Latest / Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond / J Dilla: Dan Charnas on the Life and Legacy of Jay Dee

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J Dilla: Dan Charnas on the Life and Legacy of Jay Dee · Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, it's justin Richmond. Today on the show,
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: we're talking to Dan Charnis. Dan Charnis is many things.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: He's an author, hip hop journalist, professor, showrunner, former A
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: and R person for Deaf American, and also a longtime
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: friend of Rick Rubens, with a handful of books under
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: his belt and awards like the Pulitzer Fellowship for Arts Journalism.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: His latest book, Dilla Time, the Life and afterlife of
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Jay Dilla, the hip hop producer who reinvented rhythm, is
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: the product of four years of exhaustive research in nearly
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: two hundred interviews. On today's episode, Rick Rubin speaks with
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Dan Charnis about how the roots of his new book
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: go all the way back to when they were working together,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: and a trip he took to Detroit with rapper Chino
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Excel to work with the producer are then known as
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: j D. Rick and Charnis also reminisce about their earliest
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: memories together, and Charnis shares what it was like meeting
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Rick's mother, Missus Ruben, for the first time. This is
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmond.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Here's Rick Rubin and Dan Charnis on the genius of
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Jay Dillah. But first we'll hear a bit of background
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: on Dan's career and relationship with Rick, all leading up
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: to his new book. Do you remember how we actually met?
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: First time we met, I do tell me. I got
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: a phone call. I was sitting in the conference room
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: at Profile Records, getting ready to call my panel of
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: rap record retailers when the receptionists said, Rick's on the phone,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: and I just knew. Of all the ricks, I knew.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: I just had a premonition it was you, even though
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: we had never met, because I had put it in
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: my mind for the last I don't know two months
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: that I was going to meet you had not told anybody.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: I had not told Bill Stephanie, who I guess is
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: the person who connected us. I picked up the phone
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: and there you were, and you were looking for somebody
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: to either help you out with a deaf American in
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: terms of like hip hop stuff, or Warner Brothers as well.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: So that's how we met. You were in New York
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: for the Black Crow's Gold album release party, and we
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: hung out. It was very much like I went to
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: the Union Square coffee house to meet you for the
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: first time, very nervous because obviously it's one of my
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: musical heroes I'm meeting, But very quickly you made me
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: super comfortable. You were staying top two floors of two
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Night eight Elizabeth Street, and I went there to meet
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: you because we were just going to like go record shopping.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: We're just gonna do something fun, and you dropped the
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: keys out of the window down to Elizabeth Street, and
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: that's that's how we met. Yet I didn't want a
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: buzzer because they didn't want anybody to visit, so it
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: was the only time, like if I knew that someone
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: was coming, I think maybe even the keys would go
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: into a sock because it was a long distance down
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: and then throw the keys out the window, and then
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: that's how we would That was fun. Yeah, you were
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: one of the very few people who ever visited there,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: just because I like to be alone. And it was
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: at the time abandoned, not abandoned, but you know, def
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: JAM had left. They had moved their offices around the
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: corner to the six hundred block of Broadway. It was
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: just your place on the top two floors, and it
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: was spick and span, you know, I think there were
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: the remnants of a recording studio that never quite got
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: built in the basement. Yes, and it was this little
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: interesting window between your def jam years and the American
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: years where things were kind of in flux, very interesting.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: I spent three years building that place, and I think
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: within in a month of it being finished, I moved
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: to California, So I never really lived there. But when
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: I was living in California, if I did come to
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: New York, I would stay there. And that was probably
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: the last time I ever stayed there because even after that,
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: while I continued owning it, it just felt like, because
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: nobody lived there for so long, it lacked a spirit.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: When he came into it, it didn't fuel right, So
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: I started staying in hotels. I remember that. The two
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: things I want to share about that era. The first
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: thing is that weekend where you were in New York.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: We went to Tower Records together when there was such
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: a thing, and you said to me, you buy me
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: a bunch of CDs of stuff that you like, and
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: I'll buy you a bunch of CDs stuff that I like.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: And we went back to Elizabeth Street and we listened,
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: and your purchases were audio too, Wow, and sir, mix
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: a lot and mine were you know, the raft of
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Golden age stuff that was coming out then the big
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Daddy Kane Bismarcki EPMD. And I didn't really like the
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: stuff that you had bought, and you weren't really interested
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: in the stuff that I bought. But for whatever reason,
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: that was like okay, like absolutely, you actually saw that
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: I had a piece right that was independent of your piece.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: And I never forgot that. I never forgot like, oh,
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: this is how you can be, I mean even just
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: in future situations, in business situations. This is how you
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: can be as a creative. This is how you can
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: be as a manager. You don't have to know or
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: master or even like the whole thing, but you can
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: have people around you that complete that part of it.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: So that was great. And then, of course when I
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: started working for you in nineteen ninety one, the thing
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: that I remember the most of the errands, and one
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: of the errands was to go back to Elizabeth Street
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: and get all the belongings of a paramour of yours
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: and put him in a box and send them. And
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: then of course my favorite one was going out to
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Long Beach to the garage to dig out a whole
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: bunch of master tapes and other things from my parents' house. Yes,
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Linda and Mickey, Yes, yes, and your mother, Linda Ruben,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: she says to me. As I walk in, she says, um,
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: can I get you anything? And I'm trying to be polite,
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: I say, no, mus Ruben, I'm fine. What do you mean?
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: You fine? How could you be fine? How could you
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: possibly be fine? That's I loved her from that moment on. Yeah, yeah,
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: that's that's that's Linda Ruben. And of course, and I
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: don't know if any of this is usable for you.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: I will say that your father, like he reminded me,
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: you know so much of you? He says, did Ricky
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: ever tell you about his magic shows? The best? The best?
