There are some rhythmic things that I find interesting, but harmony is way more important, at least to me. (This is a big part of the reason I don’t really listen to rap. Alice in Chains, for example, did a lot of cool stuff with meter (having sections of the same song in different meters, using exotic time signatures like 7/8, etc…) With this fourth act, Charnas begins with focusing on how computers (DAWs) were changing the way and the rate at which music was made. Moreover, we are guided through how the creation of okayplayer.com became a connector for fans of not only The Roots, but Dilla’s fans as well. The formation of Foreign Exchange and Little Brother is a main point here. In the second part, readers are shown how a rare blood disease diagnosis shook Dilla’s world and everyone around him. He would be supported most (as always) by his mother. The world still turned, as his music friends had to continue working with or without him. Charnas debunks some myths around Dilla’s creative process during the last years of his life. He ends with a heart-wrenching account of Dilla’s passing. 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 With the subtitle The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, the book makes a bold claim, and the stakes are indeed high. The basic premise is partly an artist biography in the traditional sense, a comprehensive dive into J Dilla from family, friends, collaborators, imitators, and champions of his genius, not to mention the raw details regarding the debilitating illness that slowly, savagely took his life.

In the way that J Dilla’s music was a portal for us to hear our world and feel the pulse of life anew, Charnas has made a portal through which to understand our time—historical time, musical time, and James Yancey’s own time—in a new way. Dilla Time is a book that will be read and reread with as much pleasure as we have listened and relistened to Dilla’s music. A masterpiece.” —JEFF CHANG, author of Can’t Stop Won’t StopIf it’s the same brain structures processing the different dimensions of music, then how is one dimension more or less “bodily”?”– because you move your body to the beat. You don’t move your body to the harmony. 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. 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.

This is the story of a complicated man and his machines; his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators; and his undeniable legacy. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and “see” the rhythm of Dilla’s beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla’s music itself. We get to be a fly on the wall for the Soulquarians era at Electric Lady Studios in New York City for the making of D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Common’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Badu’s Mama’s Gun. The day-to-day details of Dilla’s time living with Common in Los Angeles, working with Madlib and the cats at Stones Throw, the making of his swan song album, Donuts, and just about everything and everybody in between. Readers tag along on legendary Dilla pilgrimages to New York City in the early days, Philly bro-dates and record store missions with DJ Jazzy Jeff, then later Europe and Brazil with the homies.

Among generations of family, dozens of friends, fans, disciples, label reps, lawyers, rappers, peers, and competitors, not all of their memories, opinions, narratives or motivations would necessarily align, and yet the author was able to extract potent recollections from nearly every relationship of any consequence during James Yancey’s short time on Earth. It’s a delicate dance only made possible by the author’s unwavering integrity and transparency, as evidenced by his meticulously-footnoting every last discrepancy—no small feat. Detailed, well-researched, and passionate analysis of the music and life of the influential hip-hop composer, producer, and musician… Charnas has All in all, this book was an education on the evolution of Hip-Hop after J Dilla got his hands on it. It was a walk through Detroit and other spaces and places. It was an exploration of the international landscapes that he touched from the UK & Australia to Hip-Hop loving markets in Japan, etc. I loved Chapter 15: Descendants and Disciples, my fave chapter - it was sooo good! There were layers and layers of information about adjacent artists and musicians and Dilla's influence on their style and what-begat-what-begat-what... each layer was delicious, so interesting, mindbending, fun, and unique. I gotta go look for the playlist someone's made on this book on Spotify, it's bound to be dope. He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years. At the core of this adulation is innovation: as the producer behind some of the most influential rap and R&B acts of his day, Dilla created a new kind of musical time-feel, an accomplishment on a par with the revolutions wrought by Louis Armstrong and James Brown. Dilla and his drum machine reinvented the way musicians play.

There's this feeling you get when you read something by someone who really cares, like realllllllllly cares about what they're sharing. An exhaustive new book released on February 1st, Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm by Dan Charnas, seeks to correct that course and tell the essential, unabridged tale in all it’s revolutionary rhythmic glory.By the way, here’s another great Herbie sample flip by Dilla, and a more subtle usage of Herbie’s vocoded singing.) 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.