla put together the beat CDs he'd send home with Rhymes. "Sometimes the beats were so incredible, I would actually be scared to rhyme on them because I didn't want to mess up the way the beat was as far as how dope I thought it was," he added.
Rhymes also discussed specific tracks, including "This Woman" featuring D'Angelo, whose vocals he said he received in February and recorded his verse over that same day. .Paak asked about "What We Got in Common," featuring Common and Batiste, and "Kingpin (Knock Ya Head Off)," which also features Ludacris.
Asked what Grammy recognition for the album would mean given his 12 nominations without a win, Rhymes called the project a captured moment in time, name-checking producers like the Neptunes, Swizz Beatz and Timbaland as collaborators whose beats he has held onto over the years. "The most incredible part about these moments is a lot of the shit that they was doing was timeless," he said of Dilla's work. "Every production from him is older than 20 years old. But it now has Cascade dishwasher liquid sparkle all around it... So when we finally put it in a stove and feed it to the street, nothing about it feels like 20 years ago."
The night ended with Rhymes performing classics such as "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See," "I Know What You Want" and "Break Ya Neck," alongside newer material like "Talk Ya Shit" and "What We Got in Common," the latter joined by Common himself. He then brought out Ma Dukes to thank her for blessing the project. "This gift that we experienced with this project, and everything that I've been able to do from 30 years ago on my first solo album to today, and everything that we're gonna continue to do, is with the grace and the blessing of the Yancey family and the estate," he said. "I want to say thank you, Ma Dukes, beyond description, words cannot be found to describe how much I love you."
Photo: All-Pro Reels, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