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: And that was a Rick Rubin, uh you know phrase
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: that I remember, so yeah, it might have been. It
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: might have been a Mickey Ruben phrase that I adopted. Yes, indeed,
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: now I note from that window we had a good
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: run together, and I remember it fondly, and I want
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: to ask about posts to our run. Tell me about
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: your life starting. I remember you really getting into yoga.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: It feels like as as we made our conscious uncompiling.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Yea where you were consciously uncoupling from the first iteration
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: of American recordings. You were moving from Warner Brothers to Sony. Yeah,
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: and I had been working on a project with a
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: rapper MC named Chino Excel, who very much made a
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: lot of friends at Warner Brothers. So the idea was
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: that I would stay with Warner Brothers, and you tried,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: you know, to help that situation happen. Actually, thank you
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: very much. So you moved into sort of the system
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: of a down era, the Sony American era. And then
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: I remained with Warner Brothers and Chino for a little
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: bit until Forrest Whittaker hired me to run his record
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: company through Sony. And that was about a year two years,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: and I was already a certified yoga teacher. It had
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: basically saved my life. While I was working for you,
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: I was introduced to that entire world value. So let's
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: just say that while I was with Forrest, I decided
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: to start writing again. I hadn't written professionally since I
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: had been writing for the Source around the time that
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: I joined Deaf American, so I decided to start writing
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: for the screen. And what I ended up doing after
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: I left Forest was writing comedy for MTV and b
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Et I wrote a season of The Lyricist Lounge Show.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: I wrote for a season of Comic View, and eventually
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: it led me to decide that, Okay, I am going
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: to go back to New York and see if I
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: can get myself into journalism school. Like just shot up
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: my foundation again. I moved to California in ninety one,
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: moved back to New York in two thousand and four,
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: got accepted to the Columbia School of Journalism. I spent
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: two years there. I did my master's project in the
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: West Bank. My beat. Every person who is in that
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: program gets a little beat in the city. So my
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: beat was Hunt's point in the Bronx. So literally, I'm
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: pounding the pavement. I'm a journalist again. Wow. But the
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: crowning course of that program was a course called book writing,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: which is taught by a really impressive and formidable writer
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: for the New York Times named Sam Friedman, and he
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: only accepted about twenty five students a year. In this
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: you have to apply to get into the class, give
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: to propose a book. So this book I proposed, which
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: became the big payback, was called Beats rhymes in cash
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: and it was the history of the business side of
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: hip hop, because there were books that were coming out
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: about hip hop that were very artists and music centric,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: but they were missing the key part of it for me,
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: which was how did this thing get big? Right? Rundy
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: MC didn't just appear and you know they were suddenly
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: on MTV. People had to fight tooth and nail to
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: get them into record stores, on radio stations, onto MTV.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: How did that part happen? The main characters in this
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: book were going to be the business people, and that proposal,
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: that book proposal was started in Sam Friedman's class. It
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: was like, you know all those movies you see, the
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: martial arts movies like kill Bill, you know the cruel
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: tutelage of Pie May. I mean. NPR came to tape
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: one of our classes, and I believe on NPR there
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: is still a recording of Freedman telling me about something
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: that I had written. I was defending it and he said, Dan,
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: as they say on the basketball court, stopped bringing that week.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: Wow man. Wow. So that was the beginning for me
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: of a new foundation in writing and a new life,
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: but also spiritually a way to wrap up a career
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: in the music business that I felt very ambivalent about.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: I think the last time I saw you, I was
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: doing interviews for The Big Payback, and I think I
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: said something. I apologized, like, I apologize for not being
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: a good enough A and R person, And I know
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: that's not how you think about things at all. It
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: just came out of me, the shame of not having
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: signed Coolio when I had the child, like Matt, you know,
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: and I'm since then, I'm much kinder to myself. But
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: I feel like my aunt, my mother's sister. She was
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: the like associate dean of the UCLA Film School while
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: I was in California, actually, and I remember going out
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: to dinner with her and sharing that ambivalence, and she said,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: life gathers beautiful. There is nothing that I have done
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: that I haven't somehow gathered into the next thing that
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: I am doing. And then also, you know, it's a
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: very sort of Rubenesque holistic way of looking at life.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: So that's kind of how I got into this second
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: career of mine. Wow, you go to Columbia, you become
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: a book writer, And how long was the process from
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: starting the class deciding it's going to be this book
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: that turns into the big payback. How long was it
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: before the big payback actually came to fruition? Oh wow.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: I graduated in two thousand and seven. What helped me
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: was I got a Pulitzer Arts Fellowship, so that provided
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: a little bit of funding. I sold the book, so
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: I would say about three to four years to sort
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: of finish that book. And my son was born like
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: in the middle of it. I got married in the
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: middle of it. But it came out finally in December
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: of twenty ten, and it was It was a six
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: hundred and sixty pages, forty years the comprehensive telling of
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: our story right the music business side of hip hop.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: I remember it seemed very well received at the time.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: I think it was it was a thrill to be
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: on you know, NPR and to do Terry Gross and
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: to be able to talk about something like this on
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: a large stage. I mean, it's still taught in schools.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: But what excites me about it are the characters within it.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: You Know, we get to meet Sylvia Robinson, we meet Russell,
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: we meet you, we meet Lee or you know, we
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: see how folks who don't even like hip hop end
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: up doing these amazing things that completely save it. That
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: to me is was the fun part to be able
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: to not just introduce people to the lives of the
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: folks that they did know, but also you know, hey,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: here's what Keith Nafterly did at this FM radio station
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: in San Francisco that completely changed American radio right. American
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: radio was segregated, literally racially segregated almost fully before this
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: guy came along and blew it all open. Yeah. And
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: you've hot hip hop related classes at NYU. Yeah, And
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: that's another sort of homecoming for me in some respect.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: The book again put me in position to become full
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: time faculty at TISH. Wow. So I have been full
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: time faculty at TISH at what is called the Clive
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Davis Institute of Recorded Music, which I believe is the
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: first school of its kind, you know, teaching sort of
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: a four part like history, business, production, and musicianship to
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: folks who want to be in the music industry, whether producers, artists, managers, executives, journalists, whatever.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: So I teach at TISH. I teach to people who
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: live in Weinstein Dorm. Incredible. These are folks who are
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: starting their own record companies. While at NYU. So I mean,
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: you're obviously very present in all of those things for me,
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: and that has really actually been a blessing. I do
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: like teaching. It actually had provided a platform for me
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: to do other things while I teach, like do TV
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: shows and to write more books. And yeah, it's been good.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: What's it like teaching about hip hop? It seems so
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: far to me because of my relationship with it. My
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: relationship to hip hop was what I did when I
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: was at school. That wasn't school. It was like school bad,
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: hip hop good. So the idea of those combining it's
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: just interesting. Yeah. Well, I will say that the hip
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: hop I'm teaching is in some ways disconnected from the
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: hip hop that's present today, right, because a lot of
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: hip hop today is very mainstreamed, not mainstream, but just
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: it's in the mainstream. It's very accessible. And so what
