Book Cover: Dilla Time by Dan Charnas. Cover Art Designed by Rodrigo Corral, Illustrated by Matt Buck. Published 2022 by MCD Picador and Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York). Find it online: https://www.mcdbooks.com/books/dilla-time
Dilla Is Forever: Mural by artist Victor “Marka27” Quinonez located at 8841 Oakland Avenue, Detroit. Photo by Joe Guillen.
The mystery
J Dilla aka James Yancey aka Jay Dee is one of Detroit’s creative heroes. Older readers may not understand why, and younger readers may not realize how much he has impacted the popular music of the 21st century. J Dilla was a hip hop producer who imprinted his compositions with a unique rhythmic swagger. He was just beginning to be recognized for his musical impact when he passed in 2006. Dilla Time, as a biography of a creative life, is not just important because it tells a rich, detailed story about a local celebrity, but also because it reveals to us the ways in which Black creativity is so fundamentally important to the shaping of our world culture.
J Dilla’s MPC3000 drum machine is displayed behind a glass case at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. His contributions to music are compared with Louis Armstrong, James Brown, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker. Dilla Time includes an original system of musical notation that graphically shows developments and transformations from jazz to funk to hip hop. This system created by Dan Charnas familiarizes readers with enough music theory to appreciate Dilla’s unique contributions. We are invited to look up songs of the past hundred years and hear for ourselves these evolutions in music. The cumulative impact of all this is to prove, almost mathematically, Dilla’s role in shaping modern music. His polyrhythmic influence affected musicians in many genres, inspiring many who would go on to become groundbreaking themselves. For many, he not only transformed the way they play music; he redefined how they think of art.
“Dilla hit Black Detroiter chakras we ain’t know we had.” ~Joel Fluent Greene
One singular Jay Dee mystery has long been: How did this Detroit Conant Garden n****, strip club veteran, and connoisseur of everyday fly shit become the sound for the nationwide conscious movement of hip hop? The answer I propose is in Detroit’s African centered legacy which seeps into our city’s identity even deeper than just the changing of our names to Yoruba, Swahili or Arabic. It speaks to the existence of the village in the city, the “slum village” you may say, the Africanisms that survive in us, yes. These gems lay dormant until cultural geniuses like J Dilla unlock them. And we can’t help but to vibe with these frequencies when they are released.
“James Yancey- son of Motown, little brother of techno– arrived in an emptied city whose roads and streets had once been etched to accommodate millions. What was it like to grow up in a place that forces you to take inexplicable turns that lead to nowhere…” (p 370)
This book is about how everyday lineages, connect people. Dilla Time invites us to witness a web of connections of family and culture that make up the infrastructure of Black Detroit. We run into cousins and cousins, friends of his momma, cross town rivals, people his homie went to school with. We hear about Dilla’s participation in school music education, in city wide performances, his singing with his family, the musicality of the Black Church (Vernon Chapel), how he was shaped by the music and dance he experienced on Detroit radio and TV.
This book is also about cultural lineages, connections among artists. Charnas describes a “golden chain” that stretches back from Dilla to Amp Fiddler to George Clinton to Bootsy Collins to James Brown and beyond. His work with D’Angelo and the Soulquarians connects him back to Stevie Wonder and Jimi Hendrix.
Throughout the book we witness the embodiment of the common refrain “it takes a village;” we see intimately the hands and minds that have made Black Detroit a place that profoundly touches American culture every generation.
The sickness
“He was embarrassed by his illness. Detroit, in the best of times a physical and psychological minefield, was a bad place to be vulnerable.” p 263
Dilla Time, especially Chapter 12, should be added to curricula on disability justice for its nuanced, moving depiction of illness in the context of hip hop communities. Dilla struggled with illness and disability all the way up to his final breath. Charnas investigates what this meant for those who loved and cared for him.
I must acknowledge that this book could only have been written after Dilla’s transition. His pride wouldn’t have allowed him to share publicly such tender moments of him being lifted from his wheelchair into a car by Maurice Lamb aka “Bobo”. He couldn’t share the vulnerable conversations he had with his baby’s mother while he was living. It was difficult, almost impossible, for Dilla Dawg to convey what it means to need assistance on tour cracking open the shrimp on your plate because your hands are too swollen. But now millions of fans who already love Dilla and proclaim “Dilla Saved my Life!” will feel these moments in this book.
There are so many Detroit “disability” stories within this book. At times Dilla concealed, other times he revealed. Sometimes he took his treatments; other times he skipped them. He lived his illness with as much intention, creativity, and spontaneity as he lived every other aspect of his life. Those who loved him and valued him did their best to make “accessibility “ and “inclusion” happen without any radical terminologies.
The author
Who am I to be writing this reflection to you? Allow me to reintroduce myself: I am a man of a time now gone. I came of age in the 90s during a time when Detroit still invested in its children. My life was nourished by powerful Ancestors: I personally learned from elder activists Grace Lee Boggs and General Baker and worked side by side with the water warrior Charity Hicks. My folks came from Jim Crow’s South and were the first in their family to go to college. I have been prayed over, prayed with and prayed for, my soul baptized at the historic Hartford Memorial Baptist Church under the legendary Pastor Charles Adams. .
