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

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This is the story of the man and his machines, his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialised in symphonies and taught at universities. Here, music is a story of Black culture in America and of what happens when human and machine times are synthesised into something new. JAMES DEWITT YANCEY (1974-2006), known professionally as Jay Dee or J Dilla, was one of the most influential music producers of our era. He wasn't known to mainstream audiences, even though he worked with renowned acts like D'Angelo and Erykah Badu and influenced the music of superstars like Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson.

The book’s heart is its rich, evocative musicological analysis, complete with rhythm diagrams, of Dilla’s beats… one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker. He scaled the mountain of Dilla’s complex career and sent back instructions so that others could make the climb.In the same way that J Dilla’s music was a portal for us to hear our world, understand our technology, 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's beats, startling some people with their seeming 'sloppiness,' were actually the work of a perfectionist al- most spiritually devoted to his music.

Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teachus to feel and to 'see' the rhythm of Dilla's beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla's music itself. Dilla Time is a book that will be read and reread as closely and with as much pleasure as we have listened and relistened to Dilla’s music. He wasn't known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit.

And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco.

Charnas’ book is also an ethnographic key to the funk-da-fide Detroit family and community which nurtured and skilled Dilla in the science of soulful music production from the cradle to his tragic deathbed– preparing the artist to forge his own Cubistic, canonical and revelatory extension of the architectonic Motown legacy. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years, a genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the Twenty First Century.His music has been interpreted by classical composers and studied at major universities; his drum machine is on exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel that he created on a drum machine, but one that changed the way traditional musicians play. 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. Equal parts biography, musicology and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of James Dewitt Yancey, from his Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. Culled from more than 150 interviews about one of the most important and influential musical figures of the past hundred years, Dilla Time is a book as delightfully detail-oriented and unique as J Dilla's music itself.