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: I try to do is take them back to a
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: time when this stuff almost had to be earned. Like
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: I call actually call your generation the greatest generation, whether
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: we're talking about you or Dante or Faith or Lisa
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Cortes or any of the folks who populated Rush and
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: def Jam. In those days, there were risks to engaging
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: right new York wasn't safe. Clubs weren't safe. Nothing was easy.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: It wasn't made to be accessible. You had to go
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: to negrill to find the good stuff. There were there
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: were costs involved. You know, people had to section off
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: a piece of a roller rink just to have a party. Right.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: So for me, that's what I try to I try
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: to bring students viscerly back to that time where there
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: was a sort of barrier to entrance, and what came
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: out of that was just this incredible art that only
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: measured itself against itself. People weren't thinking about chart position.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: They weren't thinking about comparing cars or stock portfolios or
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: how they could make the biggest marketing splash. It was
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: a very not an innocent time, but it was a
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: very pure time, if that makes sense. Absolutely absolutely I
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: felt that. I felt that, and when it started changing,
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: I was less connected to it. I didn't get it then,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: but I get it now. Yeah. Felt like in the
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: early days there was a real sense of community where
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: everyone was working together for something that they loved and
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: like all of the artists on def Jam at the time,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: we all felt like a family. And when it became
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: more competitive between the artists. I don't know, it shifted
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: away in popularity. Also, the people who started coming to
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: hip hop were not the people who had pure intention,
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: but just you know, people who thought, this is my
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: way of cashing in. That's exactly right. And it just
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: hit me later. I suppose then it hit you because
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: obviously I felt like I was a generation behind you,
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: even though it was only four years behind you. Yeah,
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: it would be a hip hop generation behind though if
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: you think of it in terms of it's not necessarily
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: a number of years. It's kind of like by movement, right,
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: And so you came of age in this era. It
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: was like even before the advent of digital sampling. Absolutely,
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: you weren't sampling in the studio. There were no samplers
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: with Nope. At the end, there were sampling, but we
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: never really embraced it because we had our other methods.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break here, but we'll
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: be back with more from Dan Charnis. We're back with
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: Rick Rubens conversation with Dan Charnis. Tell me about the
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Dila book. When did the idea come? This is a book. Okay,
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: So it begins when I am at American Recordings and
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: I've signed this artist named Gino Xcel, or actually I
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: signed the group that he belonged to, which is this
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: group called the Art of Origin out of New Jersey,
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: two guys, Gino Xcel and Kerry Chandler. Kerry was always
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: sort of not present enough. And one of the things
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: I had to learn is an A and R person
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: that I didn't learn until too late, is it You
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: can't want it more than the artist. The artist has
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: to want it. And what Kerry wanted was a career
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: in house music and deep house, and he to this
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: day is one of the most lauded accomplished deep house
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: pioneers like he is seen that way. So he knew
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: his path. What we now had to figure out what
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: was what was the path for Chino Xcel. We really
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: didn't have much of a budget. We were kind of
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: doing things philosophically on a shoestring at at American, so
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: we sort of cobbled together that first album that actually
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: did better than most people thought it was going to do.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: So we were ready to do the second album and
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: we had kind of a budget and this was going
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: to be now at Warner Brothers as American was moving
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: to Sony. We made a list of producers that we
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: wanted to work with, and one of those guys was
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: this kid named j d out of Detroit. So now
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: I'm going to wind the clock back a little bit
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: because there's a story there too. You remember, back at
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Deaf American, the Far Side was a group that sort
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: of in our orbit and was signed by friends of
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: ours at Delicious Vinyl. And the Far Side did this
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: amazing first album and they were produced by this amazing
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: producer named Jay Swift. And then we found out that
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: Jay Swift was leaving the Far Side and I said, Rick, man,
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: this kid, he's great, right, And we were in a
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: bidding war with Tommy Boy to get Jay Swift's record label.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: I remember you and I spent a day with Jay
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: Swift and his people and his artists, driving around listening
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: to music, visiting their house. And you didn't do a
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: lot of that, Rick, Like, I knew that that was special,
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: and I felt like you were doing that for me
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: in a way. I actually don't even remember it happened,
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: but I know that if I was there, I was
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: there because you believed in it and I was supporting you.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: Oh you were man. So then at the end of
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: our day together, you very us sanely asked them, so
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: what are you looking for? Right? Finally came the business
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: question and Lamar Algie, who was working with Jay Swift
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: at time, he said a million dollars and we dropped
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: them off. We drove off, and we nearly got into
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: a car crash after we drove off because it was
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: just like more than we had ever paid really for anything.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: And we knew at that moment that it just was
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: not going to happen. And so Tommy Boy got Jay
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: Swift and his record label, and that was probably a
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: blessing in disguise because that did not end up too
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: well for Jay Swift for them. But the other path
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: of that equation was what's the Far Side gonna do
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: now that Jay Swift's not with them? They did this
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: amazing album. This is their their musical voice. And I
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: remember asking Mike Ross, what's Far Side gonna do? He says, oh, no,
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: don't worry. We found this kid in Detroit named j D.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: I said, Jay D Detroit. No hip hop has come
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: out of Detroit's what you know the only thing we'd
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: ever heard out of Detroit was all some dre and
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: the hardcore Committee from nineteen eighty eight, no conception that
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: there could be anything like that coming out of Detroit.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: Of course, in ninety five when we heard the Far
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: Side second album, when we heard Running, immediately we all knew,
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: like JD is it. So that is how I end
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: up flying to Detroit with Chino Excel in the summer
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety nine. It's my very first time in Detroit.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: We drive out to his neighborhood of Conan Gardens. We
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: park outside his house, the very famous basement door, this
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: white door on the side of the house. We walked downstairs.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: There's common sense. What's common sense doing here? He'd already
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: become common but I was still thinking, you know, I
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: didn't realize he was in the middle of making that
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: groundbreaking album like Water for Chocolate. We hung out, we
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: went to Mongolian barbecue, we went to the studio. It
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: was very It did not feel like history right, so
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: much so I brought my camera to Detroit and I
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: left it in the hotel room. What did I bring
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: my camera to Detroit to do? To take pictures of
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: us at the Motown Museum? Because I just didn't understand
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: that what I was witnessing in the basement was a
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: similar level of not just Detroit history, but music history.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: I hadn't you know, I was a knucklehead. As your
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: former partner once said about me, he's smart, but he
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: don't know nothing. That's me smart but I don't know nothing.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: So I didn't document it. And when we're at dinner together,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: me and Cino together were like a comedy team. I'm
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: just talking, talking, talking, talking, and James just just listening
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: because that's who he was. He was a listener. He
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: was doing what I should have been doing. I should
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: have been listening. So over the many years later when
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: I started the book, I've had to make up for
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: the fact that I wasn't a good listener back in
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine. So I know this is a long story.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: But I get back to La we start mixing me
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: album and it is only then that I because when
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: you're mixing, you're listening to things on repeat. What's wrong
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: with those high hats? Are those? Are those high hats?
