J Dilla's Donuts (33 1/3)

by Jordan Ferguson

  With the dominance of techno in the Detroit club scene, the city’s hip-hop lovers would have to find alternative venues.

  No discussion of hip-hop in Detroit during the 1990s happens without a mention of Maurice Malone. Originally a fashion designer who promoted techno and dance parties on the side, Malone moved to New York in 1990 to seek out new markets for his clothing designs and educate himself about the fashion industry. During his time there, he became enamored with that city’s flourishing hip-hop scene, and returned to Detroit a year later with a clear mandate: bring the energy and enthusiasm he saw in NY back to the Motor City.

  What initially began as a series of rotating events and concerts called the Rhythm Kitchen, centered around a weekly function at Stanley Hong’s Mannia Café on East Baltimore Street, eventually expanded into the Hip-Hop Shop, a retail space on West 7 Mile Road. Essentially an outlet to sell Malone’s designer jeans and other items, the marquee attractions were the open mic battles that took place on Saturdays between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. The Saturday battles and the shop as a whole became a mandatory destination for hip-hop heads, a space wholly dedicated to the love and appreciation of the music and the culture, and a place for the city’s growing crew of artists to network and collaborate.

  Malone built on the success of the Shop and began running events in The Shelter on East Congress Street, located in the basement of St. Andrew’s Hall (made famous as the scene of 8 Mile’s climactic rap battles). The night quickly proved to be such a success it moved to Saturday nights and took over the entire venue as “Three Floors of Fun,” giving artists wider exposure to a suburban audience that would come into the city on weekends, thanks in part to the enthusiasm and advocacy of resident DJ House Shoes.

  Between the Rhythm Kitchen parties, the battles at The Hip-Hop Shop and the “Three Floors of Fun,” at St. Andrew’s, by the mid-1990s Detroit had finally built itself a nurturing environment and community for aspiring MCs and producers, including artists such as Phat Kat, Elzhi, Eminem, and Dilla’s first group Slum Village.

  Hi

  James DeWitt Yancey entered the world on February 7, 1974, the first of Beverly and Maureen “Ma Dukes” Yancey’s three children. The family, raised in the Conant Gardens neighborhood on Detroit’s northeast side, was steeped in music: Beverly was a bassist and vocalist who toured playing halftime shows with the Harlem Globetrotters, Maureen classically trained in opera and jazz vocal.

  “Jazz was the music he grew up with and was raised on,” said Ma Dukes. “Since he was a couple of months old, he wouldn’t go to sleep unless he heard jazz, so my husband had to sing and play for him to go to sleep. It was his lullaby music as a child in his nursery.”1

  Dilla’s mother encouraged a love of music and performance throughout her family, scheduling weekly entertainment nights where each member would perform for the others.

  “Every Friday night was Family Night, everybody in the household had to perform, entertain each other. It was cheap! You didn’t have to pay to entertain. You eat dinner and everyone would go in the living room. I had mics in the living room like people have cocktail tables. So you just plug in, grab your mic and do your thing. But everyone had to do something.”2

  Dilla’s love for music quickly changed from a private, personal appreciation into a DJ’s need to spread the gospel of the music they loved with others.

  “He started playing records at two years old—he’d spin records in Harmonie Park,” said Ma Dukes. “My husband would get off of work and take James to the park, and he’d have his arms full of 45s—his little arms, you know, fit right through the holes. He’d take his 45s and his record player to the park and spin records—adult records, not kiddie records. My husband would take him record shopping so he could play all the new releases.”3

  However, despite a continued passion and talent for music that followed him through childhood and into high school, his parents began to have concerns about his future. When Dilla won admission to Detroit’s Davis Aerospace Technical High School, Ma Dukes strongly encouraged him to go, to nurture a natural gift he had for the sciences.

