THE CULT OF J DILLA
By Simon Reynolds for http://www.guardian.co.uk/, June 16, 2009

Since his sudden death in 2006, the impact of hip-hop producer J Dilla has grown ever bigger, with an entire wave of music influenced by his legacy. But what made him special?

Record stores are dying in my neighbourhood, the East Village of New York. The only ones that are hanging in there, even prospering, belong to a particular type: boutiques that offer a tidied-up version of the crate-digging experience, without the dust and the graft, the knees-bent flicking through musty cardboard boxes in roach-infested basements. Smart-looking and well-organised, these stores have racks made of unvarnished wood, while their wares – funk and soul, bebop and fusion, soundtracks and library music – tend to be selective and pricey. As well as selling source vinyl for the breaks and samples prized by DJs and producers, these stores also stock vintage rap 12-inches and current underground hip-hop (always on vinyl, of course). By the counter, they'll have copies of Wax Poetics on sale.

Several years ago I was in one of these shops, just about to put on some headphones and sift through an armful of vinyl, when some wondrous music streamed out of the store's sound system. All rippling ribbons of synth and quiet-storm diva murmuring and gasps, it was the most swooningly cosmic thing I'd heard in a small eternity. As I headed down the aisle to the back of the store where the DJ lurked, the thought popped into my head: "P'raps this is Dilla?"

I don't know why, really, since I only had a vague idea of who he was, having read about his recent death and gleaned that he was this big-deal cult producer. J Dilla, aka Jaydee, aka James Dewitt Yancey, is someone I had "slept on". To be honest, I avoid that whole backpacker rap/Premier-is-God/Wax Poetics area. (In fact, I only go to these crate-digger boutiques because they sometimes have 60s and 70s rock and weird avant-garde stuff.) I'm one of those people who believe the sector that kept rap vital these last dozen years wasn't the underground but that cusp zone between "the streets" and commercial mainstream: Cash Money, Ruff Ryders, Ludacris, Lil Jon. Mostly dirty south, in other words: hip-hop that isn't encumbered by crippling reverence towards its old-skool past. Still, sometimes as a critic you just absorb a sense of the musical landscape through osmosis and sure enough when I asked the DJ what record he was playing, he reluctantly (the attitude, typical for this kind of store, seemed to be "if you need to ask, you're not someone who needs to know") showed me the instrumentals version of Dilla's posthumous album, The Shining.

Over the next week I got hold of as much Dilla as I could: stuff he'd done with his group Slum Village and in collaboration with Madlib, solo records like Donuts, Ruff Draft, Welcome to Detroit and, naturally, The Shining (where I discovered that the track that blew my mind in the store was called Won't Do).

So what made Dilla special? If you could break his style down into three main components, they'd be his way with a vocal sample, his way with a beat, and his way with synths. As an example of the first, let's look at a really old track that's on the first volume of Dillanthology: The Light by Common. I loved this when it came out in 2000, but I'd never realised that Dilla produced it until I got Dillanthology. The Light is pretty much the only Common tune I've ever cared for and such was my antipathy for the rapper that for a long while I considered the track a kind of sample-delivery machine: you wait patiently through the verses for the gorgeous, glistening chorus, which is derived from Open Your Eyes by Bobby Caldwell, a white-but-sounds-black singer who hit big in early 80s America with a similar "rock'n'soul" sound to Hall & Oates.

If you compare the original song (and do check out Caldwell's hat while you're about it) with The Light you can clearly see Dilla's artistry: he's taken an already lovely, if slightly schmaltzy, song and created another song out of it. Open Your Eyes is a guy telling a woman to stop pining for her lost lover, because what she needs is right here in front of her. Combining different bits of the chorus into a new chorus, Dilla extracts from the original song a more mystical statement about L.O.V.E. that fits Common's lyric (which I grew to find, um, touching) like a glove. The most extraordinary, steal-your-breath part of the Light comes at the end where Dilla takes vocal fragments from various points in the song – a line here, a curl of grace notes there – and weaves them into what sounds like a stretch of spontaneous soul-singer extemporising. It's as though Caldwell is right there in the studio with Dilla and Common, scatting over the beat.

Talking of beats: Dilla's signature, widely forged at the moment, is what tech-heads refer to as "unquantised drums". Quantisation is a procedure that makes rhythms perfectly regular and grooves superhumanly tight. The gist of what Dilla did (and I invite comments-box experts to fill in the gaps in excruciating technical detail) is to avoid quantising and go for a looser, human feel, fitful and fallible, sometimes pushing "off-beat" to the edge of plain wrong. Hip-hop headz talk of Dilla as the catalyst for "the return of the boom-bap", a phrase originally from KRS-One's 1993 album Return of the Boom Bap.

Sometimes rendered boom-boom-bap, it's a phonetic evocation of hip-hop's classic drum pattern. The booms are the kicks, the bap is the snare, and the combination is that loping midtempo groove that tugs at your neck and your head, not so much at your hips or your feet. As it has developed in underground rap circles these last 15 years, boom-bap has come to refer to hip-hop for nodders and smokers. To backpackers it's the pulse of life itself, but to these ears, boom-bap strikes me as being as capable of being blandly formulaic as any other kind of beat. Dilla did his fair share of perfunctorily functional grooves, but at his most creative he deconstructed the rhythm, placing the booms and baps, hi hats and claps, in an off-relationship to each other, clustered too close or coming in too late, but always retaining a ghostly relationship to hip-hop feel.