At twelve years old I vomited my way through spring semester until the staff at Children’s Hospital of Michigan discovered that I had kidney failure. For decades of my life, I kept silent on sickness, on weakness, on being in pain as I gave speeches and ran around the city trying to become my image of what a leader should be. I recognized the symptoms Dilla scrawled privately in his book of rhymes, the breathing imbalances and various pains. My kidney failure was caused by Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS), a disease similar to the thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) that affected Dilla’s blood and pushed him into kidney failure, like me, needing dialysis treatments three times a week. For much of the last five years, I have co-facilitated support groups for people with chronic illness and disability. I’ve seen firsthand the power of breaking the silence or shame on these bodily travails.
The title of my first hip hop album The Basics refers to both local struggles for the basics of life: food, water, housing etc and for a Detroit Black socialist vision of society in which we all have enough and no one has too much or the power to deny us our enough. All sorts of collective visions came forth from the Detroit that raised me. My Grandma knew her neighbors and watched things change in Black ‘hoods. She lamented to us how economic mobility ended up weakening Black communities as people moved out, taking their talents and taxes to wherever they could afford and leaving the city home to the poorest… and the most progressive, attracted to the possibilities of change-making left from how patterns of abandonment intersect with well-word routes of culture. I’ve seen wide-eyed students become anxious Detroiters, then become experts on Detroit. I’ve seen Detroit activisms that depended on grassroots Black voice and strength and yet still devalue that leadership. I’ve seen some that try to avoid or sanitize the Blackness of the leadership with surface-level coalitions.
Through it all, we hold onto the legacies of love and creative community that feed us. We are linked by histories, patterns of culture making that extend beyond our individual lives. After the Cafe Mahogany and the Hip Hop Shop era of the mid 90s, Jessica Care Moore went to NYC and spread the gospel of Detroit to the Apollo Theater while Dilla supplied the world with a foundation for conscious hip hop and neo-soul. I was home in Detroit’s abundant spoken word scene where every single night held a different life-giving poetry event. When we slung CD’s from our knapsacks, crowds yelled out in fake surprise “only five dollars?!?!?” to encourage each other to purchase these underground vibrations and support local legends and fiercely linked independent (Black) visions.
I share a little about my journey to invite you deeper into Dilla Time, into your own curiosity about Detroit’s rich cultural soil. These connections not only sprouted creative masterpieces that touched the world; they were messy, MacGuyvered systems of care and reciprocity by which we kept each other alive, kept each other going. Readers of Riverwise and lovers of our city will appreciate this book and its depiction of the impact that Black Detroit has had on the world. Even if your name is not mentioned, it’s quite easy to see yourself and the two degrees of separation in our “village.” Lovers of Detroit will observe (mourn, perhaps?) how Detroit is changing when Black Detroit and its Africanisms are decentered in realms of creativity, commerce, and policy. Through Riverwise and other local justice communities, we can continue asking what we can do to create conditions that will nurture talent and creative flourishing.
Organizers in the city today can take note of the contradictions of this complicated artist from Conant Gardens. His creativity and innovation brought him into close contact with artists whose music has been soundtracks for radical entertainment, whose names are synonymous with consciousness and spirituality. Yet Dilla was protected by our city’s dealers and hustlers; he enjoyed strip clubs and loved showing off the cars and jewelry his music manifested.
A revolutionary must be loved and protected by the deep grassroots to weather the storms, the transformations required from both opposition and success. Organizers in the city today can take note of the contradictions of this complicated artist from Conant Gardens, particularly how his deep roots. His creativity and innovation brought him into close contact with artists whose music has been soundtracks for radical entertainment, whose names are synonymous with consciousness and spirituality. Yet Dilla was protected by our city’s dealers and hustlers; he enjoyed strip clubs and loved showing off the cars and jewelry his music manifested. He built connection and love in the grimy underground which powered him.
Culture creators will appreciate how Charnas recognizes the various networks that inspired Yancey and those he participated in. We don’t create in a vacuum. We work in constant conversation with artists before and around us, and this book skillfully describes these exchanges and Dilla the diligent listener.
Hip hop lovers will appreciate the stories told here, which include the prowess of his musical process, his creation of chart toppers, and how collaboration with Dilla transformed many artists’ careers.
Dan Charnas, pioneer in hip hop journalism and one of the first writers for The Source magazine, rigorously conducted nearly 200 interviews to produce Dilla Time, a 400 page master work. One part biography, one part Detroit cultural history lesson, one part primer on music production and rhythmic analysis, and at the same time, complicated love letter.
Photo of Author Dan Charnas
Dilla offered us abundant, overflowing too-muchness. Sing it out, let our voices echo together, “One won’t do and two is not enough.” Charnas has written footsteps in the dark, a polishing and a shining.
Just as gospel and techno influenced young Yancey to listen closely and create something beautiful, funky, and unexpected, reading Dilla Time will provide great inspiration to creative readers and lovers of our brilliant, shifting, still grimy city.