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: Swung drums are wrong? What's going on here? And I
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: literally took it into my digital audio workstation, my computer.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: I lined up the wave form with the grid. I
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: measured where the where the high hats were and the
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: high hats were not swung. What is making them sound swung? Oh,
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: the snare is coming in early. The snare is coming
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: in before the backbeat. Why is he doing that? How
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: is he doing that? Why does it sound good? And
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: then suddenly you hear music that is not produced by
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: j D in the year two thousand and two thousand
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: and one. Suddenly that that rhythmic time feels everywhere. That
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: was the beginning of the realization for me, but it
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: didn't occur to me until I was a teacher many
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: years later at NYU that this could be something that
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: could be taught, and so I started teaching it as
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: a part of my regular music history course, and then
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: it became its own course. And one of the things
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: that we did when it became his own course was
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: that since nineteen ninety nine I had developed a personal
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: connection with Detroit. My wife is from Detroit. So nine
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: years after JD, I go to Detroit for a second
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: time to meet my wife's family, and then I really
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: meet Detroit itself. So now I have a personal network
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: in Detroit. We're going to take twenty students from New
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: York and bring them to Detroit, incredible. We take him
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: to the Techno Museum. We're going to take him to
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: the Motown Museum. We're going to take him to the
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: former basement. We're going to introduce him to his family,
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: friends and collaborators. Dennis Coffee of the Funk Brothers gave
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: us a tour of the Motown Museum. Amazing. We went
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: on bus tours of the East Side and the West Side.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: We talked to Pulitzer Prize willing comment it was it
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: was dope. It was dope. It was really really good.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: And then we came back to New York and then
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: we met with like, you know, the usual suspects like
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: Questlove came through and Bob Power. And so that's when
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: I realized there really wasn't enough stuff that was musically
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: accurate that really explained what this guy did. And usually
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: if you're going to do a book, it starts with
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: a little bit of anger, like righteous anger, like I
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: keep Rundy MC didn't just pop on the charts by themselves,
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: Like this didn't just happen. Oh we need to talk
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: about you know, Corey Robins, right, the same thing with Dila,
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: Like people acted like all Dilah did was turned off.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: The quantized function, the timing correct function on his drum
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: machine just so made me so angry, you know, the
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: healthy anger, the anger that gets you motivated. Yeah, that
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: is my long witted story about how this book began.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: How important do you think the family part, the bio
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: part of the story is for Dillah, Oh, it's integral.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: We're either a continuation of our family or response to
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: what's going on on our family, or both. James was
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: the product of two musicians, people who love music, but
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: whose careers in music were truncated. So he carried that
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: with him. And he was also the product of this
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: kind of raucous church environment, and he carried that with him.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: He was also a product of popular culture, and in
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: particular particular kind of popular culture. I don't know, Rick,
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: if you've ever seen clips on YouTube of The Scene,
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: this is one of the things that my wife hit
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: me to. If you grew up in Detroit in the
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: seventies and eighties, there was this TV show on w GPR,
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: one of the only black owned TV stations in the country,
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: called The Scene, and it was like Soul Train on
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: steroids that you would not like. The dances on this
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: show are unbelievable, and that's what Detroitter's go up when
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: they grew up with the electrifying mojo right one of
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: the only guys in radio to play Prince right out
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: the gate. And one of my favorite moments in the
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: book is how I call it sort of Dilla's rosebud
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: moment to use a Citizen Kane reference. He's watching this
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Sydney Potier Bill Cosby movie called Piece of the Action.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: It was part of that trilogy, that Potier Cosby trilogy,
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: every which way but loose that was that was Uptown
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: Saturday Night, Let's do it Again and Piece of the Action,
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: and like staple of black pop culture life in the
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, and his family had the video cassette and
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: the Anti family had movie days where they would just
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: sit around and watch movies all day. So I remember
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: hearing Jay Dilla only did probably twenty or less significant
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: interviews in his life. I was able to find you
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: sixteen of them for the book. And in an interview
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: that he did in two thousand and three with a
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: Swedish journalist, he just mentions offhand where he got his
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: loud and offbeat rhythmic sense from and he says, uh,
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: you know, I think I might have been thinking staple
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: singers piece of the action. I said, what, so there
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: is no song by the staple singers, but there's a
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: maybe a staple song, Pie said, And then I learn
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: it's part of this movie. But I listen to the song, Rick,
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: and there's nothing. Curtis Mayfield wrote it and produced it.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: It's a straight ahead funk song. So it's all right,
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: you know what, I'll watch the movie, right, And so
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: I watched the whole thing. Theme song comes on. Nothing unusual.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: We get to the very end of the movie and
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: there's a party at the end, and they pop a
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: cassette into it like a boombox, and they press play
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: and piece of the Action comes out, except this time
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: the crowd assembled are clapping, right because it's a party.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: But you know, in film, you're not recording the claps
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: in the room. They actually added it as fully afterwards,
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: and the claps are coming in and out of sync
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: with the music in ways that are sound completely artificial,
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: completely machine driven. Yea. And you listen to it, Rick,
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: and it's like you're listening to voodoo right. You're listening
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: to Deangel's album yeah, years in the future, because Deangel's
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: album sounds that way because they're trying to sound like James.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: And that was James moment where he's like, I want that,
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: I want that sound. That was my I don't know,
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: exciting moment. It's an incredible breakthrough discovery. It's a great
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: and I think at times that I've heard things where
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: the first time that I hear something, it's we'll call
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: it the wrong version, you know, a remix or something
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: before you hear the regular version. Like the first time
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: I heard the remix of the Buster record with ODB. Yeah,
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: if you hear the regular record, it's a good Busta
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: Rhymes record, but the remix is insane, right, you know.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: Funny Rick, because as I'm writing this book, I'm thinking
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: a lot about you, not just as a historical figure,
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: but also esthetically. There's this phrase that you used it
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: a bunch of times, but Hank Shockley said that he
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: got it from you, and it's this phrase, the worst shit.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: Oh man, that's the worst shit. But what you really
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: mean it's the best shit, But it's the worst ship
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: because it's not supposed to be happening. You're not supposed
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: to go You're not supposed to throw a piece of
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: a record in on top of something, and it's not
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: supposed to sound that jarring or that bad. Like it's
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: the worst shit, but it's the best shit. And that
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: was j D. If you talk to his brother John
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: Ella j and ask him, well, what is that all about?
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: Why did James do this stuff? He said, we like shit,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: this weird, We like shit, this sounds funny. There's a
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: great sense of we don't talk enough about humor in music.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: Not ha ha funny, but just people doing shit that
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: just makes them laugh spontaneously. Yeah, it's the best, the
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: best things that you get to experience when serious can
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: make you laugh, just because it's so jarring and so
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: real that the response is laugh. I'm always looking for
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: the laughter when working on things. It's always a good sign.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: John Karamonica The New York Times wrote an article and
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: I think it was either about you or about Kanye,
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: But it was a time when Kanye had come to
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: work with you to finish an album. It might have
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: been Jesus, I'm not I'm not sure. And John Karamonica
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: writes this where Rick walks out of the trailer. I
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: guess he was working in a trailer or something or
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: so Rick walks out, turns to the journalist, John says,
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: you would not believe what's going on in there. It's unbelievable.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: But I heard it both ways. I heard it as
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: literally unbelievable, and then ill So heard it as oh man,
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: it's the worst shit you know. And I'm sure it
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: was both. It was probably both, oh man. J D J.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: Dilla is firmly in that esthetic of the worst shit
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: being the best shit. What was he a fan of?
