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

by Dan Charnas

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

J Dilla’s music was an act of calculation as well as feeling; two legitimate but different kinds of intelligence. Some of his closest collaborators agree. As DJ Jazzy Jeff told me: “You can follow the method and you won’t have the feeling. You can have the feeling but no success because you have no method.” D’Angelo agrees that time itself can be both felt and measured: “You can do both,” he says. “Beat machines taught us that.”

he was actually a programmer who used and mastered the features of the equipment on which he worked.

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.

In modern popular music, we tend to stomp our feet on beats one and three (the downbeat), and clap our hands on beats two and four (the backbeat). So it sounds something like this: STOMP-clap!-STOMP-clap!

Every day, no matter how late Jay stayed up, he rose at 7:00 a.m. From 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. he swept, wiped, and dusted every inch of his studio while listening to music, usually records that he had recently purchased, listening for sections to sample and manipulate on his Akai MPC3000 drum machine.

He

didn’t just skip through the records, “needle-dropping” for interesting parts. He listened to entire songs, listened and listened. His vigilance was almost always rewarded by an element deep within a track. From 9:00 a.m. until noon, he made “beats,” or individual rhythm tracks for rappers to rhyme on or singers to sing over. He created them quickly, one after the other, finished them, and then moved on. At lunchtime, he took a three-hour break. Sometimes he’d use that time to pick up visiting musicians and artists at the airport and take them back to his home studio. Then he’d work again from 3:00 p.m. until 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., and use the rest of the evening to hang out—go eat, go to the strip clu...

Anyone who ever got close to J Dilla discovered the truth about the man and, by extension, his music. Not a single thing was out of place. Everything was exactly where he wanted it to be.

African performance was less formalized and more participatory than the European system. The African concept of pitch was much more granular, what we now call microtonal. And Africans evolved a more complex rhythmic sense, wherein two different pulses were often laid on top of each other, played simultaneously, called polyrhythm; for example, a chunk of time counted in twos and threes at the same time. Polyrhythm was the sound of two or more strands of rhythm happening at once, at seeming cross-purposes to each other, but part of a whole.

Syncopation is what happens when we don’t hear musical events in places we expect, and instead hear those events in places we don’t.

With Scott Joplin’s performance at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the publication of his “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1899, the genre of ragtime was born. This ragged, rolling, disorienting

music where notes came in odd places was an expression of cultural freedom, and thus of defiance. Ragtime roiled white America: young people generally greeted the defiance of rhythmic expectation with surprise and delight; older whites recoiled from the disorder. For the next three decades, ragtime became America’s chief popular music, boosting the growth of the fledgling sheet music and record business.

What emerged in the United States in the twentieth century was a practice of delaying the arrival of every other beat, creating an uneven, long-short-long-short pulse called swing.

Swing as a time-feel would permeate blues, jazz, and nearly every American musical genre to follow: from rhythm and blues to country and western, from rock to soul, from

funk to disco, from punk and new wave to hip-hop and electronic dance music. Swing time is now an integral part of the American musical expectation, and thus our global musical expectation.

One musician in particular would help to encode swing into jazz, and thus put the time-feel in the center of all American popular music thereafter: Louis Armstrong, who began in New Orleans, then built his reputation and influence in Chicago and New York, where he became the one musician whom everyone tried to emulate.

So

much of what pop music became, Armstrong established: the improvised solo; the bluesy, bent way of singing and playing; even the archetype of the Black performer “crossing over” to white audiences.

But Armstrong’s delaying of time had the greatest influence. Almost every performer in jazz and pop, whether peer or protégé, took something from him: Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. In the Armstrong style, which became the popular style, he sang or played in a devil-may-care fashion, as if he was in no hurry to get where he was going. I’ll get there when I get there. I’ll see you ...

Thus Gordy created the modern concept of artist development, and over the years launched the careers of artists like Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Mary Wells, Kim Weston, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Martha Reeves, and the Jackson 5, as well as songwriting-production teams like Holland-Dozier-Holland. Tens of millions of Motown records sold across the globe, and on each of them, a map—all roads leading to Detroit.

These three genres—New York electro, Chicago house, and Detroit techno—were intertwined, but the Detroit variant leaned into the ethereal, the mechanical, the political, the futuristic. The children of Motown found a soul in the machine.

The first seven seconds of the Incredible Bongo Band’s 1973 remake of the Shadows’ “Apache.” Two minutes and thirty-eight seconds into the 45-rpm single of James Brown’s “Funky Drummer (Part 2),” released in 1969.

Four minutes and twenty-nine seconds into James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose”—the faux-concert version that appears on his 1971 Sex Machine album, not the one released as a single two years earlier. If you were a serious DJ, you needed these records in your repertoire.

The job of the hip-hop record producer was now about making music from pieces of music that were already made; recording new records by piecing together pieces of old records. The best producers, like Rubin and Marley Marl, became sonic collage artists.