  “You don’t want your children to grow into something that can’t be fulfilled within themselves, and I think that’s where the fear came in … I insisted that he go to [Davis]. This was an opportunity of a lifetime; they chose one student from every middle school each year. It was a hard process because [students] graduated with a year of college.”4 Dilla went reluctantly, not wanting to disappoint his mother, though it wasn’t long before his primary interest manifested. He was soon spinning records at school parties at least once a month as DJ Silk. Desperate to keep him enrolled at Davis, his mother struck a compromise.

  “His counter-action was, ‘Well, I’m doing these DJ gigs, you want me to go there, my name is DJ Silk, I should be wearing silk shirts.’ So I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to give you that. You’ll have every silk shirt.’ He had a rainbow of colors, including pink, which he was not afraid to wear. That drew a lot of attention. He knew who he was so it didn’t bother him.”5

  Adding further tension to an already strained situation was Dilla’s involvement with local musician Joseph “Amp” Fiddler, a session keyboard player, songwriter and producer who toured with George Clinton’s P-Funk All-Stars. Fiddler was a neighborhood success story (the Yanceys lived across the street from the church he attended) who would offer any interested area youth an invitation to visit his home studio and gain experience on his equipment, to learn the mechanics of sampling and production. For the young Dilla, it was too good an offer to resist.

  “That’s where we bumped heads, because he was supposed to be at school early for lab class, but he was at Amp’s all night in the studio … He was supposed to be at school—at a school I wanted him to excel in!”6

  Amp cut a unique figure throughout the city: tall and lanky with an expansive afro and beatnik beard, often sporting large sunglasses with concaved lenses that covered much of his face, he was a walking symbol to the kids in Conant Gardens that not only could they succeed and be true to themselves, but they could transcend an environment already feeling the realities of growing poverty and the crack epidemic.

  “I would say Amp served, in my opinion, he served more as a reference to like, ‘You can do this. You can get out of here, you can see the world, you can wear weird-ass boots and still be relevant,’ ”7 said Robert “Waajeed” O’Bryant, another onetime Conant Gardens resident and longtime Dilla confidante.

  For his part, Dilla made an early impression on his first mentor.

  “He was the most respectful, the most gentleman-like kid that I had come into my house because everyone else was wild,” said Fiddler. “He was the only one that seemed to have integrity, like, if he said he was coming at three o’clock, he came at three o’clock. And a lot of people don’t get that your word is everything and his word [was] bond.”8

  Dilla soon became a fixture at Fiddler’s, making his first attempts to transition from spinning other people’s beats to making his own, applying the methodology he’d picked up during his years of study at Davis. Even at that early stage in his development, his nascent talent emerged.

  “When he first started making beats,” recalled Fiddler, “he was just looping, but he had a particular way of doing it. Most people would start on the one of the kick, but he would start on the snare or the hi-hat or some other shit and just fit it into the equation, like a mathematician. I worked with a lot of people coming by and trying to learn the MPC [sampler], trying to learn how to produce, but nobody came like he did. They could do basic shit, but they couldn’t do anything exceptional. He had an exceptional ear for putting rhythms together.”9

  Fiddler maintained a relatively hands-off approach with his “students” —they were free to use his equipment, but he wasn’t going to hold their hands as they did so.

  “Actually, what Amp did, he’d play some stuff out [on the MPC] but he was like, ‘I’m not going to show you how to work it. You gotta lea
rn on your own.’ He was like, ‘Don’t use a book,’” Dilla recalled to Scratch Magazine in 2006. “[To this] day I never read the books to samplers and all of that, I just try to learn them.”10 His early exposure to this laissez-faire approach, free from the prescribed intents and restrictions set by the manufacturers, working without rules, planted the seeds of a philosophy that would guide Dilla throughout his career: with no one telling him what he couldn’t do, there were no limits to what he could.

  Having established himself as a local DJ and gaining experience by the day at Camp Amp, by his senior year of high school, there weren’t enough silk shirts in the world to keep Dilla at Davis Aerospace. He demanded his mother allow him to transfer to the public high school, Pershing Heights: “He put his foot down after that third year and said, ‘It’s not happening. I don’t care what you do to me,’” said Ma Dukes.11

  It wasn’t long before he and the other hip-hop talent in the school began circling each other, primarily R. L. “T3” Altman and Titus “Baatin” Glover. T3 and Baatin were already respected as a duo throughout Pershing’s hip-hop circles, when they caught wind of the new kid with skills.

