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

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For my one and his two

Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

JOB 14: 12

time is imperfect measure

knowing

this is nothing

short of knowing god

TINA ZAFREEN ALAM

Hell change the expression on your face

When you just see that boy fly

PYE HASTINGS,from Caravans A Very Smelly, Grubby Little Oik, as sampled by J Dilla

This is a book about a hip-hop producer who changed the path of popular music.

The career of James Dewitt Yancey was short, lasting around a dozen yearsfrom his first release in 1993 on a small record label in his hometown of Detroit until his death in Los Angeles in 2006 at the age of thirty-two from a rare blood disease. In that time, no record he produced rose higher than #27 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

That fact is remarkable because Yanceyfirst known as Jay Dee and then as J Dillacollaborated with some of the most popular artists of his time, like A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes, the Roots, DAngelo, Common, and Erykah Badu, and influenced the music of superstars like Michael and Janet Jackson. Whats more, J Dilla continues to inspire and provoke new artists who rose to fame after he died, from the rap icon Kendrick Lamar to the jazz pianist Robert Glasper to dozens of pop acts.

When you ask J Dillas more successful hip-hop contemporaries like Dr. Dre and Pharrell to name peers they admire, Dilla is always near or at the top of their lists. Despite his short life span and low profile, J Dilla was, and remains, the producers producer, the inspiration for inspirers, or, as the Roots drummer Ahmir Questlove Thompson says, the musicians musicians musician.

After his death, J Dilla achieved a popularity he never experienced in life. Dilla Days are now celebrated annually around the world from New York to Miami to London, attracting fans and followers by the thousands. News outlets like NPR and The Guardian document his influence in the pop and jazz worlds. Tributes flourish on record and onstage: New Yorks Lincoln Center and the Detroit Institute of Arts have hosted homages to the late producer. His work and his influence are studied by musicologists, by recipients of MacArthur genius grants and Guggenheim fellows. Colleges and universities have created courses dedicated to studying and interpreting Dillas work. Foundations fund educational programs in his name. Hes had scores of records dedicated to his memory and symphonies arranged around his music. He even had a street named after him in Montpellier, France.

All these accolades leave us with a question: Why does this hitless hip-hop producer have such a persistent presence in the music world?

In Dilla Time, I offer a simple answer: Because J Dilla transformed the sound of popular music in a way that his more famous peers have not. He is the only producer-composer to emerge from hip-hop and, indeed, all electronic music to fundamentally change the way so-called traditional musicians play. And the core of Dillas contribution is a radical shift in how musicians perceive time.

Before J Dilla, our popular music essentially had two common time-feelsstraight time and swing timemeaning that musicians felt and expressed time as either even or uneven pulses. What Dilla created was a third path of rhythm, juxtaposing those two time-feels, even and uneven simultaneously, creating a new, pleasurable, disorienting rhythmic friction and a new time-feel: Dilla Time. What follows is the story of how that happened and what it means.

T his book emerged from a class I teach on J Dilla at New York Universitys Clive Davis Institute. Its roots go back to my time in the music business as a talent scout, record executive, and beatmaker, and to a trip I made to Detroit in the summer of 1999 with my friend and colleague Chino XL to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee. But Dilla Time is journalism, not memoir. I do not consider myself an expert on J Dilla, but a student who has spoken to the real experts, the people who lived and worked and studied with him, whom you will meet in this book. My aim was to be faithful to them, and to tell their stories from each of their perspectives. The narrative is based on more than 190 interviews conducted over the course of four years, and the text and dialogue herein are the result of reporting and research. Where my sources perspectives and stories conflict, I have noted that in the footnotes. James lived with that conflict, and we must too. (You may read more about my process in the Reporters Notes and Sources section in the rear of the book.)

James Dewitt Yancey created a succession of aliasesSilk, Jon Doe, Jay Dee, J Dillaand in Dilla Time I use them interchangeably, depending on who is speaking or thinking about him and what appellation they preferred. Mostly here, he is as his closest friends and family called him, James.

Dilla Time is not a simple biography of J Dilla, but is about what he means in history. No one innovates and influences in a vacuum. Thus Dilla Time follows the stories of other people: his parents and siblings, mentors and protgs, colleagues and followers, friends and lovers. Influence takes time, so this book begins before J Dillas birth and ends well after his death. Innovation happens with new tools, so this is a book about music-making machines. Everything happens somewhere, and thus this book is also about Detroit, its citizens, and their encounter with the machine.

Thus the chapters of Dilla Time compose a grid of two separate but complementary tracksthe biography of J Dilla and the people around him, and the larger context of music and musical time.

I was accompanied in this latter endeavor by a vital expert, my colleague at NYU, the musicologist Jeff Peretz. When I began teaching a musical concept called Dilla Time to my students in 2014, it was Jeff who validated my argument and helped me deconstruct it. Jeff and I began formulating the musical pedagogy in this book during my Dilla course, and we developed it over time in conversations with each other, with our students and colleagues, and with other musicians. Jeff reviewed every word in the music chapters, created many of the original charts and analyses, and developed the visual language that this book uses to illustrate rhythmic concepts.

For those who dont know much about hip-hop or J Dilla, I offer what I hope will be both a compelling biography and a book about music that builds those concepts step-by-step. For those who already count themselves as informed Dilla fans, I hope