j dilla
Today in Hip-Hop History: J Dilla Dropped His ‘Welcome 2 Detroit’ Album 21 Years Ago
On this date in 2001, Slum Village producer Jay Dee changed his name to J Dilla and released his debut solo album entitled Welcome 2 Detroit. The 16 track BBE distributed LP featured otherwise unknown artists from Dilla’s hometown such as Elzhi and Phat Kat among others.
Although it is a solo album, on several cuts, such as the first single “Pause”, Dilla takes a backseat and lets others command the mic. Dilla also sings the lead vocals on his cover of Donald Byrd’s “Think Twice”, which also has Motown crooner Dwele playing the keyboard and singing background vocals.
Salute to the late beat making icon J Dilla and the rest of his BBE family for bringing Hip Hop such an unforgettable classic!
The post Today in Hip-Hop History: J Dilla Dropped His ‘Welcome 2 Detroit’ Album 21 Years Ago appeared first on The Source.
With ‘Dilla Time,’ Author Dan Charnas Aims To Give The Pioneering Producer His Due
Black Thought once called J Dilla the greatest hip-hop producer of all time but if you asked the average hip-hop fan, they might not be able to name one song the Detroit beatmaker produced. That’s something that’s hard to countenance, let alone, contemplate as a longtime fan of not only hip-hop but of the unique, groundbreaking style that Dilla pioneered.
Enter Dan Charnas. A hip-hop everyman who’s worked in radio and as a label executive (he even produced my beloved Golden Age musical drama, The Breaks, which was gone too soon), Charnas is a veteran of both the culture and the industry of hip-hop whose 2010 book The Big Payback is a vital read for any adherent of either the culture or the industry. In fact, I consider it required reading for any hip-hop journalist and side-eye anyone who tries to write about the business behind the music without reading it.
Charnas’ new book, Dilla Time, seeks to correct the egregious oversight mentioned above regarding the trailblazing producer by not only biographing Dilla’s life and career but also by breaking down the musical science behind his greatest innovation – what Charnas calls “Dilla time.” This is the distinctive time signature of Dilla’s drum programming which backed rap styles like The Pharcyde’s “Runnin’,” A Tribe Called Quest’s “Word Play,” Q-Tip’s solo album Amplified, Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, Slum Village’s Fantastic, Vol. 2, and many, many more pivotal projects from across the hip-hop and neo-soul landscape, as well as inspiring everyone from Pharrell Williams to Kanye West to Drake.
And if that greatly abridged list still doesn’t impress you with the impact that Dilla had on music, consider that you’ve likely heard his innovations without ever knowing it. Anyone who tunes into the Lofi Girl YouTube radio station to bob their head along to “Beats To Study To” is hearing J Dilla. His sound is ubiquitous but has been divorced from his legacy. Dilla Time aims to fix that. During a Zoom call with Charnas, we discussed that titanic but overlooked legacy, the importance of pairing art with science, and why this kind of storytelling is so critical to ensuring the accuracy of hip-hop’s historical record.
Just from jump, that first chapter is enough to tell me that this book is a banger and a half. First of all, any story involving Questlove is going to be good, right? Quest stories are great. The way you preface the story of Dilla Detroit Hip-Hop with this idea of something being wrong is fascinating to me. Why was that where you wanted to start with the story of J Dilla?
Well, that’s where I started, right? The book started that way because in many ways that was my starting point. I went in the summer of 1999 to Detroit for the very first time to work with him. Me and Chino XL flew out. We drove out to Conant Gardens down to The Basement. Dilla is there. You know, Chino puts his arm around me like, “Yo, you don’t understand. This kid. He’s been harassing me to come work with you.” Chino is kind of standing with J by the NPC behind the bar, and I get the nerve to ask “So how do you get your bass tones?”, and Chino is right next to him. Chino says, “Don’t tell him.”
Six months later, I’m back in LA. And of course, we’re mixing the album and my listening environment is my car. So I’m taking the discs or the cassettes out to my car to listen to them just so I can hear how they sound. So Chino had done this song with James called “Don’t Say A Word” and it’s on the album. You can hear it. I’m listening to the track and I’m like, “What’s going on with those drums?” Like, “Are those high hats swung? Something’s wrong here. What’s going on?” So it was that moment I literally took it into my studio and put it up on the digital audio workstation, lined the waveforms up with the grid, and realized the high hats were not swung. They were right on time but they sound swung because he’s shifting the snare earlier. Why is he doing that? How’s he doing that? And so my initial reaction mirrors the reactions of a lot of different folks, and some people say, “It’s wrong but I like it.”
