J Dilla: Dan Charnas on the Life and Legacy of Jay Dee

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, it's justin Richmond. Today on the show, we're talking to Dan Charnis. Dan Charnis is many things. He's an author, hip hop journalist, professor, showrunner, former A and R person for Deaf American, and also a longtime friend of Rick Rubens, with a handful of books under his belt and awards like the Pulitzer Fellowship for Arts Journalism. His latest book, Dilla Time, the Life and afterlife of Jay Dilla, the hip hop producer who reinvented rhythm, is the product of four years of exhaustive research in nearly two hundred interviews. On today's episode, Rick Rubin speaks with Dan Charnis about how the roots of his new book go all the way back to when they were working together, and a trip he took to Detroit with rapper Chino Excel to work with the producer are then known as j D. Rick and Charnis also reminisce about their earliest memories together, and Charnis shares what it was like meeting Rick's mother, Missus Ruben, for the first time. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin and Dan Charnis on the genius of Jay Dillah. But first we'll hear a bit of background on Dan's career and relationship with Rick, all leading up to his new book. Do you remember how we actually met? First time we met, I do tell me. I got a phone call. I was sitting in the conference room at Profile Records, getting ready to call my panel of rap record retailers when the receptionists said, Rick's on the phone, and I just knew. Of all the ricks, I knew. I just had a premonition it was you, even though we had never met, because I had put it in my mind for the last I don't know two months that I was going to meet you had not told anybody. I had not told Bill Stephanie, who I guess is the person who connected us. I picked up the phone and there you were, and you were looking for somebody to either help you out with a deaf American in terms of like hip hop stuff, or Warner Brothers as well. So that's how we met. You were in New York for the Black Crow's Gold album release party, and we hung out. It was very much like I went to the Union Square coffee house to meet you for the first time, very nervous because obviously it's one of my musical heroes I'm meeting, But very quickly you made me super comfortable. You were staying top two floors of two Night eight Elizabeth Street, and I went there to meet you because we were just going to like go record shopping. We're just gonna do something fun, and you dropped the keys out of the window down to Elizabeth Street, and that's that's how we met. Yet I didn't want a buzzer because they didn't want anybody to visit, so it was the only time, like if I knew that someone was coming, I think maybe even the keys would go into a sock because it was a long distance down and then throw the keys out the window, and then that's how we would That was fun. Yeah, you were one of the very few people who ever visited there, just because I like to be alone. And it was at the time abandoned, not abandoned, but you know, def JAM had left. They had moved their offices around the corner to the six hundred block of Broadway. It was just your place on the top two floors, and it was spick and span, you know, I think there were the remnants of a recording studio that never quite got built in the basement. Yes, and it was this little interesting window between your def jam years and the American years where things were kind of in flux, very interesting. I spent three years building that place, and I think within in a month of it being finished, I moved to California, So I never really lived there. But when I was living in California, if I did come to New York, I would stay there. And that was probably the last time I ever stayed there because even after that, while I continued owning it, it just felt like, because nobody lived there for so long, it lacked a spirit. When he came into it, it didn't fuel right, So I started staying in hotels. I remember that. The two things I want to share about that era. The first thing is that weekend where you were in New York. We went to Tower Records together when there was such a thing, and you said to me, you buy me a bunch of CDs of stuff that you like, and I'll buy you a bunch of CDs stuff that I like. And we went back to Elizabeth Street and we listened, and your purchases were audio too, Wow, and sir, mix a lot and mine were you know, the raft of Golden age stuff that was coming out then the big Daddy Kane Bismarcki EPMD. And I didn't really like the stuff that you had bought, and you weren't really interested in the stuff that I bought. But for whatever reason, that was like okay, like absolutely, you actually saw that I had a piece right that was independent of your piece. And I never forgot that. I never forgot like, oh, this is how you can be, I mean even just in future situations, in business situations. This is how you can be as a creative. This is how you can be as a manager. You don't have to know or master or even like the whole thing, but you can have people around you that complete that part of it. So that was great. And then, of course when I started working for you in nineteen ninety one, the thing that I remember the most of the errands, and one of the errands was to go back to Elizabeth Street and get all the belongings of a paramour of yours and put him in a box and send them. And then of course my favorite one was going out to Long Beach to the garage to dig out a whole bunch of master tapes and other things from my parents' house. Yes, Linda and Mickey, Yes, yes, and your mother, Linda Ruben, she says to me. As I walk in, she says, um, can I get you anything? And I'm trying to be polite, I say, no, mus Ruben, I'm fine. What do you mean? You fine? How could you be fine? How could you possibly be fine? That's I loved her from that moment on. Yeah, yeah, that's that's that's Linda Ruben. And of course, and I don't know if any of this is usable for you. I will say that your father, like he reminded me, you know so much of you? He says, did Ricky ever tell you about his magic shows? The best? The best? And that was a Rick Rubin, uh you know phrase that I remember, so yeah, it might have been. It might have been a Mickey Ruben phrase that I adopted. Yes, indeed, now I note from that window we had a good run together, and I remember it fondly, and I want to ask about posts to our run. Tell me about your life starting. I remember you really getting into yoga. It feels like as as we made our conscious uncompiling. Yea where you were consciously uncoupling from the first iteration of American recordings. You were moving from Warner Brothers to Sony. Yeah, and I had been working on a project with a rapper MC named Chino Excel, who very much made a lot of friends at Warner Brothers. So the idea was that I would stay with Warner Brothers, and you tried, you know, to help that situation happen. Actually, thank you very much. So you moved into sort of the system of a down era, the Sony American era. And then I remained with Warner Brothers and Chino for a little bit until Forrest Whittaker hired me to run his record company through Sony. And that was about a year two years, and I was already a certified yoga teacher. It had basically saved my life. While I was working for you, I was introduced to that entire world value. So let's just say that while I was with Forrest, I decided to start writing again. I hadn't written professionally since I had been writing for the