The last year has seen many of hip hop's current biggest stars—Kanye West, Rick Ross, Drake—releasing lavish, star-studded, overcooked albums. In a perfect world, perhaps somebody like J Rocc could reverse this trend. His first collection of original music on Stones Throw is an effective antidote to the opulence and ego trips that too often infect mainstream hip hop.
For a DJ, turntablist, and producer with over two decades of experience under his belt, J Rocc doesn't command a lot of public attention. He cut his teeth with Orange County turntable crew The World Famous Beat Junkies, which he founded in 1992. The Beat Junkies released three volumes of music in the '90s and have backed and performed alongside Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples, Cypress Hill and Peanut Butter Wolf, among others. He has served as DJ for both Madlib and J Dilla over the years. Naturally, he also teamed with both as the unheralded third member of Jaylib, their acclaimed collaboration that resulted in Champion Sound, one of independent hip hop's finest album-length statements.
J Rocc's latest release is not a DJ mix, a beats compilation or a mixtape—rather, it's his first full-length album of original music. Some Cold Rock Stuf should not surprise those familiar with the Stones Throw aesthetic of laid-back, primarily instrumental hip hop that is so obviously smoked out, it nearly conjures up the scent of a burning joint while it's playing. This is not a far cry from Madlib's modus operandi, but J Rocc keeps his album leaner and more focused than the slew of Medicine Show LPs and mixes that were released last year. To his credit, J Rocc has created a cohesive album that holds my attention front to back.
Some Cold Rock Stuf is packed with instrumental hip-hop breaks and beats that are strewn with soul, funk, jazz and world music samples. The album flows beautifully due to J Rocc's use of call-out hooks between several songs ("Yo yo yo yo, that was fresh—but bust a sloooow beat!") and its smart sequencing, with five short cuts that draw me in before it transitions into longer, more developed songs on the flipside. There's a good deal of variety between and within tracks, my favorite of which, "Chasing the Sun," even announces its intentions before it starts: "[J Rocc] thinks that an album should always have at least one slow [...] quiet moment, and this song is that. If you're not in that sort of a mood, you can always take it off." (I actually took his advice and skipped it the first time, to my detriment.)
Notably, Stones Throw has also packaged a "mystery disc" of untitled J Rocc material with Some Cold Rock Stuf—the mystery being that one of three possible bonus discs is included at random with each copy of the album. Mine runs 17 minutes, and it keeps the album's vibe rolling with ten brief tracks that seem like sketches from J Rocc's notebook, ideas that he could have fleshed out and included on the album had he developed them a bit more.
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