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

by Dan Charnas

Despite his short life span and low profile, J Dilla was, and remains, the producer’s producer, the inspiration for inspirers, or, as the Roots’ drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson says, “the musician’s musician’s musician.”

What Dilla created was a third path of rhythm, juxtaposing those two time-feels, even and uneven simultaneously, creating a new, pleasurable, disorienting rhythmic friction and a new time-feel: Dilla Time.

The best answers to cliché, myth, and skepticism are the facts and good context.

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.

It sounded, as Questlove would later describe in colorful language, like what would happen if you gave a baby two tequila shots, placed her in front of a drum machine, and had her try to program a beat. Nothing was exactly where he expected it to be. And that’s what made it exhilarating.

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.

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.

How our rhythmic expectations came to be is as much a tale of geography as it is musicology. Our musical expectations are governed by our location: where we’re from, and where we’ve been.

Imposing order, their order, was an obsession for the Europeans before and during the colonial enterprise.

African performance was less formalized and more participatory than the European system.

What the Africans heard as music, Europeans heard as wrong, alien, uncivilized. When the Europeans came to impose their will upon the Africans, these cultural biases played no small part in their justification for what would become the most atrocious imposition in human history, the transatlantic slave trade.

Now Detroit had two, misaligned grids. Wherever Detroit didn’t name the mile roads, it numbered them by their distance from Campus Martius. When Detroit eventually finished expanding northward, it set its border at a road called “8 Mile.”

Woodward and Jefferson were hypocrites: fans of grand plans with fatal flaws; peddlers of platonic ideals they didn’t practice; prophets of freedom who owned slaves. They wouldn’t live to see the disorder their order created.

After Europeans abducted Africans and took them across the Atlantic, African men and women had to disguise their religious and musical practices in order to preserve them. In South America and the Caribbean, African gods were rebranded under a Catholic veneer, so African polyrhythm persisted within it.1

in the Protestant English colonies that became the United States, religious practices from Africa were forbidden, and polyrhythm vanished.

Musical expression outside Christian hymns was suppressed; drumming, especially, was seen as clandestine communicatio...

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.

Syncopation was the ghost of polyrhythm, the spirit of Africa still following its progeny through time and space, through slavery to emancipation and beyond.

African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century didn’t call it syncopation, they called it ragging. To “rag” a tune was to mess around with where you put notes while holding the pulse.

Ragtime roiled white America: young people generally greeted the defiance of rhythmic expectation with surprise and delight; older whites recoiled from the disorder.

music. Jazz, in one sense, was what happened when multiple musicians ragged a tune, separately but simultaneously, a pleasant confluence of cross-purposes.

the emergence of jazz and blues did something else: they created an entirely new way—an African American way—of relating to musical time.

Polyrhythm is what happens when you divide a segment of time into a pulse of twos while dividing that same amount of time into a second, simultaneous pulse of threes.

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.

Swing signifies the difference between European and African American rhythmic feels. It’s performance based, not scripted or notated. It adopts the unique qualities of the player.

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.

In jazz, “cool” was manifested by delay and defiance of expectation.

Louis Armstrong’s musical journey north was part of a larger, dire exodus from the American South, as whites enacted laws that segregated Black Americans and stripped them of their franchise, using terror and violence to enforce them.

The clos- est and safest northern destination for many Black southerners were the cities of the Midwest, one of which offered a particular promise of prosperity.

Ford desired a controllable, loyal workforce that would reject unionism and communism.

His new record company was a chance to retain his equity and control, its name turning the Detroit penchant for ethnic diminutives—Corktown for the Irish, Poletown for the Polish, Jewtown for the Jews—back around on the motor city itself: Motown.

Motown would be a machine, a full-service music manufacturer that plucked artists from Detroit’s Black neighborhoods, matched them with material written by teams of songwriters, produced those records with a crew of peerless musicians, and debated their quality before releasing them.

The Michigan-born Malcolm X lampooned the March on Washington as a sellout by “Negro” leaders to white interests seeking to blunt Black grassroots political power.

Motown had become a synonym for Detroit, and it was Detroiters’ pride and joy; but it was a business, not a birthright, owned by a capitalist, albeit a Black one.

The drums weren’t the only instrument to play with rhythmic expectation, because in funk, every instrument was used as a drum, especially the bass guitar, which also began to take on the melodic work. Funk made the bass line prime.

Clinton released the music under two entities: Funkadelic and Parliament— and the bands soon melded in fans’ language into one collective: P-Funk.

The Mothership became a totem of a larger Black American worldview: a cultivated, exuberant dream-sense of the future, spirits both ancient and new, bound with the sciences—math, physics, machines, technology—offering the possibility of flight.

In later years, Black scholars would give this aesthetic a name: Afrofuturism.

Dewitt’s fingers thumped a rhythm on James’s belly, just as Dewitt would pluck his upright bass, singing along … Booom-badu-bup-boooom. Badooom-bup-boooom. “Dewitt,” Herman said. “You’re playing your son?!” “It’s the only way I can get him to shut up and stop crying,” Dewitt replied.

James wouldn’t sleep at night without some kind of music, either on the stereo, or Dewitt playing his bass, or—as it was tonight—Dewitt playing James.

James was quiet, in part, because he stuttered. His father was a stutterer, too; when Dewitt was a child, sometimes he would have to lie down and cross his arms against his chest, holding opposite shoulders, just to get the words out.

The backlash against disco drew much of its energy from white audiences hostile to disco’s Black and gay subcultures, but there was an aesthetic revolt, too. For many people weaned on classic rock and soul, the synthesizer became the object of outrage.

These same music fans often had no problem with the Who’s or Stevie Wonder’s use of synthesizers on their most beloved albums.

Detroiters had a natural affinity for unnatural sounds. Berry Gordy literally composed his first songs to the rhythms of the assembly line.

Detroit kids condensed them into one catchall phrase: the Jit.

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.

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.

The street DJs of New York began a collective search for the records that had the best “breaks.” They dug them out of parents’ old record collections or found them in bins at local record stores.