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And there's a few points that pick up the slack for the prog-fusion bizarreness Madlib pushed to the background: the melody for "React" is based around what might be a guitar riff or a clarinet sped up to a hummingbird tempo, "Raw Shit" hammers away at a tinny Farfisa that sounds like it's on its last legs, and "Strip Club" features a giggly steel drum that's about as sexy as a coconut bra.Įven if they're not much worth commenting on lyrically- "Shoulda never been allowed in the game/ All y'all fake gangstas now" and "My thug niggas know what I mean/ A live bitch, that's what I need" are typical Jay Dee lines, while Madlib's appeal is mostly in his muttering, halting delivery- the vocals also fit their productions in a complementary way.

But like the best Dilla tracks, the bass and drums are at the forefront and do most of the heavy lifting, and a couple of Madlib's beats, like the booming fist-pump rhythm of "McNasty Filth" and the insistent stutter-thump of "Strapped", feel like low-fi versions of Jay Dee's Slum Village work.ĭilla's tracks don't rewrite his own plan as much- which makes sense, since many of them preceded the idea of the collaboration in the first place- but they're a bit filthier than usual, his glowing digital bass pushed until it strains not for nothing is his best beat on here, a heavy slab of big-bottomed g-funk built around a disembodied soul wail and a airlock-tight drum loop, repurposed for a track called "The Red". There's odd little touches like the title track's Bollywood vocal (which, post-"Addicted", didn't skew too far away from the mainstream anyways), the piercing, slightly warped-sounding sustained string note that runs through most of "The Mission" and the Asian/Middle-Eastern horn that trills through "Survival Test". Instead, he fine-tunes his approach so that his more far-out tendencies- reassembled bop flotsam and beats that have a hard time staying put- are left to sneak in through the margins. Madlib's beats here lack much of the skewed jazz eccentricity that his more familiar Quasimoto and Madvillain productions do. It's easy to theoretically pit Madlib's muddy, crackly, blown-out organics as a barely-compatible counter to Dilla's pristine digital precision, but there's a stylistic bleedthrough that seeps both ways.

The main thing to keep in mind about Champion Sound is that the two main artists involved adapted to each other's production styles just as much as they contrasted. More than a few underground rap albums these days have shot for Champion Sound's stoned-in-the-club vibe and fallen short, while Stones Throw has become indie rap's "it" label in recent years with albums much like this: collaborative efforts infused with Madlib's unpretentiously avant-garde spirit, weird enough to stay on the margins of current pop culture but accessible enough to stick on Cartoon Network's (where it seems a bit less bizarre next to willfully batshit stuff like "Saul of the Mole Men"). Unlike Ruff Draft, Champion Sound was a widely-released, full-fledged album- more slept-on than scarce- and it's aged a bit better than early reviews might've anticipated. Stones Throw's reissue of Champion Sound, then, seems to work largely as a "hey, remember this?" nudge, coming off the heels of the recent deluxe edition of Dilla's Ruff Draft EP in a similar bid to reestablish the value of an underheard record.