More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Charnas
Read between
March 12 - July 30, 2022
J Dilla’s rhythms were not accidents, they were intentions. Yet even the biggest fans of his style initially heard them as erratic. Why? Their reactions had everything to do with those rhythms defying their expectations. To understand the music of J Dilla, we must examine that process of subversion.
Syncopation was the ghost of polyrhythm, the spirit of Africa still following its progeny through time and space, through slavery to emancipation and beyond.
Amp noticed that James had quickly evolved from simply looping long pieces of audio to slicing those loops into their constituent parts—a kick drum only, a snare only, a hi-hat only, more percussion sounds—and then sequencing them. The latter technique, “chopping,” took a great deal more skill. To Amp, it was like the difference between building a house made from prefabricated panels versus laying the bricks and nailing the wood yourself, and doing it in a beautiful way. Amp had already judged James to be a natural after listening to those pause tape beats. But every day that passed and every
...more
One popular machine, the Roland TR-808, offered completely artificial sounds and no subtle degrees of swing. The 808 had a kick drum sound that, when detuned, shook floors and walls and tailed off for what seemed like days. That vast, detuned 808 kick became the sound of hip-hop by the mid-1980s.
Q-Tip shared the demo with his comrade from De La Soul, Dave “Trugoy” Jolicoeur, when they played a show together some days later. “This is ill, right?” Tip asked Dave. “It’s like your shit,” Dave replied. “But better.”
Within a few minutes, James had created an insane track—not just a beat but a completely arranged song. Then James went back upstairs, like it was nothing. Ali had never seen anything like it—James’s level of freedom, the speed and beauty of his execution. It helped that James was quiet and unassuming. He never got in the way. He enhanced things. Tribe accepted him as a brother.
Hi-Tek journeyed from Cincinnati to deliver a beat CD and was so nervous about his session with James that he accidentally drove for hours in the wrong direction, to Cleveland, before he changed course.
The limitations of the older machines provoked the innovations of the producers who used them, and cultivated character, too—patience, perseverance, focus, risk-taking. Once computers allowed a new generation of electronic composers to more easily replicate those hard-won techniques—especially the time-feel of James Dewitt Yancey—they became ubiquitous.
To hear a professional bass player extolling the virtues of a Jay Dee bass line was startling. Phonte’s drummer friends in class broke the rhythms down to him: The kick is late. The snare is early. As simple as the stuff sounds, it’s complex. It was the first time Phonte saw a beatmaker being held in esteem by traditional musicians. In the wake of the one-two punch of Like Water for Chocolate and Fantastic, Vol. 2., Phonte bumped the latter album repeatedly. He told his partners in Little Brother: This is who we’ve got to beat. This is the fucking bar. To leap over it, 9th Wonder used his
...more
James told him: “I don’t want nobody to have my sounds when I’m gone.”
On February 18, 2004, James’s oldest friend in the record business, Fuzzy, drove him to Can-Am Studios, where James helped Dr. Dre celebrate his birthday with several friends, including Porter and the producer Focus. Porter knew that James being there was a gift for Dre, who was a longtime admirer of James’s technique and listened to Dilla beats while he worked out. The encounter was a gift to James as well. Between the MCA debacle and his illness, he felt he had missed a step. Dre suggested to James that the two of them do a record together. Collaborating with Dr. Dre might be the injection
...more
In truth, he hadn’t created much music at Cedars. James emerged from the hospital to find that Kanye West had done the majority of the production on Common’s new album, Be, save two tracks that James had recorded before his long stay. But being bedridden for two months did convince him of two things: that he could use his tiny Macintosh laptop to make beats, and that he could and should use every piece of time he had to make them.
James played them a new CD of beats made largely from the records he had been buying there. He’d given it one of his playful titles that derived from the name of some unhealthy food that he shouldn’t be eating in his condition, like Burger King, Pizza Man, or in this case, Donuts.
Created in a burst of energy after James’s discharge from Cedars-Sinai in early 2005, Donuts emerged as a complete thought.
At the beginning of one session, James was too weak to climb the stairs; Maurice carried him over his shoulder. But as soon as Maurice set James onto the studio’s sofa—in front of his MPC or his Moog—Cooley was struck by the thing he always saw when James was working on music. He was smiling.
Jank understood that Donuts was a trifle in the eyes of many people around Dilla, and perhaps to James himself, a secondary project to The Shining. There were no guest appearances from rappers, no lyrics at all, yet Jank still felt the finished album he held in his hands was saying something.
called Q-Tip from his hospital bed and told him that he regretted his occasionally ungrateful and petulant behavior during their Ummah partnership; that made Tip happy.
In Hawaii with the Roots, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson had just checked into a hotel room when Common rang. “Yo, man. The greatest has left us.”
Stones Throw Records teetered on the brink of insolvency before James died. But the death of J Dilla just days after the release of Donuts earned it mentions in The New York Times and other publications that might have otherwise ignored the bizarre instrumental record from an independent label. With stories of James’s intermittent hospitalization and reports of sampling equipment in his room, the coverage spread a dramatic creation story for the album—namely that Donuts had been largely composed bedside while James was being treated at Cedars-Sinai. It was a romantic narrative if not
...more
But the album alienated many of James’s biggest fans and closest collaborators, who felt like the frenetic, low-fidelity beats didn’t sound anything like him. It was hard enough letting James go; it was harder to have James’s last beat tape eclipse the body of work they knew.
Mao had seen and covered outpourings of grief and remembrance following the deaths of the genre’s most popular figures, like Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. But he’d never seen anything like this, certainly not for a relatively obscure beat producer.
J Dilla was his generation’s first great grid jumper, master of mazes, navigator of crossroads. His music reflected the ability to live in discomfort, the certainty of uncertainty, the ease of unease, and the suspense in waiting for a resolution that may or may not come when you expect it.
The more seasoned and classically trained musicians had the most difficulty letting go of their polish and their impulse toward precision.
Steven Ellison, a Stones Throw intern, an unabashed Dilla fan, and the grandnephew of Alice Coltrane, had begun producing his own music under the moniker Flying Lotus; he released his first album less than a year after Dilla’s death.
Hiatus Kaiyote’s Choose Your Weapon in 2015 became the most audacious and extensive deployment of Dilla Time that any group of traditional musicians had yet attempted.
Colonialism and capitalism had forced a European frame on much of the world’s popular music. Dilla’s rhythms broke through that frame, creating a kind of reunion with the musical thinking of Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia. Hiatus
“If you know me,” Glasper told the audience, “you know that J Dilla’s a big part of my life. The only producer that … changed the way I play music. He literally changed the way a whole generation plays their instruments.”
