Lou Reed once said about the debut album by his former group The Velvet Underground "When it came out almost nobody bought it, but those who did started a band". That's the effect one had when hearing Slum Village's "Fantastic, Vol. 2". It didn't sell that much upon it's original release, but the ones that bought it wanted to be a record producer. As great as this album is, it was a victim of corporate politics and bad timing. Here's the backstory: The album was originally supposed to be released on A&M Records in the fall of 1998, but due to the Universal-PolyGram merger, their label was folded into Interscope Records. That caused a year long delay- even as J. Dilla was getting noticed as a producer. Then as they were getting noticed for their song "Get Dis Money"- which appeared in the Mike Judge film and soundtrack for "Office Space"- they were unceremoniously dumped by Interscope. So they took the album to the indie label GoodVibe Recordings and the rest is history.
Although this is a reissue, this is the second one. The first reissue had removed the track "Fall In Love" and replaced it with "Who We Are". Now, on the second reissue, "Fall In Love" is back on, but "Raise It Up" has been removed- ironic, since it was the second single released from the album. If any song needed to be removed, it should have been the closing bonus track "Thelonius" since the song already appeared on Common's "Like Water For Chocolate". Yes, the production is the highlight of the album, but nobody really paid attention to the group, sadly. T3 wasn't bad on here, but he would improve on later Slum Village albums. J Dilla had some rather amusing punchlines and one liners here and there. Baatin pretty much had some quotables...when he could stay on topic (See: "Climax", "Fall In Love" and "CB4" as those few examples). Overall, it's a 70-minute masterpiece with no filler, but this album is sad to listen to now being that two-thirds of the original lineup is deceased (J Dilla died from lupus in 2006 and Baatin died from head injuries in 2009).
One of my favourite albums of all time, with this re-release i got the chance of buying it again. In my opinion this is the peak of J Dilla music and contains some of his best beats.
My only complaint is that there's not "raise it up", a personal favourite but on the other end you can get the second cd with the instrumentals. If you are a fan of J Dilla YOU MUST HAVE THIS ALBUM
