Busta Rhymes Revisits J Dilla’s Unfinished Business On New LP

Nearly two decades after J Dilla’s death, Busta Rhymes is helping to open his vault. Today (Aug. 25), the veteran MC released Dillagence 2, an album built entirely from the Detroit producer’s music, including roughly 300 beats Dilla sent Busta over the course of their friendship and collaboration.

The project is a sequel of sorts to the pair’s original Dillagence mixtape, released in 2007, but this time Rhymes went considerably deeper into an archive he has spent years approaching sparingly. Across his albums over the past two decades, he generally used only one or two Dilla productions at a time. For Dillagence 2, he began seriously assembling the project in November 2025, working with Dilla’s estate and his mother, Ma Dukes, to ensure the music and its legacy were handled with care.

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“What felt right — that’s really what it boils down to,” Rhymes told The New York Times’ Popcast. “I don’t overthink the music no more. I think a lot of the times when you overthink shit, it ends up never coming out.”

Dilla’s famously loose rhythmic approach — what has come to be known as “Dilla Time” — is particularly suited to Rhymes; rhythmic instincts. Rather than treating the producer’s off-kilter beats as something to overcome, Rhymes hears their humanity. “I think the most interesting part about it was he mastered the understanding of knowing that the soulfulness of music comes from human timing,” he said. “Human timing is never perfectly on time all the time. He’s not the only producer that does it, you know what I’m saying? But he’s the only producer that makes me feel what I feel when he does it.”

That relationship also changed Busta’s approach to his most famous technical trick. “If you notice, I’ve never tried the speed rap on a Dilla beat,” he said. “It doesn’t warrant that.”

Dillagence 2 features Common, Big Sean and Lil Wayne, who makes his first appearance over a Dilla production. It also contains previously unreleased vocals from D’Angelo, recorded more than two decades ago for a track that was never completed. Rhymes said he didn’t know the vocals existed until work on the album was underway. “I love the both of them, so I just want to do my part in delivering in that way — not just for the culture, but for them and for all of us,” he said of Dilla and D’Angelo.

That sense of responsibility runs throughout the project. Rhymes described Dilla as a man of few words who would quickly move from greeting to making music, but whose dedication to the creative process was infectious. “He loved to laugh and smile and just be in a feel-good energy space, but he was deeply entrenched in wanting to live in the creative space constantly,” he said. “And it would make me feel inspired to always want to challenge myself to marry his music in a way that felt as close to perfect as possible.”

The emotional reality of making music with artists who are no longer here, however, is something Rhymes separates from the creative process itself. “That doesn’t have anything to do with music,” he said “That has everything to do with death being so final. You just miss your family and your friends, and those two brothers, for me — it was very, very long-term friendships.”

And while Dillagence 2 looks backward, Rhymes remains acutely interested in what’s happening next. He points to artists including Ludacris, Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar and Doechii who have acknowledged his influence, while emphasizing that he sees himself as part of a much longer lineage. “I’m never the one that feels like I need to say it,” he said. “I think a lot of people say it themselves, and I think that’s where the reward is the greatest.”

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