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

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For the rap nerds and Dillaphiles, Charnas takes readers inside a plethora of the producer’s most crucial collaborations. Dilla’s embryonic lair in the Yancey family’s basement in Conant Gardens. Primordial Slum Village studio sessions at RJ Rice’s in Detroit. Inter-band fistfights recording The Pharcyde’s “Runnin’” on Delicious Vinyl. Production squad The Ummah’s inception, explosion, and dissolution, and how it affected Dilla’s relationship with Q-Tip moving forward. What that meant, as James understood it, was that Q-Tip was essentially offering to be his manager. Total tangent which may actually end this review, which has sort of spiraled: I think Charnas does an incredible job at leaving the facts stand as they are themselves in this biography. There is a thrumming undercurrent of admiration, which weakens it slightly, but overall, the tilt is bounded to his musical talent, and other facts are presented with no moral tilt. Strip club habits, tendencies to prayer, infidelity, temper, brotherly love, misogynism; all are presented in an even light for the reader to make of as they wish. We come away recognizing that Dilla was one of the greatest electronic music producers of all time, but was also just, on all levels, just a guy. Super cool. There are two reasons why my fellow academics should be engaging closely with J Dilla’s music. The first is just cultural literacy; Dilla was influential and is more widely imitated with every passing year. The second is maybe more important: there are not widely used analytical tools for studying this music, and there is a whole world of microrhythm and groove out there that the music academy has been neglecting. Right now, “music theory” classes are mostly harmony and voice-leading classes, and that harmony is too often limited to the historical practices of the Western European aristocracy. But rhythm is at least as important as harmony, and in some musics, significantly more so. There is a persistent belief that rhythm is “less intellectual” or “more instinctive” than harmony and therefore less worthy of serious study. That is pure atavistic racist nonsense, but it also means that it’s hard to do better, because we don’t have the vocabulary or the methods to study rhythm in the depth that it deserves. If we can figure out how to talk about Dilla time, then that will open up a lot of other kinds of time as well. 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

An ambitious, dynamic biography of J Dilla, who may be the most influential hip-hop artist known by the least number of people. . . A wide-ranging biography that fully captures the subject’s ingenuity, originality, and musical genius.” This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius.” —QUESTLOVEThe first chapters of the book oscillate between biographic and musicological chapters. In the beginning, Charnas jumps us straight into a chance sonic encounter between Dilla and Questlove in North Carolina circa 1994. The short vignette revealed that Questlove felt the drum production was “wrong” on the Dilla-produced Pharcyde cut “Bullshit.” Like many other musicians and music listeners, Questlove would come to learn that one’s perception of wrong is informed by personal experience, space/place, and one’s own foundational understanding of music. Moreover, Dilla’s rhythmic choices were far from being haphazardly thrown together. Both are guiding principles throughout Dilla Time. And, both facts from Charnas lead readers to Dilla’s musical and physical birthplace: Detroit.

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. The greatest hip-hop producer of all time is getting the love and care his legacy deserves. Dilla Time is a master class’ – Dream Hampton You took what I did and added sheen to it,” he said. “People gotta hear your shit. We gotta figure something out. I gotta get you out here.”This intimate, honest profile is the definitive J Dilla tome, an illuminating, intoxicating, and sobering sojourn into a man’s life, legacy, artistic contributions and musical revolution by way of groundbreaking productions, prolific output, ever-loving communities, and the seemingly-infinite reverberations of his genius. I love J Dilla's music like I love the broken part of myself that strives to be better each day. At times, I felt this book holding the music in the reverence it has always needed, but in others, I think it detracted from its own messaging by focusing on things auxiliary to the man himself. Charnas was wise to not shy away from the shortcomings of Dilla and his circle, but some of the more incessantly targeted chapters, along with the overwrought exhibitions of Dilla's musical followers, pervert what makes him worth writing about in the first place: the music.

I recently finished reading Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time. It’s a good one! If you are interested in how hip-hop works, you should read it. The book’s major musicological insight is elegantly summed up by this image: Roberts, Randall (25 February 2022). "Studio fights, ghost stories and more revelations in bestselling new bio on producer J Dilla". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 5 March 2023.While you may use the same brain regions to hear all music, what I meant was that harmony lends itself to interpretation better. There is much more you can analyze with harmony. For example, the final chord of “Javert’s Suicide” from Les Miserables is D-Eb-Ab-C-D. Is it an Ab major triad with D in the bass? Is it a D half diminished seventh chord missing the third with an added ninth? Is it better analyzed as a tone cluster than as an actual chord with harmonic function? The previous chord is an A major triad, so it could easily be analyzed as an incomplete tritone substitution (Instead of A7-Ab, like a normal tritone substitution, the 7th is missing from the A chord and the bass still resolves to the expected D whereas the tritone substitute is played on top of that). This literary device functions as a stunning rollout, incorporating both anthropology and musicology, an engrossing display of scholarship that gets its hooks in you while setting the tone and trajectory of the stirring story to follow.

Reeves, Mosi (23 December 2022). "The Best Music Books of 2022". Rolling Stone . Retrieved 5 March 2023. At the 2023 PEN Awards, Dilla Time won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. [12] Film adaptation [ edit ]His foundational understandings of music were also a notable theme through these chapters. In addition, Charnas details a deep history on the incorporation of machines into music. From metronomic machines to synthesizers to beat machines, each evolution in machine was complimented by a new musical development: Techno in Detroit forming alongside House (Chicago) and Electro (NYC). The book’s heart is its rich, evocative musicological analysis, complete with rhythm diagrams, of Dilla’s beats. . . Charnas’s engrossing work is one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker.” There's this feeling you get when you read something by someone who really cares, like realllllllllly cares about what they're sharing.