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: What was his musical taste? He loved everything. He was
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: a master listener. He was a stutterer, speaking as risky
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: sometimes socially for people who stammer or stutter. So he
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: just cultivated listening and questlove. Amir talks about when James
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: would listen to records often what he would find a
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: sample would be at the very end of this long
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: ass seven minute song. But it's brilliant. He just had
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: the ability to listen into almost anything. And I think
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: we're really primarily talking jazz for a lot of the
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: harmonic material, but he listened to progressive rock. One of
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: his most famous samples for Common is a Canterbury progressive
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: rock scene, Hugh Hopper and Alan Gowen right morning Order.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: And he listened to electronic music, and he listened to funk,
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: and he listened to army. He was a He had
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: a record library like no other. That is one sensory
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: memory I have of the basement is walking through his
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: record collection. It was formidable. Do you feel like he
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: would listen to music for entertainment or purely to gather
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: content to make things? I think it's both, you know,
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, listening is a habit. The first question your
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: conversation starter for many years and maybe it still is
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: what are you listening to? That's what you would ask.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: That's up such a brilliant, beautiful question to ask, what
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: are you listening to? Yeah? Well, I like to know,
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: you know, I want to learn about something I might
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: not know about, and I love listening to new things.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: That are if someone who's taste I care about like something,
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: there's no better recommendation to give it a shot. But
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: it also strikes me is the best way to know somebody? Right?
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: What are you listening to? He listened to everything? Man,
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: How important do you think the technology that he was
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: using was to his sound completely? And this is where
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: we get into like countering all the misinformation my favorite part,
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: because again people are saying all JD did was to
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: not quantize, which for those of you who don't make beats,
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: it's just simply turning off the function that glues your
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: notes any errant note to a regular time grid. And
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: he did do that. He did not quantize certain things,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: but he had two other really important techniques. The second
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: technique is what I called deceleration. When you take a
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: piece of music on a record and then you slow
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: it down, all of the tiny imperfections in human playing
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: elongate get bigger. And he loved that sound, right, So
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: a very fast high hat when he slows it down,
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: it's like the lopsidedness, the unevenness comes out. And so
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: that is the second way he used to play with time.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: But the third way, and the one that leads to
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: the most distinctive break with the past, is because Roger
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: Lynn created this MPC drum machine in a certain way.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: How can I describe it? As programmers we used essentially
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: there were two sort of major drum machines like coke
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: and pepsi, right, and the first one was the SP
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: twelve hundred and the second one was Roger Lynn's the MPC,
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: and both of them had this swing function on it
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: where you could take an even beat and make it uneven.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: But the thing about the SP twelve hundred is when
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: you made the beats uneven, when you turn that swing function,
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: everything would swing together. Every element that you put in
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: there would be lopsided. But for whatever reason, and Roger
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: Lynn can't even say that there was a good reason
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: that he did this, he made it possible to swing
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: every track individually, so some could be straight, some could
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: be swung, some could be swung and shifted right. I
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: mean you could pull it things a little earlier or
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: push them a little later. That wasn't possible like that.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: On the SP around nineteen ninety eight, you hear him
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: playing with this function, but in a really exaggerated way.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: Arthur Jafa of the very famous visual artist, he calls
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: it misusing the equipment. Let's say that one of his
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: signatures is to make the snare come I don't know,
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: sixty five milliseconds too early before the backbeat, and that
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: creates a long, short, long, short pattern between the kick
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: and the snare, which clashes then in like small ways
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: like Princess in the pee kind of ways with the
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: high hat which is straight, and then he's got these
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: decelerated samples flying in and then he's got some unquantized
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: bass and it's a mess. It's the worst shit, but
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: it's exhilarating. But it represents an advance, I argue for
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: those who care about these things. Theory was, but what
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: Jay Diller did was he put them on top of
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: each other simultaneously together. That's like what I wanted to accomplish.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: That was the thing that nobody was getting. Like, Yo,
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: this is a kind of advance in rhythm that only
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: happens like in once in a hundred years, and everybody
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: in the world is now using this Anderson Pok, Robert
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: glasper Hiatus Coyote, Kendrick Lamar, but nobody's drawing it back
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: to its source. So this was my attempt to do that. Yeah,
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: I would say that it may have happened before Jay Dilla,
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: but it wouldn't have happened with one person. So it
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: may have been the way two or three or a
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: group of players played, whatever their own inconsistencies were when
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: they played together. That you know, if the drummer was
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: leaning forward and if the bass player was leaning back
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: on the groove, and if there was a percussion player
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: who didn't really keep such great time, you know, playing along,
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: like trying to glue it together, like you could get
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: these moments where it's one of the things that the
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: way I think about it, I know about the Voodoo
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: album first, before Dillah, I didn't know about Dillah. My
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: first experience of that feeling came in the Voodoo album,
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: which is to this day one of my very favorite albums.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: And so now when I hear Dilla, it reminds me
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: of Voodoo. But for me, it's not better than Voodoo,
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: because again, that was my way in my way in
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: was Voodoo, And in that case, it always feels like
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: it's right on the verge of falling apart, but it's
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: not doing it because of the way it's technically made.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: It's the way they're playing it, but they're playing it
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: to sound like Dyla's grooves. Yeah, And don't get me wrong,
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: there are plenty of precedence in music for both conflict
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: between straight and swung and micro rhythmic conflict like in
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: hip hop. The Rizza did not smooth out the edges
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: of things. So when he sampled substitution, right, it wasn't
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: quite lined up with the grid, so you do get
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: this kind of lopsided thing that clashes with other things.
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: But it was not like it wasn't like a governing aesthetic.
