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

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This engineering/technological minutia is delivered in layman’s terms. Dan drops the science like it’s scalding, and does so in a language that just about anybody can easily understand. I listened to the audio book, narrated by author Dan Chanas in a way that flowed well with the book's content. When I learned that the written book includes diagrams I got a copy of that also, but I found that Chanas has done such a good job talking about "time" in music that the diagrams were unnecessary for my understanding! This is one of the book's biggest strengths - explaining in a clear and persuasive way what was unique about J Dilla's beat - and how it relates to musical styles that came before, how it influenced hip hop and a lot of popular music, how Dilla created it, how it evolved, etc. Musical TIME is a main character of this book just as much as Dilla is (as the title, Dilla Time, suggests). This is a huge strength of the book, and it's why it works as a fairly long biography of someone with a short life. I basically devoured this book and thoroughly enjoyed the stories about Dilla’s work with Common, Slum Village and others. It was fascinating to learn about some of the deeper meaning around the sample choices on Donuts and I came away with greater context around why and how Dilla made the beats that he made. In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. He follows the people who kept Dilla and his ideas alive. And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco. Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new.

It is not true that harmony lends itself to interpretation better. You may not have the vocabulary for interpreting it, but that does not mean that the vocabulary doesn’t exist. When you say that rhythm is “more bodily and less intellectual”, you are repeating a white supremacist axiom that has no basis in reality. If it’s the same brain structures processing the different dimensions of music, then how is one dimension more or less “bodily”? This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius.” (QUESTLOVE)With the subtitle The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, the book makes a bold claim, and the stakes are indeed high. The basic premise is partly an artist biography in the traditional sense, a comprehensive dive into J Dilla from family, friends, collaborators, imitators, and champions of his genius, not to mention the raw details regarding the debilitating illness that slowly, savagely took his life. An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's universally acclaimed history of jazz, with a wealth of new insight on this music's past, present, and future. After they left Q-Tip’s crib with the beat tape in hand, Tre got suspicious. Q-Tip is pushing us onto some mysterious, new producer that nobody’s ever heard of, from a city that hardly any hip-hop has come out of, but the beats are banging and sound just like Q-Tip’s stuff? In that regard, I found Dilla Time to be nothing short of a holy scroll, a bold, brilliant testimony, a clinic in dot-connecting, musical-mapping, and hip-hop nerd sh*t. The story woven within is a profound portrait of a confounding pioneer, a thorough education, rumination, and stimulation, a game-changing historical document and love letter to a lost prophet.

In the book, Charnas aims to dispel several myths about J Dilla. For one, according to Charnas, many musicians reduce J Dilla's time-feel as simply "loose" and "not quantizing," but the book describes this as an oversimplification, detailing the nuances that defined J Dilla's technique. [7] The book also debunks the misconception that J Dilla produced his 2006 album Donuts in the hospital, instead explaining that the album was born from an earlier beat tape and edited by Jeff Jank of Stones Throw Records while J Dilla was in the hospital. [4] Cover artwork [ edit ] J Dilla turned what one generation deemed musical error into what the next knew to be musical innovation. In this splendid book, Dan Charnas offers an uncanny mix of research and vision, documentation and interpretation, plenitude and momentum. Dilla Time is definitive. And exhilarating.”— MARGO JEFFERSON, author of NegrolandThis program contains examples of J Dilla's music performed in the story by drummer Nate Smith and is accompanied by a bonus PDF of maps, photos, guides, and more. An ambitious, dynamic biography of J Dilla, who may be the most influential hip-hop artist known by the least number of people.