But there’s still a lot of music to sort through: the early work with the Pharcyde and A Tribe Called Quest, a genre-shifting album with Slum Village, remixes for pop stars and electronic music producers, beat tapes that exist today only in YouTube and Zippyshare links. Charnas’s book is the latest-and likely best-work in that regard. Dilla’s death in February 2006 of complications from lupus and a rare blood disease known as thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura kicked off hip-hop’s attempts to grapple with his legacy, which has only grown in stature over the past 16 years.
Diving deep into his history-let alone ranking it-likely wouldn’t have sufficed for him.īut the past is all we’re left with. But for Dilla, the past was just a means to imagine the future. On the surface, it seems paradoxical: An artist whose sound was built upon pieces of the past had little time for looking backward. And when his sound became one of the dominant strains of hip-hop and R&B, he quickly reinvented himself, finding ways to stay a step ahead of his contemporaries.
In Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, Dan Charnas’s excellent new book on the producer and rapper born James Dewitt Yancey, collaborators repeatedly tell stories about how quickly Dilla worked, crafting masterpieces in minutes before moving on to the next beat. It’s worth stating up top that J Dilla himself would’ve likely had little use for this exercise.
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