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

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The greatest hip-hop producer of all time is getting the love and care his legacy deserves. Dilla Time is a master class.” — DREAM HAMPTON Charnas, Dan (2022). Dilla time: the life and afterlife of J Dilla, the hip-hop producer who reinvented rhythm. New York: MCD, Farrar, Straus and Giroux . Retrieved 7 September 2023. In 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. The critical mass at Electric Lady continued its gravitational pull. With Questlove came the Roots and James Poyser, with Poyser came Badu. Bilal Oliver, a singer from Philadelphia who had attended jam sessions in Questlove’s living room with other emerging Philly singers like Jill Scott, now lived in a dormitory across the street from Electric Lady while he studied jazz at the New School; he came through, as did art-minded New York hip-hop artists like Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Q-Tip, who still maintained a creative connection with D’Angelo even as the singer drifted away from the Ummah. And then there was the MC from Chicago who had become an honorary member of the collective. Why do you consider it “racist” to prioritize harmony over rhythm? Harmony has more inherent complexity to it, and it really is more cerebral and less visceral. It has nothing to do with race, in my opinion. Rhythm is more for dancing to than thinking about on an intellectual level, and rhythm doesn’t express emotion the way harmony does. It’s not a coincidence that when an a musician, even a modern pop musician, wants to write a song that is more emotional/sad, they ease up on the percussion and focus more on harmony and melody.

In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. He follows the people who kept Dilla and his ideas alive. And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco. Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new. Sydney Sweeney” Is a Dramatic, Cinematic, and Emotionally-Charged Hit for Bridget Rian November 21, 2023 What that meant, as James understood it, was that Q-Tip was essentially offering to be his manager. In the book, Charnas aims to dispel several myths about J Dilla. For one, according to Charnas, many musicians reduce J Dilla's time-feel as simply "loose" and "not quantizing," but the book describes this as an oversimplification, detailing the nuances that defined J Dilla's technique. [7] The book also debunks the misconception that J Dilla produced his 2006 album Donuts in the hospital, instead explaining that the album was born from an earlier beat tape and edited by Jeff Jank of Stones Throw Records while J Dilla was in the hospital. [4] Cover artwork [ edit ]Dorfman, Matt (9 December 2022). "The Best Book Covers of 2022". The New York Times . Retrieved 5 March 2023. The two biggest rooms of the three-studio complex were underground. In the control rooms, the equipment was powered by tubes and transistors rather than microchips. Walking into the control room of Studio A for the first time, D’Angelo touched the old Focusrite board and felt the spirits. Through the glass, in the spacious, oval-shaped wood-paneled live room of Studio A, sat a dusty Fender Rhodes keyboard. Not just any Fender Rhodes. The Fender Rhodes—the Holy of Holies, the one that created the sound of modern soul music; the same one that Stevie Wonder played on his greatest albums, the same one that RAMP employed on “Daylight,” and, by extension, on “Bonita Applebum,” the song that launched the aesthetic for Tribe, the Ummah, and D’Angelo himself. Electric Lady was the mother, the matron, the matrix of the very sound they sought. Deeper still, beneath the floorboards, ran the Minetta Creek, the buried watercourse of ancient Manhattan. For an old soul like D’Angelo, this was like coming home to a place he’d never been, a sacred place to commune with his ancestors. Questlove had heard all these terms used to describe the music of Jay Dee, who in midcareer switched his sobriquet to J Dilla. For the rap nerds and Dillaphiles, Charnas takes readers inside a plethora of the producer’s most crucial collaborations. Dilla’s embryonic lair in the Yancey family’s basement in Conant Gardens. Primordial Slum Village studio sessions at RJ Rice’s in Detroit. Inter-band fistfights recording The Pharcyde’s “Runnin’” on Delicious Vinyl. Production squad The Ummah’s inception, explosion, and dissolution, and how it affected Dilla’s relationship with Q-Tip moving forward. I listened to the audio book, narrated by author Dan Chanas in a way that flowed well with the book's content. When I learned that the written book includes diagrams I got a copy of that also, but I found that Chanas has done such a good job talking about "time" in music that the diagrams were unnecessary for my understanding! This is one of the book's biggest strengths - explaining in a clear and persuasive way what was unique about J Dilla's beat - and how it relates to musical styles that came before, how it influenced hip hop and a lot of popular music, how Dilla created it, how it evolved, etc. Musical TIME is a main character of this book just as much as Dilla is (as the title, Dilla Time, suggests). This is a huge strength of the book, and it's why it works as a fairly long biography of someone with a short life.

a b c d Sanfiorenzo, Dimas (1 February 2022). " 'Dilla Time' Author Dan Charnas on Why J Dilla Is In A League Of His Own - Okayplayer". www.okayplayer.com . Retrieved 5 March 2023.A wide-ranging biography that fully captures the subject’s ingenuity, originality, and musical genius. 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 At the 2023 PEN Awards, Dilla Time won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. [12] Film adaptation [ edit ]

By the way, here’s another great Herbie sample flip by Dilla, and a more subtle usage of Herbie’s vocoded singing.)There are two reasons why my fellow academics should be engaging closely with J Dilla’s music. The first is just cultural literacy; Dilla was influential and is more widely imitated with every passing year. The second is maybe more important: there are not widely used analytical tools for studying this music, and there is a whole world of microrhythm and groove out there that the music academy has been neglecting. Right now, “music theory” classes are mostly harmony and voice-leading classes, and that harmony is too often limited to the historical practices of the Western European aristocracy. But rhythm is at least as important as harmony, and in some musics, significantly more so. There is a persistent belief that rhythm is “less intellectual” or “more instinctive” than harmony and therefore less worthy of serious study. That is pure atavistic racist nonsense, but it also means that it’s hard to do better, because we don’t have the vocabulary or the methods to study rhythm in the depth that it deserves. If we can figure out how to talk about Dilla time, then that will open up a lot of other kinds of time as well. And then, thirteen seconds in, the much louder Manzel beat enters, and that doesn’t line up with the drum machine beat. It is closer to being on the grid, but it isn’t in straight time either: you can see how the little markers are mostly late. The book’s heart is its rich, evocative musicological analysis, complete with rhythm diagrams, of Dilla’s beats. . . Charnas’s engrossing work is one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker.” Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm is a 2022 biography of hip hop producer J Dilla written by Dan Charnas. [1] It chronicles the life of J Dilla until his death in 2006, as well as his posthumous influence on the music industry. Described as "equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history," the book emphasizes J Dilla's signature rhythmic time-feel, which Charnas termed "Dilla time," and its wide-reaching impact on modern music. [2] [3]