Source around the time that I joined Deaf American, so I decided to start writing for the screen. And what I ended up doing after I left Forest was writing comedy for MTV and b Et I wrote a season of The Lyricist Lounge Show. I wrote for a season of Comic View, and eventually it led me to decide that, Okay, I am going to go back to New York and see if I can get myself into journalism school. Like just shot up my foundation again. I moved to California in ninety one, moved back to New York in two thousand and four, got accepted to the Columbia School of Journalism. I spent two years there. I did my master's project in the West Bank. My beat. Every person who is in that program gets a little beat in the city. So my beat was Hunt's point in the Bronx. So literally, I'm pounding the pavement. I'm a journalist again. Wow. But the crowning course of that program was a course called book writing, which is taught by a really impressive and formidable writer for the New York Times named Sam Friedman, and he only accepted about twenty five students a year. In this you have to apply to get into the class, give to propose a book. So this book I proposed, which became the big payback, was called Beats rhymes in cash and it was the history of the business side of hip hop, because there were books that were coming out about hip hop that were very artists and music centric, but they were missing the key part of it for me, which was how did this thing get big? Right? Rundy MC didn't just appear and you know they were suddenly on MTV. People had to fight tooth and nail to get them into record stores, on radio stations, onto MTV. How did that part happen? The main characters in this book were going to be the business people, and that proposal, that book proposal was started in Sam Friedman's class. It was like, you know all those movies you see, the martial arts movies like kill Bill, you know the cruel tutelage of Pie May. I mean. NPR came to tape one of our classes, and I believe on NPR there is still a recording of Freedman telling me about something that I had written. I was defending it and he said, Dan, as they say on the basketball court, stopped bringing that week. Wow man. Wow. So that was the beginning for me of a new foundation in writing and a new life, but also spiritually a way to wrap up a career in the music business that I felt very ambivalent about. I think the last time I saw you, I was doing interviews for The Big Payback, and I think I said something. I apologized, like, I apologize for not being a good enough A and R person, And I know that's not how you think about things at all. It just came out of me, the shame of not having signed Coolio when I had the child, like Matt, you know, and I'm since then, I'm much kinder to myself. But I feel like my aunt, my mother's sister. She was the like associate dean of the UCLA Film School while I was in California, actually, and I remember going out to dinner with her and sharing that ambivalence, and she said, life gathers beautiful. There is nothing that I have done that I haven't somehow gathered into the next thing that I am doing. And then also, you know, it's a very sort of Rubenesque holistic way of looking at life. So that's kind of how I got into this second career of mine. Wow, you go to Columbia, you become a book writer, And how long was the process from starting the class deciding it's going to be this book that turns into the big payback. How long was it before the big payback actually came to fruition? Oh wow. I graduated in two thousand and seven. What helped me was I got a Pulitzer Arts Fellowship, so that provided a little bit of funding. I sold the book, so I would say about three to four years to sort of finish that book. And my son was born like in the middle of it. I got married in the middle of it. But it came out finally in December of twenty ten, and it was It was a six hundred and sixty pages, forty years the comprehensive telling of our story right the music business side of hip hop. I remember it seemed very well received at the time. I think it was it was a thrill to be on you know, NPR and to do Terry Gross and to be able to talk about something like this on a large stage. I mean, it's still taught in schools. But what excites me about it are the characters within it. You Know, we get to meet Sylvia Robinson, we meet Russell, we meet you, we meet Lee or you know, we see how folks who don't even like hip hop end up doing these amazing things that completely save it. That to me is was the fun part to be able to not just introduce people to the lives of the folks that they did know, but also you know, hey, here's what Keith Nafterly did at this FM radio station in San Francisco that completely changed American radio right. American radio was segregated, literally racially segregated almost fully before this guy came along and blew it all open. Yeah. And you've hot hip hop related classes at NYU. Yeah, And that's another sort of homecoming for me in some respect. The book again put me in position to become full time faculty at TISH. Wow. So I have been full time faculty at TISH at what is called the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, which I believe is the first school of its kind, you know, teaching sort of a four part like history, business, production, and musicianship to folks who want to be in the music industry, whether producers, artists, managers, executives, journalists, whatever. So I teach at TISH. I teach to people who live in Weinstein Dorm. Incredible. These are folks who are starting their own record companies. While at NYU. So I mean, you're obviously very present in all of those things for me, and that has really actually been a blessing. I do like teaching. It actually had provided a platform for me to do other things while I teach, like do TV shows and to write more books. And yeah, it's been good. What's it like teaching about hip hop? It seems so far to me because of my relationship with it. My relationship to hip hop was what I did when I was at school. That wasn't school. It was like school bad, hip hop good. So the idea of those combining it's just interesting. Yeah. Well, I will say that the hip hop I'm teaching is in some ways disconnected from the hip hop that's present today, right, because a lot of hip hop today is very mainstreamed, not mainstream, but just it's in the mainstream. It's very accessible. And so what I try to do is take them back to a time when this stuff almost had to be earned. Like I call actually call your generation the greatest generation, whether we're talking about you or Dante or Faith or Lisa Cortes or any of the folks who populated Rush and def Jam. In those days, there were risks to engaging right new York wasn't safe. Clubs weren't safe. Nothing was easy. It wasn't made to be accessible. You had to go to negrill to find the good stuff. There were there were costs involved. You know, people had to section off a piece of a roller rink just to have a party. Right. So for me, that's what I try to I try to bring students viscerly back to that time where there was a sort of barrier to entrance, and what came out of that was just this incredible art that only measured itself against itself. People weren't thinking about chart position. They weren't thinking about comparing cars or stock portfolios or how they could make the biggest marketing splash. It was a very not an innocent time, but it was a very pure time, if that makes sense. Absolutely absolutely I felt that. I felt that, and