Something that the book does that I think is absolutely spectacular is the diagram representing regular time, swing time, and Dilla time, comparing it to a map of Detroit. Honestly, Dan, that’s Dilla-level thinking.
You needed to see it, right? It’s difficult to write about music well, but I can show you. That is one of the things where it’s like, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” When I first started teaching a little segment on Dilla to my pop music history course, when I first started teaching in 2013, 2014… I teach like a hundred really important key figures in the last a hundred years of pop music. Innovators, influencers… so Dilla was one of them. Mostly because I knew that these kids actually liked this kind of stuff. And I had been sort of secretly pissed for years listening to people described Dilla’s genius as only “he turned off the quantized function.”
So you know, a lot of projects just start with, “Yo, gotta do something about this sh*t.” So that was the beginning of the J Dilla lecture, and then the J Dilla course in 2017. And then after that, I was like, “Alright, I guess I’m going to do this sh*t.” And it really started as a tiny book about musical science. And a colleague of mine had this incredible visual system for representing rhythm that required no musical notation. I want anybody to be able [to grasp the concept].. I mean, that’s what I was trying to do with The Big Payback. I don’t care if it’s hip-hop. It’s a great story, well told. That’s what I’m trying to do. I just want everybody to be able to understand the genius. Even if you don’t know what a breakbeat is. I’m going to tell you what a breakbeat is.
Some of you have seen this symbol on my Twitter page, and on the Dilla Time website. ⁰⁰On the penultimate eve of the release of Dilla Time, it’s time to talk about The Triptych, and what it means… ⁰
THREAD>>> pic.twitter.com/MkNqqn2Qg2
— Dan Charnas (@dancharnas) January 30, 2022
I always ask this because I know that everybody gets bored answering the same questions over and over again, bringing up the same stories over and over again. Is there anything that you’ve ever wanted to talk about in an interview that no one’s ever asked?
I guess the other is that you have to understand that what JD did, his genius was completely unprotected by law. He was a master at sampling. And yet, the legality of master use is such that he could create this amazing piece of art. And if the owners of the master and the owners of the song that was sampled, don’t want to license what he did, he couldn’t put it out.
And it is high time that we develop a compulsory licensing for master use. We have a compulsory license for publishing. In other words, if I write the song and I put it out, “Rocket Man” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. If Aaron, you want to do your cover version of that — I’m not sure I would buy that cover version — but let’s say you want to put it out, they couldn’t stop you. Nobody could stop you from f*cking up that song because there is something called a compulsory mechanical license that says, “As long as you pay Elton John and Bernie Taupin the statutory rate, Aaron gets to remake ‘Rocket Man.’ And I’m going to expect you to do that version, post it on the internet. But again, what I’m saying is we don’t have a process like that for master use. But we have Shazam.
If nobody takes away anything else, what is the one thing you want people to take away from this book about J Dilla, about music, about hip-hop, about just America?
I don’t know if I can boil it down to one thing, but I will say that the prime directive of this book was to actually explain how this beat maker created a new time feel that didn’t really exist before him. And to say it definitively and to put his name on it, because I saw him becoming a footnote in his accomplishments.
“Lo-fi beats to study to,” and Lord knows they’re everywhere. I was in the office getting my booster shot, in the office, put on the TV, the lo-fi beats and the little girl, bobbing her head. And I was just like, “This is crazy.”
And I don’t even know what that means, because Jay Dee’s stuff…
It wasn’t lo-fi at all.
Donuts, my God, that is incredible sound.
Dilla Time is out now via Macmillan Publishers. You can get it here.
Biggie Wanted Nas And Busta Rhymes To Join Him On A Tupac Diss Track Produced By J Dilla
Of all the many rap beefs in the history of hip-hop, none has been as brutally dissected — and deadly — as Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac’s East Coast/West Coast spat. Things reached a head when Tupac dropped the supremely insulting “Hit ‘Em Up” in June of 1996, which besides being lyrically pointed at Big, Puff and Mobb Deep, rode samples of two Junior Mafia tracks in “Get Money” and “Player’s Anthem.”
