Imagine if this album didn’t emerge as a self-eulogy, if its creator didn’t pass before the music even had time to sink in for its listeners, if it didn’t finally turn a whole generation or two on to the rulebreaker beatmaking of a hip-hop visionary who spent his whole career as an underappreciated “producer’s producer.” It’d still be a shining example of how Dilla wasn’t content to use sampling as a second language — he created an entirely new language out of it, finding expressive resilience in concision, disjointed repetition, and counter-intuitive rhythms.