  “We heard about J Dilla—which was Jay Dee then—a guy who was really dope on the beats who went to Pershing High School as well,” said T3. “At first, we just started out being friends, kind of like that. Then he invited us to his house. When we heard the beats, they were way ahead of their time of what was out hip-hop wise back then.”12

  Intrigued by what he was hearing about his new classmate and impressed by the talent emerging in the area, T3 selected a number of MCs, DJs, and aspiring producers to an event at his grandmother’s house.

  “I wouldn’t call it a competition, but just people showcasing their talent in Detroit,” he said.13

  Impressed by each other’s talents, Dilla joined up with T3 and Baatin, as well as Waajeed (who had already worked as a producer with Baatin and who bought beats from Dilla as early as 1992) and Dilla’s cousin Que. D as a dancer, forming the crew Senepod, a variation of the word “dopeness,” spelled backwards. “We were doing high school stuff—rapping in the lunchroom and vibing. Just basically keeping it moving,” said T3.14 When Waajeed and Que. D focused on solo pursuits, the remaining trio regrouped as Slum Village.

  While the group is usually remembered as Dilla, T3 and, Baatin, membership was always a somewhat fluid concept. Waajeed and Que. D were never far, and collaborations were frequent among other members of the Pershing High/Conant Gardens hip-hop community.

  “It was always some funny stuff like I was the fifth Beatle or some shit,” said Ronnie “Phat Kat” Watts, a frequent collaborator who met Dilla at the Rhythm Kitchen and gave him his first commercial production credit in 1995 as half of the duo 1st Down. “I mean, we was crew, so I guess you could say I was an honorary member.”15

  For Waajeed, the group always represented more than music.

  “Slum Village was meant to be a refuge for us not to have to deal with hood shit. We wouldn’t have to be concerned with the neighborhood politics. It was our out in terms of artistic expression, and ultimately it was our out to get out of the hood.”16

  Despite the good intentions, T3 and Dilla directed the early career of Slum Village, as Baatin had been lured into the fast money and deadly risks of street life.

  “Baatin had started selling drugs,” said T3, “and we went to confront him about it. He was like, ‘Man, fuck that … I gotta do what I gotta do.’ That’s when we started Slum Village. Slum Village started as rebellion against Baatin, to get him to fall back into hip-hop again.”17

  In 1992 the group scored a management deal from local R&B musician R. J. Rice and John Salley, a former Detroit Piston turned actor and game show host. The pair were given free rein in Rice’s home studio, allowing them to improve the skills they’d already begun to build at Camp Amp. Baatin quickly returned to the group full time and they began developing the songs that would eventually appear on the group’s demo, Fan-tas-tic Vol. 1.

  Though raw, those early demos still feature signs of the innovation that would come to define them: the lyrical subject matter might never have strayed far from the acquisition of wealth, cars, and women, but they maintained a freestyle flavored, rhythmic, often joyous vocal delivery. They meshed perfectly with Dilla’s surprisingly mature and fully realized sonic palettes, playing the warm Fender Rhodes samples and thick basslines against bright, cracking snares. While music typically precedes vocals in hip-hop song craft, T3 and Baatin had an ear for flowing in and out of the grooves of Dilla’s accents and melodies in a way that wasn’t typically seen from MCs, where lyrical complexity was the order of the day. For Slum, it was all about that swing, and if the words didn’t fit, make them fit. On the four “Fantastic” interludes that appear throughout the album, the trio’s lyrics barely form a complete sentence, relying on “ay-yo”s and teeth sucking to pad out the bars, but lyrical coherence was never the point. Instead, their voices become another percussive instrument: Baatin’s rasp, T3’s cocksure, nasally tone, and Dilla’s smoothed out confidence unite to stick and move throughout the beats with impressive agility.