when it started changing, I was less connected to it. I didn't get it then, but I get it now. Yeah. Felt like in the early days there was a real sense of community where everyone was working together for something that they loved and like all of the artists on def Jam at the time, we all felt like a family. And when it became more competitive between the artists. I don't know, it shifted away in popularity. Also, the people who started coming to hip hop were not the people who had pure intention, but just you know, people who thought, this is my way of cashing in. That's exactly right. And it just hit me later. I suppose then it hit you because obviously I felt like I was a generation behind you, even though it was only four years behind you. Yeah, it would be a hip hop generation behind though if you think of it in terms of it's not necessarily a number of years. It's kind of like by movement, right, And so you came of age in this era. It was like even before the advent of digital sampling. Absolutely, you weren't sampling in the studio. There were no samplers with Nope. At the end, there were sampling, but we never really embraced it because we had our other methods. We're going to take a quick break here, but we'll be back with more from Dan Charnis. We're back with Rick Rubens conversation with Dan Charnis. Tell me about the Dila book. When did the idea come? This is a book. Okay, So it begins when I am at American Recordings and I've signed this artist named Gino Xcel, or actually I signed the group that he belonged to, which is this group called the Art of Origin out of New Jersey, two guys, Gino Xcel and Kerry Chandler. Kerry was always sort of not present enough. And one of the things I had to learn is an A and R person that I didn't learn until too late, is it You can't want it more than the artist. The artist has to want it. And what Kerry wanted was a career in house music and deep house, and he to this day is one of the most lauded accomplished deep house pioneers like he is seen that way. So he knew his path. What we now had to figure out what was what was the path for Chino Xcel. We really didn't have much of a budget. We were kind of doing things philosophically on a shoestring at at American, so we sort of cobbled together that first album that actually did better than most people thought it was going to do. So we were ready to do the second album and we had kind of a budget and this was going to be now at Warner Brothers as American was moving to Sony. We made a list of producers that we wanted to work with, and one of those guys was this kid named j d out of Detroit. So now I'm going to wind the clock back a little bit because there's a story there too. You remember, back at Deaf American, the Far Side was a group that sort of in our orbit and was signed by friends of ours at Delicious Vinyl. And the Far Side did this amazing first album and they were produced by this amazing producer named Jay Swift. And then we found out that Jay Swift was leaving the Far Side and I said, Rick, man, this kid, he's great, right, And we were in a bidding war with Tommy Boy to get Jay Swift's record label. I remember you and I spent a day with Jay Swift and his people and his artists, driving around listening to music, visiting their house. And you didn't do a lot of that, Rick, Like, I knew that that was special, and I felt like you were doing that for me in a way. I actually don't even remember it happened, but I know that if I was there, I was there because you believed in it and I was supporting you. Oh you were man. So then at the end of our day together, you very us sanely asked them, so what are you looking for? Right? Finally came the business question and Lamar Algie, who was working with Jay Swift at time, he said a million dollars and we dropped them off. We drove off, and we nearly got into a car crash after we drove off because it was just like more than we had ever paid really for anything. And we knew at that moment that it just was not going to happen. And so Tommy Boy got Jay Swift and his record label, and that was probably a blessing in disguise because that did not end up too well for Jay Swift for them. But the other path of that equation was what's the Far Side gonna do now that Jay Swift's not with them? They did this amazing album. This is their their musical voice. And I remember asking Mike Ross, what's Far Side gonna do? He says, oh, no, don't worry. We found this kid in Detroit named j D. I said, Jay D Detroit. No hip hop has come out of Detroit's what you know the only thing we'd ever heard out of Detroit was all some dre and the hardcore Committee from nineteen eighty eight, no conception that there could be anything like that coming out of Detroit. Of course, in ninety five when we heard the Far Side second album, when we heard Running, immediately we all knew, like JD is it. So that is how I end up flying to Detroit with Chino Excel in the summer of nineteen ninety nine. It's my very first time in Detroit. We drive out to his neighborhood of Conan Gardens. We park outside his house, the very famous basement door, this white door on the side of the house. We walked downstairs. There's common sense. What's common sense doing here? He'd already become common but I was still thinking, you know, I didn't realize he was in the middle of making that groundbreaking album like Water for Chocolate. We hung out, we went to Mongolian barbecue, we went to the studio. It was very It did not feel like history right, so much so I brought my camera to Detroit and I left it in the hotel room. What did I bring my camera to Detroit to do? To take pictures of us at the Motown Museum? Because I just didn't understand that what I was witnessing in the basement was a similar level of not just Detroit history, but music history. I hadn't you know, I was a knucklehead. As your former partner once said about me, he's smart, but he don't know nothing. That's me smart but I don't know nothing. So I didn't document it. And when we're at dinner together, me and Cino together were like a comedy team. I'm just talking, talking, talking, talking, and James just just listening because that's who he was. He was a listener. He was doing what I should have been doing. I should have been listening. So over the many years later when I started the book, I've had to make up for the fact that I wasn't a good listener back in nineteen ninety nine. So I know this is a long story. But I get back to La we start mixing me album and it is only then that I because when you're mixing, you're listening to things on repeat. What's wrong with those high hats? Are those? Are those high hats? Swung drums are wrong? What's going on here? And I literally took it into my digital audio workstation, my computer. I lined up the wave form with the grid. I measured where the where the high hats were and the high hats were not swung. What is making them sound swung? Oh, the snare is coming in early. The snare is coming in before the backbeat. Why is he doing that? How is he doing that? Why does it sound good? And then suddenly you hear music that is not produced by j D in the year two thousand and two thousand and one. Suddenly that that rhythmic time feels everywhere. That was the beginning of the realization for me, but it didn't occur to me until I was a teacher many years later at NYU that this could be something that could be taught, and so I started teaching it as a part of my regular music history course, and then it became its own course. And one