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

by Dan Charnas

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.

To “rag” a tune was to mess around with where you put notes while holding the pulse.

In the late 1960s into the 1970s, James Brown solidified and codified funk through a series of songs that built out this aesthetic like “Sex Machine” and “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.”

Bitches bitches bitches For me do dishes Later on grant my wishes Get on your knees with the quickness Suck the dick of a ni**a named Silk, bitch

So he decamped in late 1996 to a neglected studio where time had stopped: Electric Lady, built by Jimi Hendrix, tucked into a tiny building on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, on a block known for shoe shops, not show business. But Electric Lady was where many of the records that inspired the hip-hop generation were recorded.

James had gotten girls pregnant before; it was Maureen who sometimes arranged and paid for their abortions, nearly a half dozen by her count.

O.D.B. said, “Don’t get on the red bus.” He said to stay where I was, and he’d come back for me. And when he came back, he said I could have any kind of ride I wanted. “Anything you want, you’ll have it. Don’t worry about it.” He said to stay where I was.

Terrace Martin had pedigrees in both hip-hop and jazz. He connected with Battlecat the same year that he began seriously studying saxophone at Santa Monica’s renowned music program at Locke High School, alongside his cousin, Steven “Thundercat” Bruner. Martin’s chops got him to a congress of all-star high school jazz bands in Colorado, where he befriended a teenage pianist from Texas named Robert Glasper. Martin continued his jazz studies at CalArts, but he put just as much work into his hip-hop production. He and Thundercat played in Snoop Dogg’s backing band, the Snoopadelics, alongside Thundercat’s childhood friend, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington. For most of the 2000s, Martin composed songs for his heroes, like Snoop, DJ Quik, and Kurupt; and even coproduced a solo EP for Frank Bush, now “Frank Nitt,” at Delicious Vinyl. But Terrace Martin found his ultimate creative foil in a teenage rapper from Compton.

Kendrick Lamar, like Martin, saw himself as a product of his neighborhood, but also as part of a greater community and a longer lineage. Lamar claimed Tupac Shakur himself

Thundercat was already pals with Flying Lotus, and together they created the musical base for the song “Wesley’s Theory.”

But no song is simple text. It is also subtext, context, and pretext.