When one considers how Detroit has contributed to the development of popular music, there are generally three obvious starting points. The first, and most familiar, is Motown, born from the production line of car manufacturing and engineering. The last is techno, a mechanised music that feels like an automated response to the post industrial troubles the city endured. The one in the middle is the birth of American punk, almost akin to what Birmingham and the West Midlands experienced with the birth of heavy metal, Black Sabbath forged from the furnaces of the steel industry (and coming out swinging too).
Dilla Time is a book by Dan Charnas, an American writer who has written previously about hip hop. Charnas’s book posits that a fourth musical revolution emanated from the wastelands of late 20th century Michigan. The disrupter was a young man who, dismayed at a future on the Boeing production line, took a look at where his life was heading and wedded himself to a different type of machinery. That he was dead by 2006 at the young age of 32 adds another layer to the story, with a subsequent tortuous response to his chaotic back catalogue and legacy. This stems from his dedication to his art and the trappings of success, to the detriment and neglect of his financial affairs.
James Dewitt Yancey was born to a family where music was central to their homelife, with talent shows and new records a constant influence. Eventually landing on the name J Dilla, he quickly established a reputation via his unique use of nascent drum machines to create lopsided but addictive beats. This is the central thread to Charnas placement of Dilla in the canon of popular music. The rhythmic approach to music derived from European classical music relied on either 4 to the floor or waltz time with three beats to the bar. Dilla used the technology to shift the beats around, sometimes by milliseconds but generating a musical rhythm that was subtly different.
Detroit at the time was a hip hop backwater, neither East Coast nor West Coast. Dilla’s beat tapes fell into the hands of the outsiders, the Native Tongues movement inhabited by the likes of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and the Roots. Ironically, one theme that the book comes back to is Questlove, the Roots’ drummer, and his constant desire to support his friend whilst trying to replicate these rhythms as a human musician.
This little video displays perfectly the pain that Questlove must have gone through. The rhythmic approach reminds me of Thelonious Monk, who is referenced a few times in the book. The loping beat of In Walked Bud or Epistrophy doesn’t seem a million miles away from Dilla, when you listen closely.
I’ve really enjoyed Dilla Time. It is a book that deals with Dilla’s brief life with openness and sensitivity. His illness, Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), caused his hands to bloat and blister and affected the ability of his blood to clot. He swathed his fingers in bandages and soldiered on, hitting the pads even when he was at his most sick in Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. One recurring theme in the book is the author trying to get the reader to create his own version of Dilla Time by tapping their feet and clapping in line with the altered beats. This was real patting your head and rubbing your tummy territory, and needless to say, I was hopeless at it.
What I hadn’t appreciated was Dilla’s input into so much of the era’s music that I still love and listen to. He was central to the production and writing of some of my most prized albums by Common (One Day It’ll All Make Sense), Erykah Badu (Mama’s Gun) and D’Angelo (Voodoo). His own music is close to my heart, having bought his posthumous Donuts album a few years ago. They’re all underpinned by his unique rhythmic sensibility.
Given the licensing issues that plague his legacy, Youtube is possibly the best hunting ground for much of his material. This is one of my favourite videos that I’ve come across. Miguel Attwood-Ferguson is an acclaimed jazz musician and arranger. He decided to orchestrate Dilla’s music and created the Suite for Ma Dukes. Ma Dukes is the affectionate nickname that Maureen Yancey. Dilla’s mother carries. She’s been central to the keeping the flame of his music alive, and also to the debris created by his posthumous affairs and arguments with his estate.
The suite was performed by a 60 piece orchestra, dressed in white, at the Luckman Fine Arts Centre at California State in Los Angeles in February 2009. There was an empty seat with a cello, Dilla’s childhood instrument. The initial part of the performance was beatless and the hip hop fans in the audience were growing restless – this isn’t what they were expecting or wanting to hear. During the intermission, he saw a few of the audience making their way out of the audience. “Stay”, he remonstrated with them. “There will be drums.”
As the second half progressed, more soul and hip hop musicians joined the orchestra – Thundercat, Bilal, Dwele. Eventually, Talib Kweli and De La Soul’s Posdnous arrived to perform the latter band’s Stakes Is High which Dilla produced. The place erupted. “Love! Vibration!” echoed across the auditorium, with an emotional Ma Dukes arriving on stage at the end to acknowledge the crowd.
Would Dilla have followed such a trailblazing trajectory if he’d lived? It is difficult to say, beyond the obvious reasons concerning anyone’s legacy. The key issue that casts initial doubt is that technology was evolving at such a speed that machine learning and programming, access to personal computer software such as GarageBand or ProLogic was rendering his music more easy to replicate. Dilla was adaptive though and who’s to say that he wouldn’t have worked his way through things.
If you look at the cover image for this post, you’ll see an Akai MPC3000. They’re going for over £3000, even though they’ve probably been somewhat usurped by software that gets bundled for free when you buy your new laptop. The fact it is valued is predominantly down to what the young man from Detroit did in twenty years ago.
You can still hear his influence across the music that now tops the streaming services. Those repetitive beat driven records that most people north of forty don’t listen to. Just because it is ubiquitous and just because many of us are too old to appreciate it doesn’t render it worthless. In fact Dilla’s own legacy was as a rhythmic disrupter. His skills have been recognised academically now with Berkeley College of Music offering a Dilla Ensemble workshop module. The challenge was to encourage classically trained musicians to adopt deliberate and repetitive imprecision. It often led to the drums following the piano or guitar as the primary rhythmic instrument, something closer to a jazz approach than other 20th century music forms.
All those songs that don’t sound like they’ve come within a million miles of a real life drummer? I reckon he would have hated them. As the t-shirt went:
J Dilla Changed My Life
Where to start with J Dilla
There’s a few good starting points for his solo material. Welcome to Detroit released on London’s Barely Breaking Even Records is good introduction as it includes both his vocal tracks as well as his beats. There’s an instrumental version available too if you prefer things a little stripped back.
Donuts is much more stripped back, released after he died with musical sketches to the fore.
And here’s a few playlists which will help explain things a little more. The first is a little short and sweet, picking up themes from his solo albums.
The next one picks up his production work. It covers work by those artist that I’ve mentioned in the blog post plus many more – his own hip hop band (Slum Village), the Pharcyde, Busta Rhymes etc
This is the playlist that is cross referenced to the book if you want to go very very deep.
And finally, if you do end up reading the book, this is a fantastic resource for exploring further:
BlackCountryRock 