While Biggie got his shots own shots in over the years (“Who Shot Ya?” came out months after Tupac was shot at Quad Studios in November of 1994, although Biggie never admitted it being pointed at Tupac), there was more in store from Biggie that never fully materialized the way he ended it to. In an interview with The Art Of Dialogue, Junior Mafia member and Biggie’s cousin, Lil Cease, shed more light on the epic beef and what might have happened if things went as planned:
“Big wasn’t gonna put forth a full effort into a whole full song dissing Tupac… Big was kinda more like just sprinkling on it,” Cease said of “The Ugliest,” a J-Dilla produced track that featured Busta Rhymes. Biggie delivered the verse, “And the winner is, not that thinner kid / Bandanas, tattoos, my fist never bruise / Land still cruise, Frank White paid his dues.” While Tupac wasn’t name-checked, it was clear who the lyrics was pointed at, and the diss was strong enough for Busta to not put the song on the album it was earmarked for, The Coming, but this was hardly the epic shot that Biggie thought he could take with a little help.
Cease says the original plan was for Nas and Busta to do the heavy lifting on the diss which could have really lit a fire under the beef. But that’s not how it went down.
“It’s not a diss if you don’t say their name. Ya gotta say somebody’s name if you wanna call it a ‘diss record’” Cease says. “If you’re just throwing subliminals, that’s only for that man to hear and figure out ’cause you’re gonna say something that only he would understand like, ‘Alright, he’s talking about me.’ Big didn’t say his name… It was for Busta Rhymes’ song at that. The song never came out — supposed to been Busta Rhymes, Nas and Big. It was produced by Q-Tip. But everybody never did their verse after Big did his. Nobody laid the verse on it, so the song kinda just pushed away. ”
Nevermind that Cease confuses Dilla with Q-Tip as the song’s producer (Tip was famously J Dilla’s manager), but had Nas and Busta joined Biggie in the spat, “The Ugliest” could very well have topped “Hit ‘Em Up” as the piece de resistance of the Tupac/Biggie beef.
Watch a clip of Lil Cease’s interview below.
Skillz Finds And Restores An Original J Dilla Beat Tape With The Pharcyde’s ‘Runnin’ Instrumental On it
With so much music being created, shared, and stored digitally these days, it’s easy to take for granted the easy access to rarities and behind-the-scenes snippets that at one point would have been impossible to hear. Highlighting this, Virginia rap veteran Skillz (aka Mad Skillz) recently posted a rare treasure indeed: An original cassette tape given to him by Detroit production legend J Dilla containing the original instrumentals for Skillz’s breakout singles “It’s Goin’ Down” and “The Jam,” as well as the one for The Pharcyde’s 1995 fan-favorite “Runnin’.”
Skillz found the tape over the weekend, taking a photo, posting it to Instagram, and tagging Q-Tip in his excitement at unearthing a one-of-a-kind, historical item. Unlike digital formats, cassette tape can degrade over time and the casing can become damaged, so Skillz had to perform “surgery” on the cassette (as he put it in his Instagram Story documenting his discovery). After fixing the tape, he was able to digitize it and share its contents, which included some previously unheard samples as well tracks from some of Dilla’s best-beloved beats, including “Runnin’,” revealing how the song was transformed from its original incarnation to the one heard on the LA group’s album Labcabincalifornia.
It’s truly a fun discovery for any hip-hop head and a glimpse into a creative process that would ordinarily have been lost to time. Check it out above.
Phife Dawg’s ‘Nutshell Part 2’ Gets An Animated Lyric Video With Busta Rhymes And Redman
Just in case the densely-packed wordplay in Phife Dawg‘s posthumous “Nutshell Part 2” got away from you, the song now has an animated lyric video to help make it easier to follow Phife, Busta Rhymes, and Redman‘s elaborate rhyme schemes. The video, which you can watch above, is exclusively premiering here at Uproxx. Featuring illustrated versions of our rhyme heroes bursting forth from a literal nutshell and dynamic synchronized artwork, the Mike Gordon-created lyric video (with additional animation from Konee Rok) is the latest part of the rollout for Phife’s upcoming posthumous album Forever, which is due later this year on AWAL.
Forever will be Phife’s first solo album since 2000’s Ventilation: Da LP, and while there’s little information so far, “Nutshell Part 2” gives us enough to go on to assume that it’ll make good use of the Five Footer’s contact list. Word has it, there’s still plenty of posthumous J Dilla production work yet to be released, so it’s possible that more beats from the late, great Detroit legend will appear here, along with cameos from other Native Tongues affiliates showing their affection for the dearly departed Phife. A Tribe Called Quest initially announced the album in 2017 but given the extra time they spent on perfecting it in the years since, it’s sure to be a fitting tribute to Phife’s legacy.
Watch Phife’s animated “Nutshell Pt 2” lyric video above.