Kanye West would not be as popular as he is today if J Dilla was still alive, according to the late producer’s brother

Illa J.

Speaking to AnecDope, Illa opined: “If [J Dilla] was still here, music would’ve took a different turn. I don’t think

Kanye is as big as he is if my brother stayed alive. I’m sorry, Kanye needs seven producers. If you look at the credits,

there’s like 20 producers on one track.”

The Detroit native also theorized what kind of music Dilla would be making today if he hadn’t have died in 2006,

saying: “I think he’d be making some crazy trap beats. Obviously, he’d make some Hip Hop stuff but I think he would

mess with it all.

“If you listen to the lines he says on songs, he has lines where he [quotes Lil Jon‘s ‘what?!’ ad-lib] so he definitely was

always tapped in.”

Kanye West has spoken about J Dilla’s influence on his work on many occasions. In the 2014 Stones Throw

documentary Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton, he likened the producer’s beats to “good pussy” and said: “We gotta make

music and we think, ‘If Dilla was alive, would he like this?’ I have to work on behalf of Dilla.”

Common also recently recalled watching the two producers “bond” at his home in Los Angeles, which he shared with

Dilla in the 2000s.

“Ye came over, it was Mother’s Day. We were going to a Mother’s Day brunch with Ye and his mother and my mother

and then Dilla was at the crib. Ye was talking to him and they was just bonding, and then Dilla gave Ye these drums on a record,” he told Hot 97.

Common then described Kanye’s reaction when Dilla gifted him a beat tape: “I promise you, Ye was like, it was the

golden chalice. We went to the studio later that day and Ye was telling Gee [Roberson], ‘Yo, Dilla gave me these

drums!’”