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

This is a book about a hip-hop producer who changed the path of popular music.

The career of James Dewitt Yancey was short, lasting around a dozen years—from his first release in 1993 on a small record label in his hometown of Detroit until his death in Los Angeles in 2006 at the age of thirty-two from a rare blood disease. In that time, no record he produced rose higher than #27 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

That fact is remarkable because Yancey—first known as Jay Dee and then as J Dilla—collaborated with some of the most popular artists of his time, like A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes, the Roots, D’Angelo, Common, and Erykah Badu, and influenced the music of superstars like Michael and Janet Jackson. What’s more, J Dilla continues to inspire and provoke new artists who rose to fame after he died, from the rap icon Kendrick Lamar to the jazz pianist Robert Glasper to dozens of pop acts.

When you ask J Dilla’s more successful hip-hop contemporaries like Dr. Dre and Pharrell to name peers they admire, Dilla is always near or at the top of their lists. Despite his short life span and low profile, J Dilla was, and remains, the producer’s producer, the inspiration for inspirers, or, as the Roots’ drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson says, “the musician’s musician’s musician.”

After his death, J Dilla achieved a popularity he never experienced in life. “Dilla Days” are now celebrated annually around the world from New York to Miami to London, attracting fans and followers by the thousands. News outlets like NPR and The Guardian document his influence in the pop and jazz worlds. Tributes flourish on record and onstage: New York’s Lincoln Center and the Detroit Institute of Arts have hosted homages to the late producer. His work and his influence are studied by musicologists, by recipients of MacArthur “genius” grants and Guggenheim fellows. Colleges and universities have created courses dedicated to studying and interpreting Dilla’s work. Foundations fund educational programs in his name. He’s had scores of records dedicated to his memory and symphonies arranged around his music. He even had a street named after him in Montpellier, France.

All these accolades leave us with a question: Why does this hitless hip-hop producer have such a persistent presence in the music world?

In Dilla Time, I offer a simple answer: Because J Dilla transformed the sound of popular music in a way that his more famous peers have not. He is the only producer-composer to emerge from hip-hop and, indeed, all electronic music to fundamentally change the way so-called traditional musicians play. And the core of Dilla’s contribution is a radical shift in how musicians perceive time.

Before J Dilla, our popular music essentially had two common “time-feels”—straight time and swing time—meaning that musicians felt and expressed time as either even or uneven pulses. What Dilla created was a third path of rhythm, juxtaposing those two time-feels, even and uneven simultaneously, creating a new, pleasurable, disorienting rhythmic friction and a new time-feel: Dilla Time. What follows is the story of how that happened and what it means.

This book emerged from a class I teach on J Dilla at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute. Its roots go back to my time in the music business as a talent scout, record executive, and beatmaker, and to a trip I made to Detroit in the summer of 1999 with my friend and colleague Chino XL to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee. But Dilla Time is journalism, not memoir. I do not consider myself an expert on J Dilla, but a student who has spoken to the real experts, the people who lived and worked and studied with him, whom you will meet in this book. My aim was to be faithful to them, and to tell their stories from each of their perspectives. The narrative is based on more than 190 interviews conducted over the course of four years, and the text and dialogue herein are the result of reporting and research. Where my sources’ perspectives and stories conflict, I have noted that in the footnotes. James lived with that conflict, and we must too. (You may read more about my process in the Reporter’s Notes and Sources section in the rear of the book.)

James Dewitt Yancey created a succession of aliases—Silk, Jon Doe, Jay Dee, J Dilla—and in Dilla Time I use them interchangeably, depending on who is speaking or thinking about him and what appellation they preferred. Mostly here, he is as his closest friends and family called him, James.

Dilla Time is not a simple biography of J Dilla, but is about what he means in history. No one innovates and influences in a vacuum. Thus Dilla Time follows the stories of other people: his parents and siblings, mentors and protégés, colleagues and followers, friends and lovers. Influence takes time, so this book begins before J Dilla’s birth and ends well after his death. Innovation happens with new tools, so this is a book about music-making machines. Everything happens somewhere, and thus this book is also about Detroit, its citizens, and their encounter with the machine.

Thus the chapters of Dilla Time compose a grid of two separate but complementary tracks—the biography of J Dilla and the people around him, and the larger context of music and musical time.