of the things that we did when it became his own course was that since nineteen ninety nine I had developed a personal connection with Detroit. My wife is from Detroit. So nine years after JD, I go to Detroit for a second time to meet my wife's family, and then I really meet Detroit itself. So now I have a personal network in Detroit. We're going to take twenty students from New York and bring them to Detroit, incredible. We take him to the Techno Museum. We're going to take him to the Motown Museum. We're going to take him to the former basement. We're going to introduce him to his family, friends and collaborators. Dennis Coffee of the Funk Brothers gave us a tour of the Motown Museum. Amazing. We went on bus tours of the East Side and the West Side. We talked to Pulitzer Prize willing comment it was it was dope. It was dope. It was really really good. And then we came back to New York and then we met with like, you know, the usual suspects like Questlove came through and Bob Power. And so that's when I realized there really wasn't enough stuff that was musically accurate that really explained what this guy did. And usually if you're going to do a book, it starts with a little bit of anger, like righteous anger, like I keep Rundy MC didn't just pop on the charts by themselves, Like this didn't just happen. Oh we need to talk about you know, Corey Robins, right, the same thing with Dila, Like people acted like all Dilah did was turned off. The quantized function, the timing correct function on his drum machine just so made me so angry, you know, the healthy anger, the anger that gets you motivated. Yeah, that is my long witted story about how this book began. How important do you think the family part, the bio part of the story is for Dillah, Oh, it's integral. We're either a continuation of our family or response to what's going on on our family, or both. James was the product of two musicians, people who love music, but whose careers in music were truncated. So he carried that with him. And he was also the product of this kind of raucous church environment, and he carried that with him. He was also a product of popular culture, and in particular particular kind of popular culture. I don't know, Rick, if you've ever seen clips on YouTube of The Scene, this is one of the things that my wife hit me to. If you grew up in Detroit in the seventies and eighties, there was this TV show on w GPR, one of the only black owned TV stations in the country, called The Scene, and it was like Soul Train on steroids that you would not like. The dances on this show are unbelievable, and that's what Detroitter's go up when they grew up with the electrifying mojo right one of the only guys in radio to play Prince right out the gate. And one of my favorite moments in the book is how I call it sort of Dilla's rosebud moment to use a Citizen Kane reference. He's watching this Sydney Potier Bill Cosby movie called Piece of the Action. It was part of that trilogy, that Potier Cosby trilogy, every which way but loose that was that was Uptown Saturday Night, Let's do it Again and Piece of the Action, and like staple of black pop culture life in the nineteen seventies, and his family had the video cassette and the Anti family had movie days where they would just sit around and watch movies all day. So I remember hearing Jay Dilla only did probably twenty or less significant interviews in his life. I was able to find you sixteen of them for the book. And in an interview that he did in two thousand and three with a Swedish journalist, he just mentions offhand where he got his loud and offbeat rhythmic sense from and he says, uh, you know, I think I might have been thinking staple singers piece of the action. I said, what, so there is no song by the staple singers, but there's a maybe a staple song, Pie said, And then I learn it's part of this movie. But I listen to the song, Rick, and there's nothing. Curtis Mayfield wrote it and produced it. It's a straight ahead funk song. So it's all right, you know what, I'll watch the movie, right, And so I watched the whole thing. Theme song comes on. Nothing unusual. We get to the very end of the movie and there's a party at the end, and they pop a cassette into it like a boombox, and they press play and piece of the Action comes out, except this time the crowd assembled are clapping, right because it's a party. But you know, in film, you're not recording the claps in the room. They actually added it as fully afterwards, and the claps are coming in and out of sync with the music in ways that are sound completely artificial, completely machine driven. Yea. And you listen to it, Rick, and it's like you're listening to voodoo right. You're listening to Deangel's album yeah, years in the future, because Deangel's album sounds that way because they're trying to sound like James. And that was James moment where he's like, I want that, I want that sound. That was my I don't know, exciting moment. It's an incredible breakthrough discovery. It's a great and I think at times that I've heard things where the first time that I hear something, it's we'll call it the wrong version, you know, a remix or something before you hear the regular version. Like the first time I heard the remix of the Buster record with ODB. Yeah, if you hear the regular record, it's a good Busta Rhymes record, but the remix is insane, right, you know. Funny Rick, because as I'm writing this book, I'm thinking a lot about you, not just as a historical figure, but also esthetically. There's this phrase that you used it a bunch of times, but Hank Shockley said that he got it from you, and it's this phrase, the worst shit. Oh man, that's the worst shit. But what you really mean it's the best shit, But it's the worst ship because it's not supposed to be happening. You're not supposed to go You're not supposed to throw a piece of a record in on top of something, and it's not supposed to sound that jarring or that bad. Like it's the worst shit, but it's the best shit. And that was j D. If you talk to his brother John Ella j and ask him, well, what is that all about? Why did James do this stuff? He said, we like shit, this weird, We like shit, this sounds funny. There's a great sense of we don't talk enough about humor in music. Not ha ha funny, but just people doing shit that just makes them laugh spontaneously. Yeah, it's the best, the best things that you get to experience when serious can make you laugh, just because it's so jarring and so real that the response is laugh. I'm always looking for the laughter when working on things. It's always a good sign. John Karamonica The New York Times wrote an article and I think it was either about you or about Kanye, But it was a time when Kanye had come to work with you to finish an album. It might have been Jesus, I'm not I'm not sure. And John Karamonica writes this where Rick walks out of the trailer. I guess he was working in a trailer or something or so Rick walks out, turns to the journalist, John says, you would not believe what's going on in there. It's unbelievable. But I heard it both ways. I heard it as literally unbelievable, and then ill So heard it as oh man, it's the worst shit you know. And I'm sure it was both. It was probably both, oh man. J D J. Dilla is firmly in that esthetic of the worst shit being the best shit. What was he a fan of? What was his musical taste? He loved everything. He was a master listener. He was a stutterer, speaking as risky sometimes socially for people who stammer