Amp Fiddler believed in karma and love over scarcity and fear.

Harry Chamberlin, created a keyboard instrument that triggered tiny loops of magnetic-tape recordings of real-life instruments: the Chamberlin, later called the Mellotron. This was the ancestor of sound sampling.

Listening To: Man-Made Rhythms Man: “Funky Drummer” by James Brown Drums played by Clyde Stubblefield Man Emulates Machine: “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson

Drums played by Ndugu Chancler, to a machine metronome Man Engages Machine: “Lady Cab Driver” by Prince Drums played by Prince and by the LM-1

The ability for drum machines to loop larger pieces of sampled audio meant that the looser, more human groove of real-life drummers could be imported and kept in perfect time with any electronic elements. It was a way, in effect, for the machine to engage man.

And it turned the beatmaker into an alchemist of musical culture—whose most refined and well-crafted instruments came numbered, not named: 12, 1200, 60.

This “Beats + Noise” approach was contrasted by another one, call it “Beats + Beauty,” wherein the power of the digital sampler was employed to find and recombine harmony and melody, not just rhythm and sonic texture. This lineage attracted beatmakers like DJ Jazzy Jeff and DJ

Premier,

the first to employ samples of jazz mus...

By the time James made a song with Phat Kat called “Front Street” in early 1994, recorded in part at Amp’s place, his personal style had coalesced: a melodic jazz sample, the top frequencies filtered out to make the music more amorphous and gloomy, over hard drums, in the vein of A Tribe Called Quest or Pete Rock. But James’s snare snapped even harder; and just as distinctive, his kick drum bounced all over the place because he didn’t use timing correct on it to make the notes perfectly aligned with the grid. James played the notes freehand instead, giving the beat a looser feel. It was the first beat from James Dewitt Yancey that would sound to future listeners just like a beat from James Dewitt Yancey.

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.”

Q-Tip told James he had been playing his tape for everybody in the crew. As Tip enthused, it became clear to James that Q-Tip was more focused on him as a producer than Slum Village as a group. “Y’all are dope,” Tip assured him. “But I think the road to entry is through your production skills because they’re so singular.”

“Damn, that’s crazy,” James replied. “I’m surprised.” Something about this gesture didn’t compute for James: a producer promoting someone who could potentially be competition. But Q-Tip was from a different school of thought: brotherhood.

On a whim, Pete Rock had come to meet the young producer from Detroit. He left convinced that James Yancey was from some other place.

Fatlip. Most hip-hop beats featured very predictable drum patterns, in part because they were looped, but also because they hewed to a standard time grid. But in “Runnin’,” Jay Dee had flouted both these conventions. He’d programmed the kick drum not in a standard two- or four-bar loop, but in a long sequence that didn’t repeat until the twentieth bar, in linear fashion, so that it did different things in every new measure of music, as a human drummer would do.

Montgomery. Tre was saying that Jay Dee had a distinctive approach to his instrument, the drum machine. And Tre put his body on the line to protect Jay Dee’s rhythmic sense, a fact that was not lost on James Yancey.

Ali watched James come downstairs, grab a record, and walk to their workstation, his fingers darting over the turntable and the sampler pads in a way that let Ali know James had already found some audio to manipulate and had begun chopping it. 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.

But Linn’s machines were more sophisticated than that. The MPC sequencer allowed users to set the degree of swing for each musical element individually. For example, you could make one sound’s swing barely

noticeable, another a shuffle, another really severe, and another not swung at all.

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.

The guy hears the whole band, everything. And then places his notes precisely where they need to be in relationship to everything else.

of sounds

The expense and chaos of the sample clearance process led several hip-hop producers to either reduce their sampling or eliminate it altogether. To do that and retain the hip-hop aesthetic took a great deal of practice, skill, and musicality. Rising hip-hop producers from the South were adept at this: the Neptunes by being sparse, Timbaland by being hectic, and Organized Noize by being lush. But Dr. Dre, from the West, had long since set the bar for them all.

clean of any vocal. It became the bed of a song for Mos Def and Talib Kweli. Kanye West didn’t care about open spaces. He sampled anything—vocals, no vocals, it didn’t matter. He took dusty old soul records, like Lenny Williams’s “Cause I Love You,” jacked up the speed, chopped the music and vocal alike, and made a new track for the Chicago rapper Twista, “Overnight Celebrity.” It was a technique presaged, just as the conflicts of Dilla Time were, by the insouciant sampling habits of Wu-Tang Clan producer the RZA. But Kanye was more deliberate and consistent in his use of vocal bits, creating an aesthetic that was part hip-hop, part the Chipmunks. Madlib, too, was creative progeny to the RZA, but with an even more profound lean into error. As such, Madlib and J Dilla were producers of the same heart.

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