![]() ![]() If you’re looking for a quick way to learn what Dilla sounds like, try anything recorded by Slum Village, the group he cofounded in the mid-nineties with his friends T3 and Baatin. De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” (1996) is a personal favorite, and Dilla had a huge hand in D’Angelo’s Voodoo (2000), an album that sits near God. In the twelve years he was active as a producer, starting in 1993, he expanded the emotional range of hip-hop and created a small library of lodestones. Dilla died at the age of thirty-two, in 2006, due to the combined effects of lupus and a rare blood disease known as TTP. The late producer J Dilla, born in Detroit as James Dewitt Yancey, in 1974, changed how music moves. ![]() Hills? Dying? These are they.ĭan Charnas’s Dilla Time is a music book that’s actually about the stuff of music. Gently, I want to suggest that popular music is a wild cloud contained by recordings that invite repeated listening, but rarely because of words. ![]() The words of singers are treated as both the target and source of meaning, the bit that demands unpacking, even though, as words, they are closer to self-evident than anything else in a song. There is a dogged tendency in music criticism to focus on lyrics. Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, by Dan Charnas, with musical analysis by Jeff Peretz, MCD, 458 pages, $ 30 ![]()
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