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.

TRY IT YOURSELF: SHIFTING TO FUNK

Detroit had a Black-owned TV station, WGPR, and on it, a uniquely Detroit music and dance show: The Scene, hosted by Nat Morris, featuring futuristic music and otherworldly dance moves that made Soul Train look tepid by comparison.

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.

What Russell was saying is that great grooves come from drummers playing somewhere between perfectly straight and perfectly swung.

Not straight, not swung, but somewhere in between.

Machine sounds and rhythms were so prevalent in the 1980s that emulating them became a fashion for traditional drummers. When Michael Jackson wasn’t using drum machines for his 1982 album, Thriller, his studio drummers imitated the machine’s unerring timing, as Ndugu Chancler did in the song “Billie Jean.”

Throughout their first three albums, A Tribe Called Quest mined jazz and seventies soul for its harmonic and melodic complexity and refined an ever-more-high-fidelity approach they branded as “precise, bass heavy, and just right.”

Brown Sugar felt thin compared to, say, Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind. New

Common and Derek settled in an apartment in the

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.

In his speech, Jafa professed his curiosity about why people of African descent found particular pleasure in what he called “polyventiality,” the impulse to deal with multiplicities: multiple rhythms, multiple tones, multiple perspectives