I cannot find any point of disagreement with Straightbangin's assessment of Jay Dee.

2) Soulquarianism
I’m gonna say something sacrilegious here. Jay Dee contributed to the erosion of good rap. Let me say up front: I really like Jay Dee...just not as much as Skeff Anslem, Large Pro, Premier, Pete Rock, Erick Sermon, Havoc, QDIII, etc. Now, I’d like you to do me a favor and take out your CD collection and start playing the classics. Can you hear the difference between Buhloone Mind State and Stakes Is High? Between Midnight Marauders and Beats, Rhymes, and Life? Between Resurrection/One Day It Will All Make Sense and Like Water for Chocolate? Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde and Labcabincalifornia? The difference in sonics you hear in each of these cases can be summed up in a word, “rawness.” Note, these are all good albums, but those in the former group are all time classics, and those in the latter group simply don’t rate in that category. The stank flute from “Pack the Pipe,” the Chicago despair of “Hungry,” the downright spookiness of “8 Million Stories.” By 1996, those type of songs were gone, replaced with Jay Dee’s brand of boom-bap neo-soul.

I can’t put this all on Jay Dee, though. “F*ck the Police” is one of my favorite beats ever. Jay Dee is simply an illustrative example of how rap began to soften up. Nothing better encapsulates the de-raw-ification of rap than what happened to the Roots following Illadelph Halflife. First of all, ?uestlove turned into some cult-leaderish untrustworthy tastemaker converting his weird trustafarian/Nuyorican army to worship the Sweet-and-lo/Native Tonguian stylings of Little Brother and crap neo-soul like Floetry. Then, his band started sucking, too. Less Malik B and less Hub meant more stringy-soft backgrounds, more hot-air braggadocio from Black Thought, a slew of indistinguishable songs about rap, Philly, Philly rap, hip-hop, love-lyfe, etc. I seriously feel like the Roots let us down. Because of the live-band gimmick, they were our best opportunity to solidify 1994-caliber rap into the mainstream forever. Instead, they became hip-hop Phish, and ?uestlove whined a lot (comprising, in many ways, the predecessor to Kanye). I remember a few years ago talking to the editor-in-chief of a very popular music magazine, and he told me how ?uestlove was hating on their rag for only covering super-mainstream artists or super-underground artists. Ironically, that perfectly exemplifies the route that the Roots dug themselves into: middle. of. the. road.

The point Straightbangin is making, and a point I agree with, is that between 1994 and 1996, hiphop softened. This softening made the hiphop beat more accessible. At that time (post-modern period of hiphop—modern period being between 1984 and 1989), a lot of people could not listen to hiphop not because of sexist or violent lyrics but because of its sound. Listen to Queen Latifah's "Rough" (1994). That's sonic bombing at its best. These days the opposite is the case. The sound is soft and the lyrics are hard.