Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm

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The View' EP Shades Ana Navarro Over Her Costume Choice On Halloween Show: "You Don't Have a Heart" Twenty years before the Roots became the house band for NBC’s The Tonight Show in 2014—placing them at the epicenter of the American cultural mainstream—they were an obscure hip-hop act promoting their first album on the road, opening for only slightly less obscure hip-hop acts. The Roots’ twenty-three-year-old drummer, Ahmir Thompson, was their de facto leader, with his trademark afro their de facto logo. The world would later come to know him as Questlove. But on this evening in 1994, outside a small North Carolina venue, he was an unknown.

Decider's Scary Movie Challenge For Scaredy-Cats: 7 Horror Films Ranked From Goofy Ghosts To Full-On Gore FestIn 1997, at another recording studio in New York City, the singer D’Angelo assembled a band to record his second album. In addition to Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, there were James Poyser on keyboards and Roy Hargrove on horns. The odd man out in this crew of young Americans was the London-based bassist Pino Palladino. Power wanted to say something, but he knew he couldn’t. Q-Tip and the guys in the crew seemed to be keen on Jay Dee, and Power was always wary of overstepping his bounds. So he held his tongue. Geek Down is frightening. There’s something angry and almost violent about it. It starts with a rough squall, tearing open the sky with a loop of drum breaks (the Jimi Entley Sound’s Charlie’s Theme) and wailing guitars (ESG’s UFO) that rub together to create thunder. Just 79 seconds long, Geek Down was Dilla denying his imminent death. It’s a moment of a man envisioning his nightmares, fears and anxieties and translating them on to wax. 9. Last Donut of the Night How our rhythmic expectations came to be is as much a tale of geography as it is musicology. Our musical expectations are governed by our location: where we’re from, and where we’ve been. So, before we meet James, we need to first take an important journey—from Europe to Africa to America—and on that trip we are going to need maps. In positioning J Dilla, a map of one place in particular tells us much of what we need to know. The Today Show' Anchors Go All Out For A Kellyoke-Themed Halloween: Savannah Guthrie as Taylor Swift, Hoda Kotb As Cher, And More

Power had developed a rhythm with the group’s two producers, the lead vocalist, Jonathan Davis, who performed under the name Q-Tip, and the DJ, Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Power knew what to expect from them and they shared a language to communicate musical ideas. But that dynamic changed on this album with the addition of another, outside producer. Some new kid Q-Tip found in Detroit named Jay Dee. Former Olympic Gymnast And ‘Dancing With The Stars’ Contestant Mary Lou Retton Says She’s “Staying Very Positive” After Recent Hospitalization Performance Worth Watching: “My purpose is make sure that James’s life, his life’s work, is not in vain,” Maureen Yancey says of her fight to protect her son’s achievements. “I’m a Detroiter. A proud Detroiter. So yes, I will stand and I will fight, and I won’t let anybody put my son down, what I do for him down, or anything else, because I’m here to lift up his music, and his legacy.” Our Call: STREAM IT. The Legacy of J Dilla provides personal perspectives and technical insights into the singular sound for which the late hip-hop producer will always be remembered. But it also explores how an artist’s untimely death can complicate everything that’s left behind. Stream It Or Skip It: 'Mayflies' On Acorn TV, Where A Man With Cancer Asks An Old Friend To Help Him Die On His Own TermsAn ambitious, dynamic biography of J Dilla, who may be the most influential hip-hop artist known by the least number of people. . . A wide-ranging biography that fully captures the subject’s ingenuity, originality, and musical genius.” — Kirkus (starred review)

The strip club was a huge part of Dilla’s life and art. What was it like researching that part of his persona? There is a depth and honesty in his music, in the way his beats meld together," Atwood-Ferguson says. "His music is full of subtle things that most people aren't aware of – and they shouldn't have to be. People should just enjoy it." In the way that J Dilla’s music was a portal for us to hear our world and feel the pulse of life anew, Charnas has made a portal through which to understand our time—historical time, musical time, and James Yancey’s own time—in a new way. Dilla Time is a book that will be read and reread with as much pleasure as we have listened and relistened to Dilla’s music. A masterpiece.” —JEFF CHANG, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop But there were other ways to conceive of music. The Greeks, much earlier, had devised a ten-tone triangular system of harmony called the tetraktys. Asian cultures divided the distance of an octave into scales with five, seven, twelve, twenty-two, and fifty-five steps. Our Take: It’s one thing to listen to, read about, or hear someone tell you how innovative J Dilla’s beatmaking was. But in Legacy, it’s something wonderfully different when DJ Jazzy Jeff provides an audio and visual example by triggering percussion sounds on an MPC and illustrating the savvy of just where Dilla put them. (Onscreen animation adds the tutorial.) The revolutionary sampling and sequencing machine literally has a button you press to make things perfect, to streamline and crisp up a constructed rhythm. But as Jazzy Jeff describes it, Dilla took that machine and added a human element to its tech. He built imprecision into perfection – what we hear is how he meant it – and people have been trying to emulate his ability to do that forever. But there’s never going to be a “Dilla button” on the MPC.There are actually hundreds more steps to this whole process," he says, "but I will spare you them! To be honest, two of his most famous pieces, Fall in Love and Stakes Is High, I found difficult, so I plan to revisit them. They're not even close to the level of magic that I want them to be at." Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. That was “Bullshit,” they answered, one of the songs from their new album. Produced by that kid we told you about, Jay Dee. Dilla Time is a portrait of a complex genius taken too young, as well as a glorious study of the music and culture he created.” — Spin The next thing was actually hearing other people be influenced by him: Questlove and D’Angelo on ‘Voodoo’, Hi-Tek and Talib Kweli, Musiq Soulchild, Floetry — all of them incorporated his type of loping, unexpected rhythm. It was the Jay Dee feel. The general narrative was that Dilla turned off the quantise function on his MPC to escape the straight 4/4 rhythm. It took until 2015 for me to understand that this was a programming thing, that he wasn’t simply turning off quantise or free-handing. Quantising or not quantising is just a matter of technique. I’ve quantised and not quantised plenty of times, and my shit does not sound like J Dilla’s.