Jay Dee has been getting mentioned quite often lately, but I can’t help but feel like the vast majority of the public is treating it as a trend. A few months ago, as me and my homie were leaving a Roots show the DJ started to play some cuts off The Shining, and my homie looks back at the booth and then says to me, “Damn, he’s playing some Dilla right? That guy is the man of the moment right now, everyone’s jockin him!” I know he didn’t mean anything by it, but that comment exemplifies what I’m talking about, treating Dilla as a passing fad. Now that’s not to say everyone does that, plenty of people have made genuine tributes to the man and his music and many more have voiced their Dilla-appreciation through message boards, blogs, etc. I’m just expanding on a feeling I’ve personally felt as I’ve browsed the Hip Hop media’s coverage of Jay Dilla; this is my take on Dilla.
this editorial was first published here
I remember first hearing about Dilla when I was about 16 or 17, still in high school, through the liner notes of Things Fall Apart. ?uestlove mentioned something about him and his production style and I can remember not quite understanding what he meant. The track that Jay Dee had produced on the album didn’t particularly grab me and I couldn’t see what was so special about it, I remember thinking it had a little swing to it, but that’s about it. I kept hearing his name here and there, and I became curious. I wanted to know what made him so great, what was it about him that made people I looked up to respect him so much.
My next step into the realm of Dilla was when I finally got Common’s Like Water for Chocolate. It was the first album I heard where Jay Dee had a major part in the production. The funny thing is, at first I didn’t like the album aside from ‘The Light’ and ‘The 6th Sense,’ because it didn’t sound like what I thought Hip Hop was supposed to sound like. The rhythm of the album seemed off to me, many of the songs didn’t have a steady, traditional Hip Hop beat to them and Common was doing these things as an MC that I didn’t understand. Yet one day I found myself listening to ‘Nag Champa‘ over and over again and that’s when I began to understand, even if I didn’t know what I was understanding. All the little intricacies in the song, the sublime sounds, the whispered chorus, the keys, all that suddenly blew me away. From then on the album stayed in my constant rotation for months, but I still didn’t really consider Jay Dee to be anything extraordinary, it didn’t hit me yet.
Fast forward a few years to my second year in college. By now, I had heard more of Dilla’s catalogue, Fantastic Vol.2, his Madlib tag-team albumChampion Sound, Welcome 2 Detroit, etc. I liked his stuff, but I still didn’t revere him as one of the greatest things to happen to Hip Hop. In fact, I considered him somewhat overrated by some people, I mean I thought he was really good, but I didn’t see the big deal in the drums everyone was always talking about, or in how he supposedly flipped his samples in such a crazy way, it sounded like fanboy exaggerations to me. Then Donuts came out. Well let me be honest, the bootleg to Donuts came out and I got that. Now I was really confused, what did this guy think he was doing with this instrumental album? He was taking samples and twisting them in all kinds of ways, like musical play-dough, going from beats that sounded like infomercials (Lightworks), to minimalist, stretched samples (One for Ghost and Two Can Win), to BPM juggling (Bye and Time:The Donut of the Heart) and everywhere else in between. I still didn’t understand what Dilla was about; his beats were so complex yet simple, but I couldn’t stop listening to Donuts.
From there, I went back and revisited everything I had that was Dilla-related, listening to everything with a fine-toothed comb and I got hooked. I discovered his involvement with A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde, and I read all about how he hypnotized Q-Tip, ?uestlove, D´angelo and co. with Fantastic Vol. 1. I started noticing how his drums never sounded like anyone else’s, how they felt like they had more umph in them than others. I realized how seamlessly he would arrange his samples, doing so much more than just looping or chopping them up in obvious ways. There’s a certain level of honesty and emotion in the beats that makes them so enjoyable. Even when he rhymed, a trait for which I still feel he’s underrated, he would be able to hook his words to the rhythm and ride the beat effortlessly. I became a Dilla head, and proudly thought of him as the best beatmaker in Hip Hop. I remember going to Access Music in San Diego, a few days before Donuts was set to be released officially, and saw the album already on sale. I quickly snatched it up and was bumping the fully mastered versions of the bootleg I previously had. Then, less than a week later a good friend of mine hits me up with a text message, “Dilla just died yo.”
What? I was confused as hell. How does a man so young just die? I had read on OK Player some months prior that Dilla had been hospitalized for something, but that news was addressed by Dilla himself in a XXL article as a case of augmented food poisoning. I was boggled by the news. This was the first time I felt any kind of reaction towards the death of someone I didn’t personally know. I remember when 2pac and B.I.G. died, but I didn’t really appreciate them fully until years after, so their death was cemented to my notions of them as great from the beginning. With Jay though, I felt as if he was a contemporary to me in the sense that he was progressing as I was growing up, and to have him pass so suddenly was almost shocking.
By way of some incredible twist of fate, I ended up attending the intimate funeral held for Jay Dee in Los Angeles. The experience was surreal, but the most wonderful thing I witnessed was the reception afterwards. The sorrow seemed to vanish, and instead everyone was celebrating, while a special best-of-Dilla mix played on repeat. It was amazing to see a room full of people that I had grown up admiring and idolizing, all gathered in remembrance of Dilla. I heard first-hand testimony from people that were close to him about how he lived music, waking up every morning and heading to his living room and making music for hours. In the late evening, I was talking to one of my idols who was in attendance, and he was telling me about Dilla´s production, about how he did more with the most meager equipment and studio set-up than any other producer in Hip Hop. He went off on how much he listened to Donuts over and over, and was convinced that Jay knew his time was coming so he alluded to it all over Donuts, almost treating it like a goodbye. That day made me realize the humanity that Jay Dee inflected into his music.
I constantly listen to Jay Dilla now, whether it’s through his own work, like The Shining or The Pharcyde´s Labcabincalifornia, which I played all of last summer, or the simple brilliance of Fantastic Vol.1 that I’ve had on repeat these last few months. I’m beginning to understand the music better by understanding the passion behind it. Whether it he was sampling something onto his MPC, or playing original compositions on various instruments, Jay Dilla mastered Hip Hop. He mastered the art of drums, of the bass, of sampling, all while doing it his way. Jay Dee existed on a different level than normal, everyday Hip Hop, almost as if he lived in another world to which the corniness and watered-down shit had no access to. Even as people constantly jacked and bit him without giving him recognition, (see 2pac´s posthumous ‘Do for Love‘ and Janet Jackson’s ‘Got Till It’s Gone‘ for examples) the innovation and originality never ceased. It’s sad though, that Dilla needed death for people to give him his due props, with now every hipster, hip hop head and music connoisseur naming Jay Dee as a favorite, when 5 years ago those same people would think you where talking about Jermaine Dupri. I guess the age-old adage is true, and brilliance often goes unnoticed until the genius is no longer among us. I never met Dilla, but through my own passion towards the art, he’s become an integral part of my growing up. Jay Dilla´s music has become the soundtrack to my life.