I was accompanied in this latter endeavor by a vital expert, my colleague at NYU, the musicologist Jeff Peretz. When I began teaching a musical concept called “Dilla Time” to my students in 2014, it was Jeff who validated my argument and helped me deconstruct it. Jeff and I began formulating the musical pedagogy in this book during my Dilla course, and we developed it over time in conversations with each other, with our students and colleagues, and with other musicians. Jeff reviewed every word in the music chapters, created many of the original charts and analyses, and developed the visual language that this book uses to illustrate rhythmic concepts.

For those who don’t know much about hip-hop or J Dilla, I offer what I hope will be both a compelling biography and a book about music that builds those concepts step-by-step. For those who already count themselves as informed Dilla fans, I hope Dilla Time confirms your admiration and deepens your understanding.

I also reframe the discussion of J Dilla and challenge some clichés about the man, his music, and his legacy that have ossified over the years.

My students were barely in grade school when J Dilla died. When I ask them why they’ve elected to take a course on him, the word that comes up most often is love. J Dilla’s music evokes feelings, and the language of feeling suffuses much of the writing about him: how Dilla felt music and how we feel in return. There is something transcendent and evocative about his work that seemingly goes beyond analysis.

What this approach possesses in spirit it lacks in specificity. In promoting J Dilla merely as a musical mystic, even the greatest Dillaphiles miss something crucial: what J Dilla actually did, how he did it, and why it is important. J Dilla’s music was an act of calculation as well as feeling; two legitimate but different kinds of intelligence. Some of his closest collaborators agree. As DJ Jazzy Jeff told me: “You can follow the method and you won’t have the feeling. You can have the feeling but no success because you have no method.” D’Angelo agrees that time itself can be both felt and measured: “You can do both,” he says. “Beat machines taught us that.”

Thus what J Dilla did, the instinctive and the methodical, deserves analysis: to be quantified—or quantized, if you prefer.

James himself did not analyze or theorize much about his approach. “I just want to make some shit” is a typical way he expressed himself when asked. He didn’t have a grand formula. But J Dilla did develop key techniques. And he knew he had a sound. He was acutely aware of its influence and often unhappy about hearing people emulate his style. I doubt he would have made an argument for his own significance. But that’s my job, not his. So I am going to quantize J Dilla a little bit, break him down. And that’s needed: contrary to the trope that he was simply a great drummer who happened to play the drum machine, he was actually a programmer who used and mastered the features of the equipment on which he worked.

This polarity—the facts of Dilla versus the emotion of Dilla—often approaches the tension between sacrilege and gospel. In the decade after his death, Dilla’s musical concepts circumnavigated the globe, but that feat has often been overshadowed by the intense feelings inspired by J Dilla’s music and story. A culture emerged around his memory, one with its own pantheon and lore: His mother and brother took prominent roles in promoting his work after his death, becoming public figures themselves. His mother in particular became engaged in a public struggle with her son’s estate, followed by open conflict among Dilla’s family and friends over the stewardship of his legacy and the propriety of projects made and events held in his name. To this day, J Dilla fans are confused about who is actually in charge, and conflicted about who should be. I hope to impart some clarity about the battle for his remains.

All the mysticism and myth about J Dilla engendered a kind of deification that has become profoundly creepy to some family, friends, and fans. The adulation has created skepticism among people who otherwise admire his work.

There is, on my shelf as I write this, a figurine of J Dilla that was commissioned by his estate and sold to fans around the world. It’s adorable: His trademark Detroit Tigers cap atop his head, a silver donut hanging from a chain around his neck, and a tiny MPC drum machine under his arm. His nose is a button, his eyes tiny dots, his limbs exaggerated. It reminds me of another widely circulated piece of fan art, distributed online in 2010 by the graphic artist DeadlyMike, an illustration of J Dilla as the Peanuts character Schroeder, hunched over an MPC instead of a piano. The figurine, like the portrait, is comforting to people, especially considering how horribly he died: Dilla as eternal child. But that doll is also there to remind me: That is not James.

Dilla Time is not the Book of St. James, scripture from the Church of Dilla. In these pages you will not meet a god, though some have called him that. Instead, you will get to know a beautiful, complicated man with both virtues and flaws. James Yancey possessed an evolved musical sensibility; he was generous, smart, and deeply funny. In other areas—relationships with friends, with women, and with his daughters; his ability to care for others and ultimately for himself—he was not quite as consistently refined. And James, like everyone in this book, gets to be human.

The best answers to cliché, myth, and skepticism are the facts and good context. I wrote Dilla Time to honor James’s life and make plain his achievements. I argue that his work is every bit as transformative and revolutionary as acclaimed geniuses like Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and James Brown. And if you don’t know these folks, or why they’re significant, I’ll explain that too.

Let’s go.