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

by Dan Charnas

“Dilla is one

the few cats in hip-hop that I would put next to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis in terms of technical, formal sophistication.”

Jazz was born in the whorehouses of New Orleans, after all. Fucking around is the whole point.

J Dilla took all the pieces of the city’s history, put them into his machine, and—as one can do only with a machine—slammed them against one another. Grid against grid.

The genius of Dilla was that you never knew when that resolution would come. For Moran, and for many in his generation of jazz like Glasper, that sensation felt good.

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.

Terrace Martin produced Kendrick Lamar’s first demo, put a song on his debut album, and enthused about him to his musician

friends.

Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday were here, swinging. James Brown stomped on the One. Tupac Amaru Shakur lived in between the lines. And the pulse was driven by the irregular heartbeat of James Dewitt Yancey.

might mean: Don’t change yourself so that people will love you. It might mean: Never get too comfortable with yourself, always change it up.

Now children are being taught with Dilla’s music.” Here she referred to the J Dilla Foundation’s 2015 donation of

nearly

10,000 in electronic equipment to Pershing High School to create the J Dilla Music Lab. Her second nonprofit—the James Dewitt Yancey Foundation—was currently partnering with the Save the Music Foundation to create J Dilla Music Tech Grants for electronic music education in forty...

Over the years, on her way to and from meetings and errands in the museum, Burnside often detoured through Musical Crossroads just to watch people’s reactions to the objects. Nothing there fascinated her more than visitors’ encounter with the J Dilla display.

There were the pilgrims, the folks who came seeking J Dilla’s MPC. When they spied it, boom!… they made a beeline for the case. Mos Def had been like that. When he arrived, he told Burnside: I only have time to see Dilla. Where is he?

There were the hip-hop heads who didn’t know that Dilla’s equipment was here, and when they stumbled upon it, turned toward each other, hands over their mouths, Yo! Oh, shit!… pointing at the drum machin...

Then there were the devotees. When these folks saw the J Dilla display, they didn’t take photos. They’d stop, put a hand over their heart, and sigh. Some of them would stand for a long while, a quiet communion. Questlove was like that when he...

Sometimes there were tears. Not just from his friends, but from strangers, people who had never touched or met or even seen the man. One day, Burnside saw a middle-aged woman staring at the case, holding her purse, wiping her eyes. Thank you, she repeated. Thank you. The woman, overcome, put her face in her handkerchief, took a moment, and began to tell her story. The whole family, despite their age differences—he...

House Shoes told them almost everything: How he dropped out of college and spent the rest of his tuition money on records. How he began working in a record shop and started his career as a DJ in Detroit. And how he began releasing his own records with production by J Dilla. One of the Secret Service agents put up a hand to stop Shoes. “Waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait,” the agent said. “Hold on. You put out one of J Dilla’s first records?!” The rest of Michael Buchanan’s conversation with the Secret Service consisted of him sharing his Dilla memories and memorabilia.

Fuck it. There’s nothing worse in this world than a liar or a thief, and there are plenty, and you have to stand up to them, no matter who they are.