or stutter. So he just cultivated listening and questlove. Amir talks about when James would listen to records often what he would find a sample would be at the very end of this long ass seven minute song. But it's brilliant. He just had the ability to listen into almost anything. And I think we're really primarily talking jazz for a lot of the harmonic material, but he listened to progressive rock. One of his most famous samples for Common is a Canterbury progressive rock scene, Hugh Hopper and Alan Gowen right morning Order. And he listened to electronic music, and he listened to funk, and he listened to army. He was a He had a record library like no other. That is one sensory memory I have of the basement is walking through his record collection. It was formidable. Do you feel like he would listen to music for entertainment or purely to gather content to make things? I think it's both, you know, I mean, listening is a habit. The first question your conversation starter for many years and maybe it still is what are you listening to? That's what you would ask. That's up such a brilliant, beautiful question to ask, what are you listening to? Yeah? Well, I like to know, you know, I want to learn about something I might not know about, and I love listening to new things. That are if someone who's taste I care about like something, there's no better recommendation to give it a shot. But it also strikes me is the best way to know somebody? Right? What are you listening to? He listened to everything? Man, How important do you think the technology that he was using was to his sound completely? And this is where we get into like countering all the misinformation my favorite part, because again people are saying all JD did was to not quantize, which for those of you who don't make beats, it's just simply turning off the function that glues your notes any errant note to a regular time grid. And he did do that. He did not quantize certain things, but he had two other really important techniques. The second technique is what I called deceleration. When you take a piece of music on a record and then you slow it down, all of the tiny imperfections in human playing elongate get bigger. And he loved that sound, right, So a very fast high hat when he slows it down, it's like the lopsidedness, the unevenness comes out. And so that is the second way he used to play with time. But the third way, and the one that leads to the most distinctive break with the past, is because Roger Lynn created this MPC drum machine in a certain way. How can I describe it? As programmers we used essentially there were two sort of major drum machines like coke and pepsi, right, and the first one was the SP twelve hundred and the second one was Roger Lynn's the MPC, and both of them had this swing function on it where you could take an even beat and make it uneven. But the thing about the SP twelve hundred is when you made the beats uneven, when you turn that swing function, everything would swing together. Every element that you put in there would be lopsided. But for whatever reason, and Roger Lynn can't even say that there was a good reason that he did this, he made it possible to swing every track individually, so some could be straight, some could be swung, some could be swung and shifted right. I mean you could pull it things a little earlier or push them a little later. That wasn't possible like that. On the SP around nineteen ninety eight, you hear him playing with this function, but in a really exaggerated way. Arthur Jafa of the very famous visual artist, he calls it misusing the equipment. Let's say that one of his signatures is to make the snare come I don't know, sixty five milliseconds too early before the backbeat, and that creates a long, short, long, short pattern between the kick and the snare, which clashes then in like small ways like Princess in the pee kind of ways with the high hat which is straight, and then he's got these decelerated samples flying in and then he's got some unquantized bass and it's a mess. It's the worst shit, but it's exhilarating. But it represents an advance, I argue for those who care about these things. Theory was, but what Jay Diller did was he put them on top of each other simultaneously together. That's like what I wanted to accomplish. That was the thing that nobody was getting. Like, Yo, this is a kind of advance in rhythm that only happens like in once in a hundred years, and everybody in the world is now using this Anderson Pok, Robert glasper Hiatus Coyote, Kendrick Lamar, but nobody's drawing it back to its source. So this was my attempt to do that. Yeah, I would say that it may have happened before Jay Dilla, but it wouldn't have happened with one person. So it may have been the way two or three or a group of players played, whatever their own inconsistencies were when they played together. That you know, if the drummer was leaning forward and if the bass player was leaning back on the groove, and if there was a percussion player who didn't really keep such great time, you know, playing along, like trying to glue it together, like you could get these moments where it's one of the things that the way I think about it, I know about the Voodoo album first, before Dillah, I didn't know about Dillah. My first experience of that feeling came in the Voodoo album, which is to this day one of my very favorite albums. And so now when I hear Dilla, it reminds me of Voodoo. But for me, it's not better than Voodoo, because again, that was my way in my way in was Voodoo, And in that case, it always feels like it's right on the verge of falling apart, but it's not doing it because of the way it's technically made. It's the way they're playing it, but they're playing it to sound like Dyla's grooves. Yeah, And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of precedence in music for both conflict between straight and swung and micro rhythmic conflict like in hip hop. The Rizza did not smooth out the edges of things. So when he sampled substitution, right, it wasn't quite lined up with the grid, so you do get this kind of lopsided thing that clashes with other things. But it was not like it wasn't like a governing aesthetic. He wasn't trying. It wasn't an intention so much. And I know that's a funny word to use, right, No, it's true. It's not the grand gesture of the work, and it's not in all of his work. It's on occasion funny though. Rick. One of the occurrences of this sort of coming in and out of sync again not necessarily intentional, but something that even Questlove noticed was our record with the Nons World Ultimate, because they used a sequencer that sometimes lagged behind the simpty that was on the tape. So you'll get these moments on this album World Ultimate where things are and then it releases and it's weird like that was where we were in nineteen ninety five. But again it was not intentional as sort of result. Also, if you listen to Tutti FRUITI like the drummer is swinging and little Richard is banging out straight eights at the beginning of the song before they kind of come in line with each other. These things have existed before. I guess the reason that I'm going so linguistically hard for Dilah is not so much the hero worship of it or to locate it in this one guy, but to say, the reason that music sounds the way it does today is because all these people are tracing their own musical rhythmic conflict back to what he did. Absolutely no question. As you say in the book, there was music before