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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Charnas
Read between
February 1 - February 9, 2022
It is the deliberate juxtaposition of multiple expressions of straight and swing time simultaneously, a conscious cultivation of rhythmic friction for maximum musicality and maximum surprise. It is conflicted time. It is Dilla Time.
Jay Dee / J Dilla’s methods of rhythmic sabotage were created by deliberate, severe displacement of elements, expressing multiple pulses of straight and swung.
The innovations of James Yancey bear the mark of a programmer, not a drummer. The sheer regularity with which elements like the rushed snare appear is not the result of error or reflex.
It is the unmistakable product of his particular use—or misuse, if you prefer—of the MPC. Dilla had the compulsion to play with time. The MPC created a platform that allowed him to do it in ways not quite possible on the machines he used previously.
Behind the J Dilla “freehand” performance narrative, there is a fetishization of the conventional musician and a rejection of the programmer, the very person that Dilla was.
Once a pattern is established, it sets up an expectation. We expect to hear an event in a positive (or “strong”) space, and do not expect to hear one in a negative (or “weak”) space.
This propensity to hear positive and negative spaces continues as rhythms become more elaborate. When those expectations get subverted, we feel disoriented.
our expectations are governed by the most granular pulse in a given song, what we call the rhythmic current.
Because the rhythmic current—the most granular pulse—governs our expectations, changes on a microscopic level can ironically be jarring, and it is in this area, subverting the rhythmic current, that James did most of his work.
He lingered in a place beyond time, searching for something that had been lost: the sound of soul music before the machines took over.
D’Angelo traced his own epiphany as a programmer to Tribe’s second album, Low End Theory: in the right hands, he realized, machines could evoke soul, too.
To charge themselves, they’d listen for hours to records, old and new, or watch Questlove’s “treats”—videotapes from his collection of hundreds:
That evening at the House of Blues birthed another musical relationship. Next to D’Angelo sat a young performer from Dallas: Erica Wright, just signed by D’Angelo’s manager Kedar Massenburg’s new label.
What she chose, eventually, was a singing career under the name Erykah Badu. Like D’Angelo, she evoked the sounds of the past—the phrasing of Billie Holiday with the firepower of Chaka Khan; and she matched those classic aesthetics with hip-hop sensibilities.
While much of popular R&B in the 1990s had devolved into singing over hip-hop beats, D’Angelo and Badu were among a small group of artists who strove to re-create the elements behind those beats—like that Electric Lady Rhodes—by using a combination of programming and traditional musicianship.
Neo-soul was a revival of soul’s analog heyday by its digital children.
The creators of neo-soul weren’t just emulating old stuff, they were reckoning with new ideas as well. The emphasis, if you listened carefully, was on the “neo.”
Jay Dee could shift a drum’s position in time by programming it, and there it would remain. But Questlove had to counteract a lifetime of physical reflexes, to retrain his body to do things and feel time differently.
Lonnie Rashid Lynn was one of the few rappers to make it out of the Midwest in the early 1990s, a time when hip-hop’s most important acts emerged from either the East or West Coasts.
When James played the results through the room monitors, Questlove hung his head. He’d taken a piano stab from the Johnny Mathis record and made it sound harder than an eighteen-wheeler hitting a brick wall.
Common began writing, James sang the hook, and they named the gentle, vibrating song after the incense smoke that drifted between them, “Nag Champa.”
Baatin practiced meditation and James’s ritual was the titty bar, but that didn’t mean that James was any less possessed of spirit.
This was why he didn’t try to convince James to do things he didn’t want to do, because when James really wanted to do it, he’d bring you something like “Thelonius”: a perfect song, made with you and only you in mind.
It’s why Common was cool with staying in the basement and writing while James hung at the strip club. Common figured if he was going to really work with James, he had to give him room to live his life.
James often called Pete Rock when he had a “beat block” and needed inspiration. D’Angelo would call James.
James noted that all four of them were Aquarians—a star sign whose children could be inspired, creative revolutionaries or unreliable, detached enigmas, depending on one’s perspective.5 They began referring to themselves, jokingly, as “Soulquarians.”
When Tip and James did speak, James finally found his words. It wasn’t about the money, or lack of gratitude for his benefactor. “I just want people to know it’s me,” he told Tip.
Jazzy Jeff ended up signing Scott to A Touch of Jazz, and his producers recorded her debut album while working with another Black Lily alumnus, Taalib Johnson, performing as Musiq Soulchild.
when the Roots found someone else squatting on their ideal domain name, TheRoots.com, they decided to use a neutral one based on a common Philly salutation: Okay player.com.
In the months to come, Okayplayer became the central web portal for the Roots, Common, D’Angelo, Talib Kweli, and many other neo-soul and hip-hop artists.
Okayplayer also became one of the internet’s first virtual communities, a way for Black bohemians, nerds of color, and their multiracial followers around the globe to circumvent the commercial musical monoculture of magazines, radio, and television, years before there was something called “social media.”
Among those songs, the one that raised the eyebrows of manager Derek Dudley and MCA executive Wendy Goldstein as a potential single was a track called “The Light.”
Questlove didn’t succeed in jettisoning the song from the album, but the consensus for the first single shifted to “The Sixth Sense,” featuring a sung chorus from Bilal Oliver and a track produced by DJ Premier, whose songs tended to be sure-shots among the hip-hop core audience.
Despite being denied this first slot, Jay Dee had a hand in the creation of eleven of the album’s sixteen tracks.
The groove, which James would then chop and arrange with a chorus sung by D’Angelo, became the Slum Village song “Tell Me.”
The celebration ended when another rapper, Jay-Z, stabbed the artist manager Lance “Un” Rivera several times with a five-inch knife because he suspected Rivera of bootlegging his album.
a metaphor for how mainstream hip-hop had sidelined Native Tongues groups like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, the very phenomenon they lamented in “Stakes Is High.”
D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Common’s Like Water for Chocolate dropped in early 2000. Sophisticated twins from the womb of Electric Lady, praised by critics and fans, both reflected the rhythmic and aesthetic influence of Jay Dee, albeit in different ways:
Voodoo became the first full-scale application of James Yancey’s time-feel by a group of traditional musicians, and Like Water for Chocolate demonstrated how Jay Dee himself applied his techniques.
Jay Dee was no longer the most successful product of Detroit hip-hop. Eminem had become a multiplatinum star, and he and manager Paul Rosenberg began their own Interscope-distributed label, Shady Records.
Eminem signed his mentor Proof’s group—the Dirty Dozen, or D12—as Shady’s first act.
Maureen Yancey wondered if James resented being eclipsed. James told her: “Don’t worry about that, lady. ...
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Slowly, James made sure everyone in his Conant Gardens crew got their shot.
The significant women in James’s life, whether in the professional or personal realms, were more caregivers than partners.
As it was for many men in his circle of family and friends, women were either objects of desire to be chased and kept, or figures to worship and protect.
James leveraged his clout to maintain his control, or to escape consequences.
Hip-hop, too, was a boys’ club wherein men were the power brokers, the most valued performers and producers; and where the casual misogyny of rappers and rap lyrics was often waved away as hyperbole.
James reacted by becoming her teacher: He pointed Erykah toward the stacks and told her to pick out a record.
Erykah would elicit ambivalent reactions from James in the years to come. In interviews, James called her a “diva”; in private moments with some people close to him, he seemed spooked by their interactions, calling her “crazy.”
For Erykah, an irrepressible wit, this was typical mischief. Even if James found it amusing, it was a rare occasion where someone made him the butt of a joke.