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: He wasn't trying. It wasn't an intention so much. And
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: I know that's a funny word to use, right, No,
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: it's true. It's not the grand gesture of the work,
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: and it's not in all of his work. It's on
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: occasion funny though. Rick. One of the occurrences of this
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: sort of coming in and out of sync again not
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: necessarily intentional, but something that even Questlove noticed was our
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: record with the Nons World Ultimate, because they used a
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: sequencer that sometimes lagged behind the simpty that was on
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: the tape. So you'll get these moments on this album
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: World Ultimate where things are and then it releases and
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: it's weird like that was where we were in nineteen
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: ninety five. But again it was not intentional as sort
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: of result. Also, if you listen to Tutti FRUITI like
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: the drummer is swinging and little Richard is banging out
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: straight eights at the beginning of the song before they
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: kind of come in line with each other. These things
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: have existed before. I guess the reason that I'm going
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: so linguistically hard for Dilah is not so much the
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: hero worship of it or to locate it in this
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: one guy, but to say, the reason that music sounds
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: the way it does today is because all these people
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: are tracing their own musical rhythmic conflict back to what
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: he did. Absolutely no question. As you say in the book,
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: there was music before Dylan. There's music after Dilah, and
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: it's different. We'll be right back with more from Dan
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: Charnis after the break. We'll be right back with more
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: from Dan Charness after the break. So you started in Detroit.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: Was that where the research began. Yeah, I mean it
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: started literally with that first trip and then my second trip.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: You know, my wife, my then girlfriend says to me,
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna take you into Detroit. I'm going to show
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: you Detroit, but show me the physical layout of Detroit,
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: show me the pieces of history that made it. You know.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: You know from the book, it's a really really interesting
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: story and it's a metaphor. It's literally a physical metaphor
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: for what happened there. The map bears traces of all
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: of that stuff, the matrix of culture that created motown,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: all that genius, right, you know, it began with that
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: and then intensified with the class began to make friends
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: with Dillah's friends in Detroit, with his family. And the
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: other helpful thing was that when Dilla moved to Los
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: Angeles for the last two years of his life, he
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: became friends with my friends, Like all the people that
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: I knew, Brian Cross and Eric Coleman and Ret Maddock
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: and the beat junkies and c minus those are my peeps,
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: like my homies. So I felt like I had that
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: network too. One of the things that seems to be
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: a big theme of the book, unintentionally but interestingly, it's
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: about regional hip hop. Talk about how hip hop was
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: her regional endeavor at that point in time and what
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: it meant to be from a place like Detroit. Well,
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: hip hop started as regional because New York is a region, right.
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: New York is actually a very insular region. Nothing else
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: in the country sounds like New York. But because New
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: York is New York, it has this overweening influence on
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: everything else. As hip hop made its way out like
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: first to Philadelphia, then the Los Angeles, right, locals have
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: their own culture, so they pull certain things from hip
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: hop culture and then sort of stick with them. So
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: Miami built hip hop culture at a time when you
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: Rick were producing things like License to Ill. So it
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: was a very t R eight o eight driven kind
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: of sound that became Miami bass, almost like still Born.
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: And that sounds very unfair to Miami bass, but it's
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: like it just it zoned in on that one part
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: of hip hop, and the South loved Houston, Atlanta, Miami,
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: Memphis all love that deep eight o eight sound because
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: it's car culture. What better to bump in your car
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: than something that's like hugely bass driven. Mammi bass is
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: also fast and like a song like Brass Monkey is
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: really quintessentially what we think of as Miami bass, even
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: though there wasn't such a thing then. It's very bizarre
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: when I tell my students about trap is sort of
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: the dominant hip hop sound a day, but it really trap.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: It all kind of points back to License to Ill.
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: For me, that change in hip hop sound very much
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: is reflected in what the dominant sound of about this today.
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: But you know, Los Angeles had its own take on
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: hip hop, which was very sort of electronic and also
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: funk driven like p funk, because that was the style
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: out there. Detroit was interesting. Detroitters loved West Coast hip hop,
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: but there's this island of East Coast centric hip hop
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: fans in Detroit who have their own little singular culture.
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: So Detroit is not producing the stuff that most Detroitters like.
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: This culture that emerges around this Chinese restaurant called Stanley
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: Hangs Manua Cafe, which is called the Rhythm Kitchen, and
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: then the hip Hop Shop where Eminem comes out of,
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: Proof comes out of you know, it's very insular again,
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: and they felt like they couldn't even get much attention
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: from Detroit radio and didn't. The whole bridge to radio
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: with hip hop is interesting because for a long time
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: it was just not welcome. It was beneath the radio
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: standard of what they played. That is still to me
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: a great story. Essentially, one of the only reasons that
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: hip hop got to where it was on New York radio,
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: the birthplace of hip hop, is because two program directors
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: hated each other so much that one was willing to
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: play a music that they hated. These run DMC records
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: to try to grab Frankie Crocker's audience away from him.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: You know, it's crazy, but that's how it happens sometimes.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: Sometimes a lot of history is just personality driven. But
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: it was hard because when you're doing a book like this,
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: especially with a community that is wounded and protective, it
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: takes time to win the trust of folks and to
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: keep it and to let them know that they were
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: right to trust you. Part of that for me is
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: when I interview folks and I write, I read back
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: to them the sections that concern their thoughts, feelings and actions. Beautiful,
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: And I know that there's some journalists who do not
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: do that because they do not want to give up
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: any sense of control. Yeah, that's beauty material. Love that
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: it works. Was there any point in the reading back
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: where an interview he said, I don't exactly mean it
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: like that. You may want to change a lot, And
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: that's why I do it because I make mistakes all
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: the time, and I want to catch every single one.
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: That's my virgo nature. I want to catch every single one.
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: And believe there's still some mistakes. I'm still compiling like
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: a little errata of things that need to be changed.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: For the paperback then not a lot, but you know,
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: they're all important. But mostly when I would read back,
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: people would say, yeah, you got that right, Like wow, yah,
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: you got that right. That's exactly how it happened. Even
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: in areas of conflict. There is a There is a
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: moment in the book where very famous Detroit DJ is
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: literally struck by another Detroit pop figure, you know, in
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: a public place, and very embarrassing, you know, for the
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: person who's being struck, and somewhat embarrassing for the person
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: who's doing the striking. Right, But both of them said,
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: when I read that section back to them, that's the
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: way it happened, and that there's a certain amount of
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: healing that comes from there. Does that make sense. Yeah,
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: it's there's an acceptance and it's it's set out loud.
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: It's like it's been aired and there's the reality of
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: the situation and acknowledging it and it's not a personal
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: secret anymore, or it's dealt with and now we can
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: move past. It seems great. Perhaps it's naive of me
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: to feel this way, but I hope that there is
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: some healing that happens in this community. It's hard, it's
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: hard when somebody dies, as you know, it's hard dealing
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: with the mess that that person has left behind and
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: the conflicts that that causes, and sometimes it takes years
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: to come back from it, and their families were they
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: never heal after that moment. But my hope is that
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: when you're in an argument with somebody, usually the point
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: the argument ends and the healing begins when you finally
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: get an answer to what the other person was thinking,
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: What were you thinking when you said that to me?
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: And when they finally tell you, that's when you can
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: move past it. I'm hoping, I guess I'm just what
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: I'm saying, is I hoping that the book does that
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: in some way. It's at least as close as you
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: can get. Now. Even with that said, how often do
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: different versions of the same story come from different people
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: and either not match exactly or in some cases they
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: oppose each other? How often? Very often? And if you
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: interview two hundred people, your odds are you're going to
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: find the truth. There are certain things that I kind
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: of feel what the truth is, but I have not
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: been able to I can't literally say, like the of course,
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: the very famous story of who produced this Janet Jackson
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: song Got Till It's Gone. I really believe that Terry
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: Lewis and Jimmy jam produced that song. There are still
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: folks who will not believe it, despite the lack of
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: evidence for that. Did you talk to Jimmy and Terry.