Dylan. There's music after Dilah, and it's different. We'll be right back with more from Dan Charnis after the break. We'll be right back with more from Dan Charness after the break. So you started in Detroit. Was that where the research began. Yeah, I mean it started literally with that first trip and then my second trip. You know, my wife, my then girlfriend says to me, I'm gonna take you into Detroit. I'm going to show you Detroit, but show me the physical layout of Detroit, show me the pieces of history that made it. You know. You know from the book, it's a really really interesting story and it's a metaphor. It's literally a physical metaphor for what happened there. The map bears traces of all of that stuff, the matrix of culture that created motown, all that genius, right, you know, it began with that and then intensified with the class began to make friends with Dillah's friends in Detroit, with his family. And the other helpful thing was that when Dilla moved to Los Angeles for the last two years of his life, he became friends with my friends, Like all the people that I knew, Brian Cross and Eric Coleman and Ret Maddock and the beat junkies and c minus those are my peeps, like my homies. So I felt like I had that network too. One of the things that seems to be a big theme of the book, unintentionally but interestingly, it's about regional hip hop. Talk about how hip hop was her regional endeavor at that point in time and what it meant to be from a place like Detroit. Well, hip hop started as regional because New York is a region, right. New York is actually a very insular region. Nothing else in the country sounds like New York. But because New York is New York, it has this overweening influence on everything else. As hip hop made its way out like first to Philadelphia, then the Los Angeles, right, locals have their own culture, so they pull certain things from hip hop culture and then sort of stick with them. So Miami built hip hop culture at a time when you Rick were producing things like License to Ill. So it was a very t R eight o eight driven kind of sound that became Miami bass, almost like still Born. And that sounds very unfair to Miami bass, but it's like it just it zoned in on that one part of hip hop, and the South loved Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Memphis all love that deep eight o eight sound because it's car culture. What better to bump in your car than something that's like hugely bass driven. Mammi bass is also fast and like a song like Brass Monkey is really quintessentially what we think of as Miami bass, even though there wasn't such a thing then. It's very bizarre when I tell my students about trap is sort of the dominant hip hop sound a day, but it really trap. It all kind of points back to License to Ill. For me, that change in hip hop sound very much is reflected in what the dominant sound of about this today. But you know, Los Angeles had its own take on hip hop, which was very sort of electronic and also funk driven like p funk, because that was the style out there. Detroit was interesting. Detroitters loved West Coast hip hop, but there's this island of East Coast centric hip hop fans in Detroit who have their own little singular culture. So Detroit is not producing the stuff that most Detroitters like. This culture that emerges around this Chinese restaurant called Stanley Hangs Manua Cafe, which is called the Rhythm Kitchen, and then the hip Hop Shop where Eminem comes out of, Proof comes out of you know, it's very insular again, and they felt like they couldn't even get much attention from Detroit radio and didn't. The whole bridge to radio with hip hop is interesting because for a long time it was just not welcome. It was beneath the radio standard of what they played. That is still to me a great story. Essentially, one of the only reasons that hip hop got to where it was on New York radio, the birthplace of hip hop, is because two program directors hated each other so much that one was willing to play a music that they hated. These run DMC records to try to grab Frankie Crocker's audience away from him. You know, it's crazy, but that's how it happens sometimes. Sometimes a lot of history is just personality driven. But it was hard because when you're doing a book like this, especially with a community that is wounded and protective, it takes time to win the trust of folks and to keep it and to let them know that they were right to trust you. Part of that for me is when I interview folks and I write, I read back to them the sections that concern their thoughts, feelings and actions. Beautiful, And I know that there's some journalists who do not do that because they do not want to give up any sense of control. Yeah, that's beauty material. Love that it works. Was there any point in the reading back where an interview he said, I don't exactly mean it like that. You may want to change a lot, And that's why I do it because I make mistakes all the time, and I want to catch every single one. That's my virgo nature. I want to catch every single one. And believe there's still some mistakes. I'm still compiling like a little errata of things that need to be changed. For the paperback then not a lot, but you know, they're all important. But mostly when I would read back, people would say, yeah, you got that right, Like wow, yah, you got that right. That's exactly how it happened. Even in areas of conflict. There is a There is a moment in the book where very famous Detroit DJ is literally struck by another Detroit pop figure, you know, in a public place, and very embarrassing, you know, for the person who's being struck, and somewhat embarrassing for the person who's doing the striking. Right, But both of them said, when I read that section back to them, that's the way it happened, and that there's a certain amount of healing that comes from there. Does that make sense. Yeah, it's there's an acceptance and it's it's set out loud. It's like it's been aired and there's the reality of the situation and acknowledging it and it's not a personal secret anymore, or it's dealt with and now we can move past. It seems great. Perhaps it's naive of me to feel this way, but I hope that there is some healing that happens in this community. It's hard, it's hard when somebody dies, as you know, it's hard dealing with the mess that that person has left behind and the conflicts that that causes, and sometimes it takes years to come back from it, and their families were they never heal after that moment. But my hope is that when you're in an argument with somebody, usually the point the argument ends and the healing begins when you finally get an answer to what the other person was thinking, What were you thinking when you said that to me? And when they finally tell you, that's when you can move past it. I'm hoping, I guess I'm just what I'm saying, is I hoping that the book does that in some way. It's at least as close as you can get. Now. Even with that said, how often do different versions of the same story come from different people and either not match exactly or in some cases they oppose each other? How often? Very often? And if you interview two hundred people, your odds are you're going to find the truth. There are certain things that I kind of feel what the truth is, but I have not been able to I can't literally say, like the of course, the very famous story of who produced this Janet Jackson song Got Till It's Gone. I really believe that Terry Lewis and Jimmy jam produced that song. There