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

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JAMES DEWITT YANCEY (1974-2006), known professionally as Jay Dee or J Dilla, was one of the most influential music producers of our era. 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. The cocreator and executive producer of the VH1 movie and TV series The Breaks, he lives in Manhattan and teaches at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Filled with impeccable reportage, elegant prose, and incandescent anecdotes, Dilla Time is more than an urgently needed biography of hip hop’s most revolutionary producer. 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. This is the story of a complicated man and his machines; his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators; and his undeniable legacy.And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco.

Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new. His name wasn't known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at the age of thirty-two he had never had a pop hit. 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. Here, music is a story of Black culture in America and of what happens when human and machine times are synthesised into something new. In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death.

In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted childhood in Detroit, to his rise as a Grammy-nominated hip-hop producer, to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death; and follows the people who kept him and his ideas alive. Since his death from a rare blood disease at the age of 32, Dilla has been celebrated with annual “Dilla Day” festivals across the globe and lauded by journalists from NPR to The New York Times.

He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. 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. He also rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of soul in Dilla's own Motown, to funk, techno, and disco. 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's beats, startling some people with their seeming 'sloppiness,' were actually the work of a perfectionist al- most spiritually devoted to his music.This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius' - QUESTLOVEEqual parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. An outgrowth of a course on J Dilla he developed at NYU in 2017, the book’s roots go back to Charnas’s time in the record business, when he traveled to Detroit in 1999 to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee. Dilla Time is a different kind of book about music, a visual experience with graphics that build those concepts step by step for fans and novices alike, teaching us to see and feel rhythm in a unique and enjoyable way.