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: I didn't talk to Jimmy and Terry, but I talked
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: to the person who literally programmed the machine that that
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: was on, because Jimmy and Terry were on the record
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: already very clearly, so I focused on, you know, the
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: hands on people, so to speak. I truly believe that
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: they produced the song. But then that really makes the
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: book more interesting to me, the story more interesting. Why
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: would James lie? Why would he say he produced this
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: song and didn't. And that has a lot to do
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: with not only his own struggles to become known and
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: to get credit and to make a name for himself,
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: but also his family's story because his father had a
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: very similar story. It's a shame by the spinners claim
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: that he wrote it. Nobody in Motown confirms the story
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: people having heard of him. It's hard, you know, especially
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: because it's family myth. And I felt some kind of
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: way about poking at family myths and it's interesting, really interesting,
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: and it's true that all he had to model was
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: that behavior. So you know, like that would make sense,
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: Like if you grew up seeing this behavior, you think
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: that's how you deal with that situation. You know. I
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: think about him in that moment where you know the
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: story of JD. For folks who don't know, he was
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: essentially plucked out of obscurity. He was just a beatmaker
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: in Detroit until one of George Clinton's band members, Aunt Fiddler,
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: introduced James to Q Tip, who was the lead producer
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: and vocalist for Tribe Call Quests. So q Tip literally
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: takes this guy out of Detroit, introduces him to everybody
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: buster rhymes, delas soul, mad skills the far side. He
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: makes him essentially like a member of a Tribe Call
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: Quest and he doesn't ask for anything for q Tip
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: did not ask for anything. But what he did propose
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: is that James become a part of this collective called
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: the Uma, the Brotherhood, and it's supposed to be JD,
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: q Tip, Ali, Raphael Sadiq, and this guy named Michael
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: Archer from Virginia who we now know as D'Angelo. The
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: idea behind the Uma is the same idea behind a
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: tribe call quest. We do all the work, but we
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: credit it to the collective. Right, and this is how
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: other things were done, like the Hitman and the track Masters,
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: the dust Brothers. Right. But JD felt, and I think rightly,
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: he felt truncated by this. Right. He felt like he
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: couldn't make a name for himself, that the literal structure
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: that his mentor had created had bottled him up. And
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: then he's beginning to see other people in the world
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: use his sound and his rhythm sick mares, and he
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: can't even be himself. But how do you tell your mentor,
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: the guy who's plucked you out of obscurity, that you
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: don't want to be in business with him. It took
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: him years, four years to have that conversation, and in
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: the meantime he did passive aggressive things. And I believe
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: that the claiming the ownership of God to what's gone
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: was one of those things. But I understand it. I
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: don't think any less of James for it. He's a product,
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: like you said, of everything that he grew up with. Yeah,
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: who would you say of everyone you spoke to? Was
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: the most helpful interview for the book by I mean everybody.
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, obviously his mother and Marine was very helpful,
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: but the mother of his youngest child, joy Let Hunter,
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: was also very helpful, even though the two of them
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: are probably the most in conflict with each other in
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: terms of the reality and rules. I was very fortunate
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: to be able to talk to Q Tip, who was
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: very protective of you know, and rightly so. And you know,
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: literally three days before the manuscript got turned in, I
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: had a two hour conversation with d'angela sitting in my
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: mother in law's den. Wow, you know, talking about nothing
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: but James. Yeah. His relationship in the studio with James great.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: So I'm just grateful for every every single one, but
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: also to be able to talk about that Detroit community
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: like Rosenberg. Paul Rosenberg, right, was an early collaboratory of
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: j D. And then he goes on on this whole
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: other trajectory. I sent him a copy of your book,
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: not knowing that he read it, and he's like, yeah,
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: Dan killed it. It's like I said it to a
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: bunch of people already just because I thought they'd like it.
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: But that's the thing for me, Like, if the Detroiters
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: like it, I feel like I've done the best I
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: can do, and I almost don't care about anything else.
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: Tell me about what an interview for a book is, like,
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: you know, it's like this, I I mean, it really
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: is about being open and listening and starting at the beginning,
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: like you started at the beginning with me, because that's
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: a great place to start the beginning. The worst thing
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: to do is walk into an interview like, so, how
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: did you meet J? D? Horrible? Right? No, who are
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: your parents? Where are you from? What are your earlist memories?
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: What did you want to do? Where'd you go to
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: high school? Who are your people? Right? That's where you start.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: I was taught that the two most important questions you
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: ask in an interview are how did you feel about that?
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: And what happened next? Because eventually the questions start asking themselves,
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: or rather the answers will just come. When people are interviewed,
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: not just by me, but I think by any good interviewer,
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: sometimes they say, oh, man, that was like therapy or
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: that was really good, because all therapy is psychotherapy is
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: somebody is there to listen to you. They're not there
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: to reply to what you're saying. They're not there to
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: even necessarily to actively try to make you feel better.
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: They're just listening, and it's so therapeutic to be listened to.
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: Most people want to talk and tell their stories and
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: have somebody really really listen to them. And I guess
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm probably come by it honestly because my
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: mother is a psychotherapist and a marriage counselor. And I
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: do say that sometimes writing this book or reporting it
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: was like doing marriage counseling on two hundred people at once,
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: a lot of held in thoughts and hurt feelings, and
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: I'm glad that the interview process and then even having
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: things read back to them makes them feel heard. Is
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: it different interviewing a musician or an artist versus what
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: I'll call a layperson. Yeah, well, it depends on the
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: caliber of the musician. Because I relied on very very
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: high caliber musicians to be able to articulate things. That
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: was the most important thing for me in this book,
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: other than the things we've been talking about. Very little
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: writing about music nowadays is about the mechanics of music,
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: how it actually works, what are these rhythms and how
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: were they created? And very little done for sampled music, right,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: like most people don't know license to ill and raising
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: hell were not created sampling drum machines. They were created
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: running audio right in from the record to a click
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: track on the master tape. That's like so important for
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: people to understand the level of creativity, right, you know,
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: that goes into something like that. So I wanted very
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: much to understand the mechanics of what's going on with
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: the drum machines and with sampling, and then also theoretically
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: what's happening. So speaking to somebody like Jason Moran, one
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: of I think the greatest musical minds alive. His whole
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: thing was not so much the rhythm of JD, but
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: how he resolved harmony. He wanted to talk about JD's
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: use of common tone. He talks about JD as an MC.
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: He calls it facing the beat, facing the rhythm, meaning
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: that if the high hat is going, JD is actually
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: going to pull inspiration from the motion of that high
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: hat and he's going to reflect it in his verse.
