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

by Dan Charnas

Erykah Badu jolted James out of his usual rhythms—the defiance of expectation, the experience of not being in control. But it was medicine nonetheless.

The episode was a frightening end to what had been one of the first things to go right for Slum Village.

T3 and Baatin had ordered their creativity and careers around James’s wishes and desires. Now James was gone. T3 had never wanted to lead. Now he was the leader.

As “The Light” shined, Vibe magazine’s September 2000 issue hit newsstands, with Eminem and Dr. Dre on the cover and the two-page Soulquarians spread on the inside.

The name of the quiet man in the bottom-right corner had been buried, surrounded, and overlooked for his entire career.

In the next year, the producer would morph into an artist, and the only name that would eclipse that of Jay Dee woul...

James’s cover of Donald Byrd’s “Think Twice,” keyboards and brass played by another Detroit musician, Andwele Gardner. Performing locally under the mononym Dwele, Gardner had made a name for himself as a singer at Detroit’s boho nightspot Cafe Mahogany,

Since he was evolving, James decided it was time for his name to evolve again, too. The cover of Welcome 2 Detroit was credited to “Jay Dee aka J Dilla.”

Common gave James his new nickname. A member of Common’s band was named “J. B.” Common had started calling him “J. Billa” while they were on tour. During the making of Like Water for Chocolate, “Jay Dee” similarly became “J Dilla.”2

The culmination of everything James had been working toward in the ten years since he’d left Davis Aero Tech, the MCA offer confirmed all the lofty sentiments his admirers and collaborators held for the quiet hip-hop virtuoso from Conant Gardens. See that boy fly.

House Shoes played a key role in bringing another producer to James’s project. Otis “Madlib” Jackson flew in from California, accompanied by his de facto manager, Chris “Peanut Butter Wolf” Manak, who had signed Madlib to his label, Stones Throw Records.

James and Madlib were both men of few words; and the pace of work was slow, centered around the consumption of dozens of joints containing the weakest weed the California visitors had ever smoked. But it was the start of a creative relationship that would grow increasingly potent for both of them.

James divulged how sad he was that Dewitt had rarely been openly affectionate with him.

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.

On a lark, Madlib created an album’s worth of rhymes over a Jay Dee beat CD that he labeled “Jaylib”; over one of them, he rapped an interpolation of the classic rap song “The Message.”

James’s financial prospects were contracting. Just a few years prior, James was commanding up to $60,000 per track for his production work. Now he was lucky if he got more than $15,000.

That wasn’t so much a sign of James’s declining worth as it was the changing economics of the industry. Compact disc sales had plummeted, and the birth of a tiny, legitimate digital download market couldn’t match the profits from selling music on little pieces of plastic.

For one photo, Beni gave James a copy of an album from a new group he had signed called Little Brother. He knew that the crew would appreciate the snapshot, because he knew their sound owed a lot to the man who now held their vinyl in his hand.

Y’skid referred to a particular song by the singer Toni Braxton that lifted James’s well-crafted drum sounds, the handiwork of the producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, who had mined not only J Dilla’s drum library but had used James’s grid-busting techniques on a new multimillion-selling album for the singer-actress Brandy.

That same year, none other than Michael Jackson released a single, “Butterflies,” that bore those same Dilla rhythmic signatures.

It was produced by A Touch of Jazz’s Andre Harris and his writing partner, a fervent Slum Village fan and transplant from England, Marsha Ambrosius.

The two most prominent members of pop music’s royal family—Janet and Michael—had created music using James Dewitt Yancey’s rhythmic approach, without ever...

The bigger the idea, the more people it would influence. The more people it influenced, the farther it would travel. The farther it traveled, the more impossible the idea was to own.

The reason James didn’t understand why all these people sounded like him is that James still didn’t know that he wasn’t simply a beatmaker, nor did he grasp how big of an idea he had cultivated.

an aspiring MC from North Carolina, Phonte Coleman, who posted as “TayGravy.”

Where drum machines used small LED lights and tiny LCD screens to help musicians and programmers navigate, computer sequencers allowed users to visualize everything: to see all the instruments and notes laid out in a horizontal grid representing the passage of time.

Phonte, an English major and aspiring lyricist, didn’t know Patrick made beats under the alias “9th Wonder”—on his desktop computer no less.

To hear a professional bass player extolling the virtues of a Jay Dee bass line was startling. Phonte’s drummer friends in class broke the rhythms down to him: The kick is late. The snare is early. As simple as the stuff sounds, it’s complex.

Phonte discovered—as did Jay Dee and the great musicians before him stretching all the way back to Louis Armstrong—that delay communicated “cool.”

every time that Phonte recorded a vocal thereafter, he gave it a little digital nudge, to the right.

Okayplayers came from all over the world: One poster from the Bronx who called himself “Desus Nice” had a way of telling stories that were so fucked up and brilliant and funny at the same time.

Phonte began a new collaboration, conducted entirely computer-to-computer, a transatlantic trade of beats and vocals between him and Nicolay that they would eventually dub the Foreign Exchange.

Floetry. Ambrosius, the singer and songwriter of the duo, was an avid fan of neo-soul, and more specifically of Slum Village.

Ambrosius dove at the opportunity for Floetry to perform at the famed Black Lily in Philadelphia. In a room with people they’d only heard about—Jill Scott, Jaguar Wright, Bilal—with Questlove playing those lagging, dragging Jay Dee–type beats behind them, Ambrosius decided she wasn’t going back.

One day Jazzy Jeff called Marsha into his office and played her a voice message: it was Michael Jackson, saying that he wanted to record the song she had written, “Butterflies.”

It was her first songwriting credit, and would be the last single released by Michael Jackson during his lifetime, in early 2002.

James’s sound had become central to hip-hop and R&B, even as his name and his production had moved to the fringes.

With computers, everyone could warp time like James. But James would, in his final act, prove that tools were only as good as the hands that touched them.

Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, or TTP, is a blood disease so rare that only a half dozen people per million develop it.

James was lucid throughout, and thoroughly frustrated that he couldn’t just get up and walk out, kept alive by machines, missing the one machine that made life worth living.

Wolf knew that the greatest jazz and the best hip-hop shared similar traits: virtuosity, courage, and a sense of play.

“Yo, same with me,” James said. “I’ve got to eat healthy, too.” James pointed Cross to the refrigerator, which he said was stocked with juice, offering them some.

Cross looked inside, confused: the fridge was filled with fruit-flavored sugar drinks. He looked around the kitchen. He saw more sugary food, like Red Vines. His heart sank. Maybe Jay Dee doesn’t quite understand what healthy food is?

Not more than a few years earlier, J Dilla had been the young, ascendant producer-MC from the Midwest. In the interim, another had risen.

Kanye West hailed from Chicago, a protégé of No I.D., Common’s chief producer before that role passed to James.

though James had been ostensibly managed by Jay-Z’s cousin, it was Kanye who ended up producing tracks for the superstar rapper a...

In another turnabout, Common had now tapped Kanye to work on tracks for his nex...

In close quarters, the producer was a human tornado of bluster and beats, a fan of Jay...

ambivalent about Kanye in the same way he was about any of his upstart admirers: half liking him, half...

Kanye took a verse for himself and gave the chorus to his discovery, the singer John Legend. The shoot was the biggest investment ever in the group by Capitol Records and Wendy Goldstein.