DILLA TIME - DAN CHARNAS

Not since the Beverly Pimp C book has a hip-hop figure been treated and discussed at such a length. This book is quite new, I’m the first person to read the Lawrence Public Library’s copy and I had to read it pretty fast due to the fact that I’m leaving the country in a few days. I’m one of the Donuts Dilla fans. I’ve listened to that album a ton. I love it. I think it works in many different settings and deepens everytime you hear it. Donuts fans are somewhat disparaged in the remembrance of Dilla’s friends/colleagues who are somewhat dismayed that Donuts overshadows Dilla’s rather immense output and influence. I like Slum Village, the Common stuff, the solo stuff, all that, but certainly listen to Donuts the most. In fact, the book points out that Dilla composed Donuts at the same time as his album, The Shining, an album he put much more time and effort into and considered and hoped to be his masterpiece, and Donuts is much more popular and listened to than The Shining. Again, guilty as charged, I have certainly not listened to that album nearly as much as Donuts. Charnas does a really good job of explaining why Dilla is unique and interesting as a musician. He allows himself a lot of space, and employs some very useful diagrams and visual representations, to explain Dilla Time, his term for Dilla’s unique sense of rhythm and beat. As I understood, as a pretty musically ignorant person, it largely involved setting slightly different time-feels (ie slightly before or after the conventional beat) onto each individual instrument so these time-feels play off each other and add an additional polyrhythm to the music which accounts for the sort of dreamy, laid-back but propulsive vibe that’s so addicting in his music. Always good to spend more time thinking about Dilla’s music, and the book was at its most interesting, to me, when it was talking about the music itself. Than man himself is a slightly different story. Unlike Pimp C, who outside of the great music he made would be a worthy subject of a biography, given how crazy his life was, Dilla comes off as a pretty calm, quiet guy who was obsessed with listening to and making music. He seems to have spent a huge percent of his life going to record stores, listening to records and mastering the MPC. He intersects with a ton of huge figures in hip-hop and you get the sense that many of them, perhaps Erykah Badu most of all, could have made more compelling subjects inside of the same milieu (I remember thinking this same thing but regarding the founding fathers and John Adams after reading David McCullough’s book). But that’s not to say that there aren’t fascinating bits and pieces. Dilla ends up having a secret family/kid, he twice is put in a position to give music to N*Synch, at the height of their fame, and Justin Timberlake in particular, who heard Dilla’s music early through a friend of a friend sort of situation, and chooses not to pursue the opportunity (the book suggests that after hearing no the second time, Timberland links up with the Neptunes), and my favorite section, which features the then-recently-deceased O.D.B acting as a sort of psychopomp. Dilla, famously died of a rare blood disorder quite young and one of the first time he was in the hospital in a quasi-coma his mom overheard her son’s half of a conversation involving getting on a white or red bus, which freaks her out. Later Dilla tells her that he was speaking to ODB who advised him,  “Don't’ get on the red bus. I’ll be back for you. Anything you want, you’ll have it. Don’t worry about it.” Seems like a good job for ODB. He composes Donuts shortly after this situation and the book makes an interesting argument that themes of mortality and death are at the forefront of Donuts (ex. the book claims that the sample on “Hi” is manipulated to sound like “Is death real?,” which I’ve always heard as “It’s dat real”), which is something that I’d never really picked up on during my listens but will certainly think about going forward with Dilla. Overall, a pretty incredible book. If you like Dilla and want to think more about his music it’s worth the 400 pages. I hope we keep getting these deep biographies of seminal hip-hop figures. There still aren’t that many of them so there's a ripe orchard to pick from, so to speak. 2006 micro-delayed drum kicks