are still folks who will not believe it, despite the lack of evidence for that. Did you talk to Jimmy and Terry. I didn't talk to Jimmy and Terry, but I talked to the person who literally programmed the machine that that was on, because Jimmy and Terry were on the record already very clearly, so I focused on, you know, the hands on people, so to speak. I truly believe that they produced the song. But then that really makes the book more interesting to me, the story more interesting. Why would James lie? Why would he say he produced this song and didn't. And that has a lot to do with not only his own struggles to become known and to get credit and to make a name for himself, but also his family's story because his father had a very similar story. It's a shame by the spinners claim that he wrote it. Nobody in Motown confirms the story people having heard of him. It's hard, you know, especially because it's family myth. And I felt some kind of way about poking at family myths and it's interesting, really interesting, and it's true that all he had to model was that behavior. So you know, like that would make sense, Like if you grew up seeing this behavior, you think that's how you deal with that situation. You know. I think about him in that moment where you know the story of JD. For folks who don't know, he was essentially plucked out of obscurity. He was just a beatmaker in Detroit until one of George Clinton's band members, Aunt Fiddler, introduced James to Q Tip, who was the lead producer and vocalist for Tribe Call Quests. So q Tip literally takes this guy out of Detroit, introduces him to everybody buster rhymes, delas soul, mad skills the far side. He makes him essentially like a member of a Tribe Call Quest and he doesn't ask for anything for q Tip did not ask for anything. But what he did propose is that James become a part of this collective called the Uma, the Brotherhood, and it's supposed to be JD, q Tip, Ali, Raphael Sadiq, and this guy named Michael Archer from Virginia who we now know as D'Angelo. The idea behind the Uma is the same idea behind a tribe call quest. We do all the work, but we credit it to the collective. Right, and this is how other things were done, like the Hitman and the track Masters, the dust Brothers. Right. But JD felt, and I think rightly, he felt truncated by this. Right. He felt like he couldn't make a name for himself, that the literal structure that his mentor had created had bottled him up. And then he's beginning to see other people in the world use his sound and his rhythm sick mares, and he can't even be himself. But how do you tell your mentor, the guy who's plucked you out of obscurity, that you don't want to be in business with him. It took him years, four years to have that conversation, and in the meantime he did passive aggressive things. And I believe that the claiming the ownership of God to what's gone was one of those things. But I understand it. I don't think any less of James for it. He's a product, like you said, of everything that he grew up with. Yeah, who would you say of everyone you spoke to? Was the most helpful interview for the book by I mean everybody. I mean, obviously his mother and Marine was very helpful, but the mother of his youngest child, joy Let Hunter, was also very helpful, even though the two of them are probably the most in conflict with each other in terms of the reality and rules. I was very fortunate to be able to talk to Q Tip, who was very protective of you know, and rightly so. And you know, literally three days before the manuscript got turned in, I had a two hour conversation with d'angela sitting in my mother in law's den. Wow, you know, talking about nothing but James. Yeah. His relationship in the studio with James great. So I'm just grateful for every every single one, but also to be able to talk about that Detroit community like Rosenberg. Paul Rosenberg, right, was an early collaboratory of j D. And then he goes on on this whole other trajectory. I sent him a copy of your book, not knowing that he read it, and he's like, yeah, Dan killed it. It's like I said it to a bunch of people already just because I thought they'd like it. But that's the thing for me, Like, if the Detroiters like it, I feel like I've done the best I can do, and I almost don't care about anything else. Tell me about what an interview for a book is, like, you know, it's like this, I I mean, it really is about being open and listening and starting at the beginning, like you started at the beginning with me, because that's a great place to start the beginning. The worst thing to do is walk into an interview like, so, how did you meet J? D? Horrible? Right? No, who are your parents? Where are you from? What are your earlist memories? What did you want to do? Where'd you go to high school? Who are your people? Right? That's where you start. I was taught that the two most important questions you ask in an interview are how did you feel about that? And what happened next? Because eventually the questions start asking themselves, or rather the answers will just come. When people are interviewed, not just by me, but I think by any good interviewer, sometimes they say, oh, man, that was like therapy or that was really good, because all therapy is psychotherapy is somebody is there to listen to you. They're not there to reply to what you're saying. They're not there to even necessarily to actively try to make you feel better. They're just listening, and it's so therapeutic to be listened to. Most people want to talk and tell their stories and have somebody really really listen to them. And I guess I mean, I'm probably come by it honestly because my mother is a psychotherapist and a marriage counselor. And I do say that sometimes writing this book or reporting it was like doing marriage counseling on two hundred people at once, a lot of held in thoughts and hurt feelings, and I'm glad that the interview process and then even having things read back to them makes them feel heard. Is it different interviewing a musician or an artist versus what I'll call a layperson. Yeah, well, it depends on the caliber of the musician. Because I relied on very very high caliber musicians to be able to articulate things. That was the most important thing for me in this book, other than the things we've been talking about. Very little writing about music nowadays is about the mechanics of music, how it actually works, what are these rhythms and how were they created? And very little done for sampled music, right, like most people don't know license to ill and raising hell were not created sampling drum machines. They were created running audio right in from the record to a click track on the master tape. That's like so important for people to understand the level of creativity, right, you know, that goes into something like that. So I wanted very much to understand the mechanics of what's going on with the drum machines and with sampling, and then also theoretically what's happening. So speaking to somebody like Jason Moran, one of I think the greatest musical minds alive. His whole thing was not so much the rhythm of JD, but how he resolved harmony. He wanted to talk about JD's use of common tone. He talks about JD as an MC. He calls it facing the beat, facing the rhythm, meaning that if the high hat is going, JD is actually going to pull inspiration from the motion of that high hat and he's going to reflect it in his verse. That to me is the benefit of talking to somebody who is a