Malibu

Anderson .Paak was in the sessions for Dr. Dre’s Compton (2015), but his actual sound DNA is a different lineage: the rhythmic tradition that descends from Dilla, absorbed through Knxwledge (whose beats fill the Yes Lawd! NxWorries record). Knxwledge is on Stones Throw, the label that has functioned as the Dilla legacy-protection society since 2006.

What Malibu demonstrates is that rhythmic methodology applied to live performance: .Paak plays his own kits over hip-hop production, and the way the drums sit in relation to the electronic elements carries the same deliberate looseness. The method — drums displaced slightly from the grid by cultivation rather than error — doesn’t require a sampler. It can be played, and .Paak is the clearest proof of that.