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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Charnas
Read between
February 1 - February 9, 2022
“You think he’s better than me?” James asked. It was a question, but it was also a threat. James would not forget the moment.
James’s appearance on Slum’s album was momentary, as it was in the final cut of the “Selfish” video, just a nod to the camera as it dollied by. It was Kanye West now who radiated and absorbed the most energy.
“Wait a minute, man!” James said. James had sampled only a fraction of that Powell song for Slum’s “I Don’t Know.” He had slowed it down to unrecognizability. But somehow J-Rocc had found where it came from.
“How di … How did you … how does,” stuttered James, reduced to sentence fragments as J-Rocc skipped through his catalog and decoded it in real time. “That’s IMPOSSIBLE, man! What is … OH MY GOD!”
Making beats is always a conversation between producers, and between the present and the past.
James’s tracks in the 1990s were an answer to a question posed by Tribe, Pete Rock, and DJ Premier: Could a beat be beautiful and banging at the same time?
Now James found himself answering a new question, posed by Madlib and, in a different way, by Kanye West: What parts of a...
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Kanye West didn’t care about open spaces. He sampled anything—vocals, no vocals, it didn’t matter.
He took dusty old soul records, like Lenny Williams’s “Cause I Love You,” jacked up the speed, chopped the music and vocal alike, and made a new track for the Chicago rapper Twista,
Kanye was more deliberate and consistent in his use of vocal bits, creating an aesthetic that was part hip-hop, part the Chipmunks.
Madlib, too, was creative progeny to the RZA, but with an even more profound lean into error. As such, Madlib and J Dilla were producers of the same heart.
If it were now fair game in hip-hop to use any part of a record—if vocals could be masticated and then regurgitated into the very fabric of the song rather than avoided—then James had some of his own ideas about that concept’s potential for harmony, melody, rhythm, and meaning.
Back at the house, Maureen emptied the tobacco from the Blunts and rolled them back up again with marijuana, and Maurice rolled James to his table so he could make beats.
being bedridden for two months did convince him of two things: that he could use his tiny Macintosh laptop to make beats, and that he could and should use every piece of time he had to make them.
Created in a burst of energy after James’s discharge from Cedars-Sinai in early 2005, Donuts emerged as a complete thought.7
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.
Use take 1 for bars 1 through 4, use take 2 for bar 5, use take 3 for bars 6 and 7, but cut away halfway through 7 and go back to take 1.
It was the most eerie thing Cooley had ever seen in a recording studio. He’s Yoda, Cooley thought. Like the Star Wars character, James never tried things. He just did. Cooley never witnessed a single instance where James did anything that he didn’t keep.
as soon as Maurice set James onto the studio’s sofa—in front of his MPC or his Moog—Cooley was struck by the thing he always saw when James was working on music. He was smiling.
James felt well enough to spend a couple of days holed up in the home studio of Sa-Ra Creative Partners, reconnecting with Taz Arnold, and meeting a local bassist they worked with, Steven “Thundercat” Bruner.
There were a number of moments like this, James hanging on the precipice, then miraculously pulling back; in the hospital suddenly, and then, just as suddenly, out.
It was hard for Wolf to convince their distributor, Caroline/EMI, to even release the glorified beat CD; and when Stones Throw missed the production deadline for an October release, Caroline told them to push it into the first quarter of 2006.
Wolf decided to release Donuts on February 7. It would be a birthday present for Dilla.
If Maurice had learned anything in his year with James, it was this: some things could be fixed, some things couldn’t, and some things had never been broken in the first place.
Questlove continued: “I think you’re trying to send a message to someone. You’re just basically trying to nudge the current leader of soul sample chops, aren’t you?” It was a veiled reference to Kanye West.
“Fuck … fuck around with that first track, that’s the one,” James confirmed. “I want you to have that.”
Unbeknownst to them, James had been doing this for the past few months—giving little gifts to his friends.
John swore he heard his brother—in the same playful voice that James used long ago in the basement while John worked on his homemade book of basketball statistics and James made beats—calling out to him: JOHNNnnnnnnny …
Ahmir guarded his emotions; Common broke down, comforted by his girlfriend Taraji Henson. C-Minus stepped out for some air with J-Rocc, and found Pete Rock, standing alone, breaking his silence only to say: “The king is dead.”
Ahmir thought: This is his goodbye letter.
On the message boards of Okayplayer and the Stones Throw website, Jeff Jank read theories about hidden messages in the songs, the idea that the sequence itself, starting and ending with the same track, was a meditation on the cycle of life.
Art is a process, not a product. The full dimensions of a work, even your own, aren’t always apparent on the first viewing or listening. It takes other people’s reactions for you to see it fully.
Though it was not the first widely acclaimed conceptual instrumental hip-hop album, Donuts’ influence could be felt in Onra & Quetzal’s Tribute in 2006, would find a perch in the work of Stones Throw intern and producer Flying Lotus,
The irony of Donuts’ reception as a deliberate final statement from James Dewitt Yancey is how little time he put into it in the last year of his life when compared to his other project, The Shining.
February had become a time to remember James Dewitt Yancey, to dance to his music, and to reaffirm a fellowship that hip-hop lost in its climb to commercial success, a community for whom J Dilla had quickly become a patron saint.
After the funeral, many of James’s friends and family busied themselves so as not to grieve. Many didn’t realize what they were still carrying.
The conversation continued. Violinists and horn players, some in sneakers and baseball caps, bobbed their heads as Riggins and the bass player Steven “Thundercat” Bruner drove the rhythm.
Sometimes grief was indeed a mask for the greedy. But sometimes what looked like greed was just grief.
People outside the family saw his mother’s abundant care for her son; few had ever seen evidence of James’s care for his daughters.
Some of them claimed to know J Dilla’s personal will; few had ever seen his legal will. And none of them had to look Ja’Mya and Ty-Monae in the eyes.
The body could not be divorced from the mind, Iyer argued, and thus rhythm could only truly be understood as a function and byproduct of human physical movement.
The artists and producers who created the music they examined—D’Angelo, Common and Karriem Riggins, the Roots, even Rodney Jerkins—all had one common influence. But that influencer was mentioned only in passing, in a quote from Questlove, the name “Jay Dee” confined to a footnote in Danielsen’s essay.
Jafa likens the effect of J Dilla’s time-feel to that of the woozy irregularity of silent film and attributes Dilla’s abilities to a sensitive nervous system that registered micro-differences in rhythms as distinct events where others might just hear noise:
D’Angelo learned from Dilla that he did not have all the time in the world, but what time D did have belonged to him, and he alone had the right to measure it.
One person in the wings, however, began to panic. Her name was Naomi “Nai Palm” Saalfield, the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for a four-piece band, Hiatus Kaiyote.
By the time he developed a true desire for changes in scenery, he was dying. But even before his death, J Dilla’s rhythmic feel began to circumnavigate the globe.
As a jazz student in the early 2000s, Robert Glasper’s trip to the Conant Gardens basement altered his musical trajectory.
“The jazz police,” Robert Glasper called them. They were everywhere, standing upon the genre’s ramparts, guarding against invasion from outside and revolution from within.
Much of the sweetness in J Dilla’s work, the love movement, came from his obsession with common tone, a harmonic metaphor for constancy amid change, the act of love in musical form.
The artists who worked the most comfortably with Dilla weren’t intimidated by the empty spaces and the disconnections, nor the feeling of uneasiness, that the ground could shift beneath their feet at any moment.
