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. 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is a profound portrait of a confounding pioneer, a thorough education, rumination, and stimulation, a game-changing historical document and love letter to a lost prophet. Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer who Reinvented Rhythm. By Dan Charnas. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2022. By the way, here’s another great Herbie sample flip by Dilla, and a more subtle usage of Herbie’s vocoded singing.) 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.”

Dilla Time's cover artwork was designed by Rodrigo Corral. The New York Times listed it as one of the best book covers of 2022, calling it "an image that signals the zones of [J Dilla's] many talents while nodding to the relationship between that talent and work ethic (and beats)," also noting the exclusion of Charnas' name from the cover. [8] Reception [ edit ] Reggae’s chief eyewitness, dropping testimony on reggae’s chief prophet with truth, blood, and fire.”—Marlon James, Man Booker Prize–winning author 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. I also strongly suspect I am the only person to ever work Dilla into a major work of published fantasy—perhaps a dubious tribute, perhaps, but that's neither here nor there.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.

Charnas begins examining Glasper and Lamar and (sort of an odd choice) Hiatus Kaiyote but stops before he really gets going. One can't blame him -- this is hardly the real subject of the book -- but it makes the whole last section feel lopsided and unfitting as a coda. And then, thirteen seconds in, the much louder Manzel beat enters, and that doesn’t line up with the drum machine beat. It is closer to being on the grid, but it isn’t in straight time either: you can see how the little markers are mostly late. Our full range of studio equipment from all the leading equipment and software brands. Guaranteed fast delivery and low prices.

Dilla Time

Reeves, Mosi (23 December 2022). "The Best Music Books of 2022". Rolling Stone . Retrieved 5 March 2023. I love that Dan Charnas didn't shy away from the realities of J Dilla's life and personality, which could sometimes be so incredibly volatile that I'm surprised he had as many connections as he did! Charnas didn't shy away from the shambles Dilla left all his communities in with his disorganization and untimely passing. His music was incredible, and he'll forever be unforgettable for what he did with sound and how he changed various genres for the better.