After the Roots’ performance, Questlove settled into a car, en route to an interview at a nearby college radio station, while the headliners, the Pharcyde, took the stage for their set. As the beats from the club drifted out into the parking lot, Questlove asked the driver to wait. He rolled down the window to listen. Something in the drums sounded … wrong. Decider's Scary Movie Challenge For Scaredy-Cats: 7 Horror Films Ranked From Goofy Ghosts To Full-On Gore Fest Country Singer Jason Aldean Continues Defending His Controversial Music Video For "Try That In A Small Town," Claims It "Did Not Shine Light On One Specific Group"

For years, while hearing “Fall in Love” through speakers and headphones of every kind, I’ve imagined the drums as being played inside a giant cave, each snare hit reverberating in every direction, while the song’s other elements take place on some lower, nearly subconscious plane. It’s a lullaby, so much so that it invites the listener to turn a skeptical ear to Dilla’s earnest, tender hook. —Thompson 9. “Lightworks,” J Dilla/MF Doom On the other side, surprisingly, was his mother Maureen, who shared so much. I think there was a relief that someone was finally telling the whole story. She was eager to dispel a lot of the clichés and false rumours that had grown up around him since he passed away.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Legacy of J Dilla provides personal perspectives and technical insights into the singular sound for which the late hip-hop producer will always be remembered. But it also explores how an artist’s untimely death can complicate everything that’s left behind. Pierre, Alphonse (16 December 2022). "A Chaotic List of the Best Rap Stars, Scenes, Trends, Freestyles, and Mixtapes of 2022". Pitchfork . Retrieved 5 March 2023. Stunning portrait of the short life and fast times of James Dewitt Yancey. . . sad, funny and unfailingly humane, it’s not only one of the best books this writer has ever read about hip-hop but also sets a new gold standard for writing about music full stop."— Ben Johnson, Mojo Magazine Chris Evans’ Cringey ‘Pain Hustlers’ Rap Is Inspired By a Real Rap Video Made By Ex-Pharma Executives We get to be a fly on the wall for the Soulquarians era at Electric Lady Studios in New York City for the making of D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Common’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Badu’s Mama’s Gun. The day-to-day details of Dilla’s time living with Common in Los Angeles, working with Madlib and the cats at Stones Throw, the making of his swan song album, Donuts, and just about everything and everybody in between. Readers tag along on legendary Dilla pilgrimages to New York City in the early days, Philly bro-dates and record store missions with DJ Jazzy Jeff, then later Europe and Brazil with the homies.

All in all, this book was an education on the evolution of Hip-Hop after J Dilla got his hands on it. It was a walk through Detroit and other spaces and places. It was an exploration of the international landscapes that he touched from the UK & Australia to Hip-Hop loving markets in Japan, etc. I loved Chapter 15: Descendants and Disciples, my fave chapter - it was sooo good! There were layers and layers of information about adjacent artists and musicians and Dilla's influence on their style and what-begat-what-begat-what... each layer was delicious, so interesting, mindbending, fun, and unique. I gotta go look for the playlist someone's made on this book on Spotify, it's bound to be dope. How our rhythmic expectations came to be is as much a tale of geography as it is musicology. Our musical expectations are governed by our location: where we’re from, and where we’ve been. So, before we meet James, we need to first take an important journey—from Europe to Africa to America—and on that trip we are going to need maps. In positioning J Dilla, a map of one place in particular tells us much of what we need to know. 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.

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm is a 2022 biography of hip hop producer J Dilla written by Dan Charnas. [1] It chronicles the life of J Dilla until his death in 2006, as well as his posthumous influence on the music industry. Described as "equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history," the book emphasizes J Dilla's signature rhythmic time-feel, which Charnas termed "Dilla time," and its wide-reaching impact on modern music. [2] [3] In the book, you make a strong case for what you call “Dilla time”, as a new way of hearing the world. It’s the iconic “limp” that he created by combining straight time and swing time, in a way that his unique virtuosity with the MPC allowed. Was there a musical moment for you when you realised the conception of Dilla time? But even when trying and failing to cast aside my nostalgic biases, this is a pretty dope book. What Dan Charnas has penned here is at once a beautiful celebration of the music of J Dilla, approaching it with the scholarly vigor, technical analysis, and musical history it so sorely deserves. The book consistently stunned me with the extent of theory and musicology it delved into, thoroughly describing the methodology behind a traditionally crafted pop song compared against J Dilla's offkilter productions. There are charts inviting readers to beat their knees in time, and then again in 'Dilla time', making for a uniquely engaging reading experience. I found the alternating spotlight on traditional craft versus J Dilla's rule-breaking ways incredibly compelling, and I don't think it's any exaggeration to posit that J Dilla himself would have loved seeing his art presented in this way. Jeff Peretz's contributions deserve a great deal of recognition for imbuing the work with a structure worthy of Dilla's genius, especially because things get noticeably sloppy once that structure falls away. Even in death, his own legacy, estate, and posthumous releases have been shrouded in conflict between collaborators, heirs, and lawyers, in addition to elitist attitudes, relationship disintegration, and a proliferation of misinformation. It seems it was high time and long overdue for somebody to step up and finally set the J Dilla record straight, for both the heads and the annals of history. But who would dare accept such a bold mission? Schwartz, Daniel (24 August 2017). "A Professor's Journey to Discover the Greatness of J Dilla With His Students". Complex . Retrieved 9 March 2023.