master of their craft. And so there were musicians who I spoke to, both programmers and traditional musicians who could really really do that. D'Angel was like that, questloves like that. In deciding what was going to go into the book, how do you decide the balance of personal versus professional? And there may even be three categories. There might be technical, professional, and personal. Yeah. Man, there was the musicology thread, there was the biography thread, and then there was the context thread. And that second chapter of the book, straight Time Swing Time was me sort of stacking all three of them on top of each other, and I did not know if it was going to work. The main tension in writing a book like this is between fan service and trying to bring new people in who don't know anything about hip hop or j D. There were ways that I had to keep things very simple, but there were also stories that I absolutely needed to tell because if they weren't in here, I don't think that they would be ever told. So the book is longer than probably I would have even liked it to be. But there were certain things I felt I had to do for the fans, the core fans, and then other stories that I needed to make sure that I can't assume that everybody knows what sampling is, So I need to tell you the story about Roger Lynn, because that is a fascinating story. It's a great story. And I used his equipment and I didn't know that story. I loved it. How about that Tom Petty? Incredible? Also the sequencer player in the manual? How did you come across? Did you happen to read the manual? I bought an MPC three thousand before I taught the Diller class in twenty seventeen, because I would be remiss if I'm trying to teach about this dude, and I don't know how the instrument works. Incredible, And so I opened the manual and there it is, and it's funny. I read it back to Roger Lynn, and Roger Lynn's like, I don't even remember writing that. It sounds like I don't know, you know, maybe like he didn't even have a memory of it. He didn't know how profound it was. I thought that was super profound, incredible because people are to read predicting the future? Incredible? Did you often do follow up interviews all the time? Sometimes, especially if there were two characters or three characters in conflict, it would be like a round robin. I'd go back and forth and back and forth, just trying to get there. You know, there was a scene about a fight between James and the mother of his child, and then fiance and I had to go file a Freedom of Information Act request to get a police report, and even the police report was sort of like had two realities in it because obviously the police weren't there what had happened. They were just there after what had happened happened. So yeah, going back time and again, but I just think, I think every time I went back it was worth it. Every third or fourth call totally worth it. Glad that I did it. How much of your interpretation is in the book versus just what you heard, just what you took in, I would say there's a good deal I allowed myself because I did a great deal of reporting. I felt I had a bit of latitude because I'm also dealing with somebody who was silent mostly during his life and is silent now. I gave myself a little latitude to interpret, latitude to lay out a theory. I didn't want to put thoughts or words into anybody's mouths, and so I was really careful about that. But I also felt like as an author and a journalist, I did have to have an intuitive relationship with James. That intuition was based again resting on reporting, resting on talking to his friends, to his family. But where that intuition comes in, it's like, Okay, why did James do that? We were talking about God till it's gone. Why would James say that? Why would James say he did something when he didn't. That's where the empathy comes in. That's like, Okay, let me try to put myself in this person. And I know there's a lot of differences between me and this person. You know, I'm white, he's black. I'm from New York, he's from Detroit. I come from an upper middle class family. He comes from a working class family. All those differences. But then again, I'm in the hip hop business. He was in the hip hop business. I made beats, He made beats. All of those things play in I allowed myself to feel certain things. So yeah, I do think that he was feeling some kind of way about his mentor Q Tip walking into a recording studio with Terry Losing, Jimmy Jamma Jenny Jackson and coming out of that studio with a song that sounded like an Uma JD record, but JD not being a part of it. At all, not being able to partake in it at all, and not being able to be JD even on the stuff he is producing. Man, that would make me hot too. It make me hot. That's where the intuition comes in. So that answer your question. Yeah, interesting. The last question is how do you feel like you were changed by this story? You live your projects, right Rick, They nurture you, but they also break you. At the same time, you're seeing me sort of post like it has been a fantastic launch. When you release a piece of work into the world, it's no longer yours, right, it doesn't belong to you anymore, And so that part has been kind of amazing to watch. You know, I've never been a New York Times best selling person before, Right, that's nice. At the same time, there's a part of me that's just like kind of broken by it, and I Yank's okay, you know. I mean that's why I'm talking to you on this day, at this moment right now, Because who is the person that led me to meditation in yoga, who is the person that gave me some things to gather? It makes sense that I'm talking to you today. So we're holy, we're broken yes, you have any idea what you're gonna do next? Yeah, I will say this, I do have an idea of a figure, musical figure who really needs this treatment. But I will keep my own counsel on that for the moment. But I guess, Rick, after being behind the desk and doing things like an R and whatever, I actually I finally arrived at the fact that I am an artist. I have an artist temperament. I'm actually more introverted than I am extroverted. And you know, I get better late than ever for that realization. So like an artist, I don't know what the hell I'm will do next. Great, but it'll probably yell at me before I do it. Beautiful, Well, I love the book. Thank you so much for talking to me. Great to see you. It's awesome to see you. Man. You know you know I love you. I love you so much. Rick, You're a great teacher. And often I use your wisdom with my son. Sometimes I say to him, this is what he said to me. And like all wisdom, dogma thinks it's true one hundred percent of the time, but wisdom knows that it's only true ninety nine percent of the ton. And you would say to me, Dan, there's nothing worth getting that upset over. Yeah, that's good. It's so liberating. That's from you. That and the worst shit. Thank you. I can't wait till we get to do this again. All right, Love you forever, Rick, Love you too, sir. All Right peace. Thanks to Dan Charming This for walking us through the reporting and writing of his new book, Dilla Time, The Life and afterlife of Ja Dilla, the hip hop producer who reinvented rhythm. It's out now everywhere. To hear some of our favorite Jay de Las songs and some of Dan's work at Death American. Check out the playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Bentaladay, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app or the music Expect any beats. I'm Justin Richmond, h