They were the result of Dilla taking inspiration from what he was impressed by in hip-hop, and trying to put his own stamp on it. “He told me that ‘Spaceship’ [from West’s debut The College Dropout] fucked him up cause for the first time he never heard that interpretation of [Marvin Gaye’s] ‘distant lover’ in his head when he heard ‘distant lover’. kinda fucked him up a lil [sic].”8 If the post is to be believed, for the first time in years, Dilla was actually taken aback by something he heard in hip-hop, a flip he never would have considered. So he tried not only to approximate the style
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