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

by Dan Charnas

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 Dilla’s contribution is a radical shift in how musicians perceive time.

One sound—whether the bang of a drum or a note struck on a piano or a bird’s chirp—doesn’t become music until a second sound occurs; either at the same time, called harmony; or at another moment in time, called melody; the ordered spacing of those sounds in time called rhythm. Thus all music begins with the second event. The indivisible number of rhythm is two, for it is the space between the first and second beat that sets our musical expectations and tells us when to expect the third, and so on.

In 1937, the experimental composer John Cage predicted that the same machines invented for music reproduction—the record player and the radio—could and would actually be used for music production. Two years later, in 1939, Cage created a piece called Imaginary Landscape No. 1, in which he used three different turntables as part of a musical performance.

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Sometimes grief was indeed a mask for the greedy. But sometimes what looked like greed was just grief.