7 Takeaways From Best-selling New Bio On Producer J Dilla

The late James Yancey, a.k.a. J Dilla, photographed in 2000 at the Key Club on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. (Gregory Bojorquez / Getty Images)

The first time you hear an instrumental track produced by the late beatmaker J Dilla, it will likely sound a little … wrong. Drunken bass drums. Swaying snares. Off-kilter cymbal crashes. Vocal samples that enter at weird times.

A world away from the precise beat patterns and samples enabled by drum machines and modern recording software, the tracks that Dilla produced starting in the mid-1990s in collaboration with artists including Pharcyde, A Tribe Called Quest, the Roots, Common, Erykah Badu and Madlib seemed to wobble within the rhythmic grid as if the machine’s innards were made of Jell-O.

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The artist, born James Yancey, is the focus of the new book “Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm.” Written by bestselling author and New York University associate professor Dan Charnas, it vividly outlines the ways in which J Dilla shifted the notion of rhythm in the digital age.

“It was elastic — like the feeling of going faster, then slower, then faster, then slower, but never actually varying one’s speed,” writes Charnas of one rhythmic technique Dilla perfected.

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J Dilla, ‘Lightworks’

Dilla died at 32 of the rare blood disease TTP (thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura) in 2006 at his apartment in Hancock Park, but not before establishing himself as a fearless innovator. His ideas on the power of precisely imperfect beats and the ways that looseness generates a certain swing have informed contemporary music ever since.

This month, “Dilla Time” debuted in the top 10 of most major bestseller lists, a feat few could have predicted in the immediate aftermath of the producer’s death. He never produced a top 10 record, but in the 16 years since, countless high-profile fans and former collaborators have adamantly argued for Dilla’s place in the pantheon, including Questlove, Pharrell Williams and Peanut Butter Wolf.

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In the introduction, Charnas makes a grand claim about the artist’s influence, writing that J Dilla “is the only producer-composer to emerge from hip-hop and, indeed, all electronic music to fundamentally change the way so-called traditional musicians play. And the core of Dilla’s contribution is a radical shift in how musicians perceive time.”

That innovation, Charnas explains, is called “Dilla time.”

What follows are seven takeaways from the book, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.