Most assuredly," he laughs. "Jimi Hendrix. Stevie Wonder. John Coltrane. The Beatles. James Brown. This is just the tip of the iceberg."

There's this feeling you get when you read something by someone who really cares, like realllllllllly cares about what they're sharing. The persistent negativity and conflict in the wake of his death are almost a bit too much to bear, but now fans—and even his friends—are able to better grasp the fissures and disconnects that have occasionally drowned out the air-horns and accolades that deserve to rain down on Dilla unabated. There is a depth and honesty in his music, in the way his beats meld together," Atwood-Ferguson says. "His music is full of subtle things that most people aren't aware of – and they shouldn't have to be. People should just enjoy it."

Let’s Ride” is a joy of a single because of how breezily low stakes it is—and how, especially at the song’s beginning, it sounds like Q-Tip is actually freestyling (see the way, in the video, he delivers the line “Four-point-something with a low ridin’ something,” his head giving a snap of satisfaction as he finishes the half-finished thought). And while some of the song’s source material offers a grim cautionary tale—a tiny piece of ESG’s “UFO” breakbeat triggered an expensive lawsuit—its airy use of a Coltrane cover is inspired, easy listening if that were not a pejorative. —Thompson 10. “Fall in Love,” Slum Village In 1999, writer Dan Charnas met J Dilla and Common while the two musicians were working on Common's album Like Water for Chocolate at J Dilla's home studio in Conant Gardens, Detroit. [4] [5] Charnas cites this meeting as "the real origin of the book." [5] By no means is Dilla Time an easy read. There are nightmarish tales of his rugged bout with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura and lupus, detailing excruciating hospital experiences, a possible misdiagnosis, and Dilla’s own fears foreshadowing his eventual demise. After his death, the author confronts some painful realities with regard to the estate, leftover tax debt, and in-fighting between the heirs, some folks talking out of turn, plus lawyers, lengthy lawsuits, lost albums, and all the bullsh*t that has dogged Dilla’s legacy since he passed away in February 2006.

Paul Hollywood Physically Glitched After Eating a Sour Showstopper on 'The Great British Baking Show' "Pastry Week" But there were other ways to conceive of music. The Greeks, much earlier, had devised a ten-tone triangular system of harmony called the tetraktys. Asian cultures divided the distance of an octave into scales with five, seven, twelve, twenty-two, and fifty-five steps. But almost every other European “rule” about music was really a choice. The reason that the above phenomenon is known as the “octave” is that Europeans decided to devise a system making that higher tone the eighth step on a scale of seven degrees or notes. Europeans created a second tonal system, dividing this same distance into twelve smaller, equidistant steps. Again, a choice. Those choices—the seven- or twelve-note scale over even rhythms counted in multiples of either two or three—evolved over hundreds of years into a common practice that determined what Europeans would hear as musical and what they wouldn’t. Dilla was, perhaps, the only hip-hop producer to have studied the cello ("Not the instrument of choice in the ghetto," as his mother puts it in the sleevenotes) as a child, and his work is full of the sort of subtle but powerful differences that a composition-based education might provide, as Atwood-Ferguson noticed when he broke down the pieces ahead of arranging them for the orchestra. Performance Worth Watching: “My purpose is make sure that James’s life, his life’s work, is not in vain,” Maureen Yancey says of her fight to protect her son’s achievements. “I’m a Detroiter. A proud Detroiter. So yes, I will stand and I will fight, and I won’t let anybody put my son down, what I do for him down, or anything else, because I’m here to lift up his music, and his legacy.”