  On “I Don’t Know,” an early favorite, from Vol. 1, the MCs frequently step to the side, allowing their sentences to be finished, commented on or punctuated by the signature shouts and yelps of the Godfather of Soul, using some of hip-hop’s foundational materials in unheard-of ways.

  “[Dilla] had did it [with] just one verse with a couple of stabs, and he came to my crib where me and Que. D stayed,” said T3. “We got in the car and he played it. I was like, ‘Ah man, that’s dope! You know what we should do? We should all pick James Brown stabs and just make it a whole song,’ … We just went through a bunch of James Brown records and we just started picking stuff. I got to pick the stabs, and we just told Dilla where to put the stabs at, and we wrote our rhymes around the stabs … I think we did that the same day he played it for us.”18

  “My recollection was, this group was on some other shit. There was nothing—nothing— like that out at the time. Nothing sounded like it, nothing felt like it,” recalled American hip-hop producer DJ Spinna. “It was almost like they were groove rappers or something, they were caught up in the moment, caught up in the way the beats made you feel and just flowed with it. Totally letting the music dictate how you flow on the record, and not really caring about normalcy. And it further established Jay’s sound and established him as a force to be reckoned with.”19

  Slum Village’s music, while influenced by the bangers coming out of New York, built a sound that was distinctly rooted in the aesthetic of the Motor City.

  “Detroit is definitely more experimental, more open-minded,” Dilla said in 1996. “The hip-hop’s more creative than violent, like gangsta rap is. Because it’s been influenced by all different kinds of music, not just rap; everything from the house music on The New Dance Show,20 to Electrifying Mojo and The Wizard’s mix shows. Growing up, that was what we had.”21

  “I feel like, because he came from Detroit, a lot of the music whether it was techno, the real techno, you know, or ghettotech or whatever, it’s music to make you dance … I think he had that background, that’s why he put that bounce, that oomph in his music, so you can like, get into it,” said DJ Amir, a music historian and rare groove specialist. “[In New York] … it was all about you got your Walkman on in the subway just like mean, ill screwface and shit. It’s not like you in the car or a club, or the strip club and chicks are all up in your face, ass wiggling in your face, you need music for that. You need a soundtrack for that, and Dilla provided for that.”22

  For Waajeed, the music Slum made combined the realities of where they were with aspirations for something more.

  “I think that Detroit, being in the middle [of the U.S.], we like [A] Tribe [Called Quest] shit, but we like gangsta shit, too. We’re from the middle of the fucking hood … After 1984, in terms of crack cocaine flooding our streets, [Conant Gardens] became a fucking war zo
ne. It was really tough at that time, so our sensibilities in music were street. But to some degree, we were kind of hippies, so we identified with the East—Tribe and all that other shit. It’s like conscious dudes that pack pistol; that’s kind of what it was for us.”23

  As Dilla’s work with Slum Village and a tight-knit crew of affiliated acts like Phat Kat, Que. D, and 5 Ela continued to win acclaim, Amp Fiddler recognized a perfect opportunity to help break his one-time protégé on a national stage.

  Fiddler was heading out on the 1994 edition of the Lollapalooza tour as part of George Clinton’s band. Also on the tour were New York hip-hop icons A Tribe Called Quest, who had claimed their spot among the elite class following the release of their third album Midnight Marauders, and Amp was determined to get Dilla’s music to Q-Tip, the group’s primary beatmaker.

  Said Q-Tip, “When we started on the tour, [Amp] came by … and he was like, ‘Yo, it’s a pleasure meeting you, I got this kid, I really want you to hear him, you gonna love him … I want you to meet him when we get to Detroit.’ I was like, ‘All right.’ We had twelve cities to get to Detroit and each day he would still come and say the same thing to me. So, we finally get there and … I’m on the tour bus and … I remember Dilla had on some glasses and he came on smiling, the first thing I saw was his smile … and he gave me his tape personally.”24