Dan Charnas

"Equal parts musicology, biography, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the invention of a new kind of beat by the most underappreciated musical genius of our time"--

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

Dilla Time

Daniel Bower

Syncopation was the ghost of polyrhythm, the spirit of Africa still following its progeny through time and space, through slavery to emancipation and beyond.

Ragtime roiled white America: young people generally greeted the defiance of rhythmic expectation with surprise and delight; older whites recoiled from the disorder. For the next three decades, ragtime became America’s chief popular music, boosting the growth of the fledgling sheet music and record business.

What hip-hop created, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, was a machine-assisted collage of human music—human sound bounded by the restrictions of computer memory, human time bounded by the restrictions of machine clocks. It turned the entire history of recorded music into a deep well from which a producer/musician could draw material—both the sounds and their timing—into unprecedented combinations and compositions. And

Art is a process, not a product. The full dimensions of a work, even your own, aren’t always apparent on the first viewing or listening. It takes other people’s reactions for you to see it fully.

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