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: That to me is the benefit of talking to somebody
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: who is a master of their craft. And so there
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: were musicians who I spoke to, both programmers and traditional
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: musicians who could really really do that. D'Angel was like that,
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: questloves like that. In deciding what was going to go
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: into the book, how do you decide the balance of
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: personal versus professional? And there may even be three categories.
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: There might be technical, professional, and personal. Yeah. Man, there
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: was the musicology thread, there was the biography thread, and
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: then there was the context thread. And that second chapter
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: of the book, straight Time Swing Time was me sort
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: of stacking all three of them on top of each other,
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: and I did not know if it was going to work.
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: The main tension in writing a book like this is
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: between fan service and trying to bring new people in
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: who don't know anything about hip hop or j D.
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: There were ways that I had to keep things very simple,
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: but there were also stories that I absolutely needed to
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: tell because if they weren't in here, I don't think
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: that they would be ever told. So the book is
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: longer than probably I would have even liked it to be.
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: But there were certain things I felt I had to
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: do for the fans, the core fans, and then other
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: stories that I needed to make sure that I can't
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: assume that everybody knows what sampling is, So I need
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: to tell you the story about Roger Lynn, because that
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: is a fascinating story. It's a great story. And I
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: used his equipment and I didn't know that story. I
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: loved it. How about that Tom Petty? Incredible? Also the
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: sequencer player in the manual? How did you come across?
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: Did you happen to read the manual? I bought an
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: MPC three thousand before I taught the Diller class in
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, because I would be remiss if I'm trying
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: to teach about this dude, and I don't know how
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: the instrument works. Incredible, And so I opened the manual
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: and there it is, and it's funny. I read it
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: back to Roger Lynn, and Roger Lynn's like, I don't
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: even remember writing that. It sounds like I don't know,
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: you know, maybe like he didn't even have a memory
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: of it. He didn't know how profound it was. I
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: thought that was super profound, incredible because people are to
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: read predicting the future? Incredible? Did you often do follow
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: up interviews all the time? Sometimes, especially if there were
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: two characters or three characters in conflict, it would be
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: like a round robin. I'd go back and forth and
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: back and forth, just trying to get there. You know,
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: there was a scene about a fight between James and
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: the mother of his child, and then fiance and I
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: had to go file a Freedom of Information Act request
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: to get a police report, and even the police report
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: was sort of like had two realities in it because
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: obviously the police weren't there what had happened. They were
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: just there after what had happened happened. So yeah, going
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: back time and again, but I just think, I think
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: every time I went back it was worth it. Every
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: third or fourth call totally worth it. Glad that I
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: did it. How much of your interpretation is in the
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: book versus just what you heard, just what you took in,
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: I would say there's a good deal I allowed myself
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: because I did a great deal of reporting. I felt
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: I had a bit of latitude because I'm also dealing
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: with somebody who was silent mostly during his life and
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: is silent now. I gave myself a little latitude to interpret,
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: latitude to lay out a theory. I didn't want to
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: put thoughts or words into anybody's mouths, and so I
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: was really careful about that. But I also felt like
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: as an author and a journalist, I did have to
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: have an intuitive relationship with James. That intuition was based
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: again resting on reporting, resting on talking to his friends,
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: to his family. But where that intuition comes in, it's like, Okay,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: why did James do that? We were talking about God
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: till it's gone. Why would James say that? Why would
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: James say he did something when he didn't. That's where
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: the empathy comes in. That's like, Okay, let me try
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: to put myself in this person. And I know there's
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: a lot of differences between me and this person. You know,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: I'm white, he's black. I'm from New York, he's from Detroit.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: I come from an upper middle class family. He comes
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: from a working class family. All those differences. But then again,
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: I'm in the hip hop business. He was in the
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: hip hop business. I made beats, He made beats. All
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: of those things play in I allowed myself to feel
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: certain things. So yeah, I do think that he was
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: feeling some kind of way about his mentor Q Tip
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: walking into a recording studio with Terry Losing, Jimmy Jamma
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: Jenny Jackson and coming out of that studio with a
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: song that sounded like an Uma JD record, but JD
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: not being a part of it. At all, not being
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: able to partake in it at all, and not being
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: able to be JD even on the stuff he is producing. Man,
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: that would make me hot too. It make me hot.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: That's where the intuition comes in. So that answer your question. Yeah, interesting.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: The last question is how do you feel like you
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: were changed by this story? You live your projects, right Rick,
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: They nurture you, but they also break you. At the
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: same time, you're seeing me sort of post like it
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: has been a fantastic launch. When you release a piece
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: of work into the world, it's no longer yours, right,
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: it doesn't belong to you anymore, And so that part
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: has been kind of amazing to watch. You know, I've
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: never been a New York Times best selling person before, Right,
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: that's nice. At the same time, there's a part of
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: me that's just like kind of broken by it, and
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: I Yank's okay, you know. I mean that's why I'm
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: talking to you on this day, at this moment right now,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: Because who is the person that led me to meditation
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: in yoga, who is the person that gave me some
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: things to gather? It makes sense that I'm talking to
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: you today. So we're holy, we're broken yes, you have
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: any idea what you're gonna do next? Yeah, I will
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: say this, I do have an idea of a figure,
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: musical figure who really needs this treatment. But I will
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: keep my own counsel on that for the moment. But
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: I guess, Rick, after being behind the desk and doing
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: things like an R and whatever, I actually I finally
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: arrived at the fact that I am an artist. I
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: have an artist temperament. I'm actually more introverted than I
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: am extroverted. And you know, I get better late than
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: ever for that realization. So like an artist, I don't
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: know what the hell I'm will do next. Great, but
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: it'll probably yell at me before I do it. Beautiful, Well,
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: I love the book. Thank you so much for talking
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: to me. Great to see you. It's awesome to see you. Man.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: You know you know I love you. I love you
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: so much. Rick, You're a great teacher. And often I
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: use your wisdom with my son. Sometimes I say to him,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: this is what he said to me. And like all wisdom,
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: dogma thinks it's true one hundred percent of the time,
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: but wisdom knows that it's only true ninety nine percent
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: of the ton. And you would say to me, Dan,
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: there's nothing worth getting that upset over. Yeah, that's good.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: It's so liberating. That's from you. That and the worst shit.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: Thank you. I can't wait till we get to do
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: this again. All right, Love you forever, Rick, Love you too, sir.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: All Right peace. Thanks to Dan Charming This for walking
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: us through the reporting and writing of his new book,
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: Dilla Time, The Life and afterlife of Ja Dilla, the
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: hip hop producer who reinvented rhythm. It's out now everywhere.
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: To hear some of our favorite Jay de Las songs
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: and some of Dan's work at Death American. Check out
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: the playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: broken Record. Broken Record is produced help from Lea Rose,
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: Jason Gambrel, Bentaladay, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Mia LaBelle.
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
• 1:06:51
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• 1:07:01
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• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: Expect any beats. I'm Justin Richmond, h