J Dilla's Donuts (33 1/3)

by Jordan Ferguson

  Problems began to develop on the streets as well as in the studio. Dilla was as meticulous about his appearance as his production, and, as record company money started coming in, he wasn’t above splurging a little to keep himself looking right. According to Karriem Riggins, a session drummer who met Dilla through Common and played on Welcome 2 Detroit, “He was fresh, man. He would always come fresh. I would go shopping with him sometimes and he would go and pick the illest stuff … the crib was crazy, he had racks of clothes, he had a room, it looked like a store.”8

  But Detroit could be a difficult place for a young black man who took pride in his appearance, and Dilla soon found his encounters with the city’s police force were increasing dramatically.

  “He caught so much flack from the police for being a clean young man,” said Ma Dukes, “The police department was down the street from where we lived, and every time he pulled off they’d stop him and harass him. They even tossed the car once looking for something; because he was young and clean-cut, they thought he was selling drugs.”9

  Seeing her son’s frustration, Ma Dukes suggested he channel his anger into his music, resulting in the “Fuck the Police” twelve-inch. Echoing N.W.A.’s controversial song of the same name, the track took Dilla’s anger and set it to a relentless drum break and a funky flute loop. Lyrically, the song marked a sharp departure from the laid-back freestyles of Slum Village, openly voicing his disdain for local law enforcement and inviting “any offended people, suck my balls.”

  “It’s getting so crazy in Detroit now with the police, man. I just felt like I wanted to speak on it. People knew it from N.W.A., but I just wanted to touch it on a more underground level so the people that I fuck with can relate too and people know that it’s still going on,” said Dilla. “It’s like you can go through life and act like it’s not but I deal with it everyday, for real, just riding in a nice car they’ll fuck with you. Just being a black person in Detroit, it’s so stupid.”10

  Due in part to its honesty, and in part to that beat, the song was embraced by the hip-hop underground and remains a cherished moment in Dilla’s solo career: “[P]eople are still singing it today!” said Ma Dukes, “Every time I go somewhere, that’s one of the songs they play.”11

  Not everything he did was met with the usual acclaim from listeners, however. Dilla had already dealt with fans that were ill prepared for the different direction found on the final two Tribe albums. After three certified classics, fans expected more of the youthful exuberance they were used to. Instead, they got the somber and somewhat weary insights of a group that was maturing as artists and growing apart as individuals. Further complicating matters was the change in sound, bringing Dilla’s woozy drum patterns and re-assembled chops to a group always heralded for its precision looping of four-bar samples. It’s not that Beats, Rhymes and Life or The Love Movement are bad albums, they were just different; Questlove later likened it to, “advanced calculus being taught to a class that just recently mastered algebra.”12

  “[He was] changing the course of people’s careers, which was at the time quote-unquote for the worse,” said Ronnie Reese, a journalist who has written about Dilla’s career extensively. “Like with Tribe, people heard Beats, Rhymes and Life, and The Love Movement and were like, ‘Man, this doesn’t sound like old Tribe.’ And looking back, you realize how brilliant it was.”

  As the new man in the crew, Dilla ended up taking most of the heat from fans who didn’t want their favorite group to change, a criticism that persisted for years afterwards: In 2009, one hip-hop blog looked back on Beats with the blunt sub-head, “Did Dilla Destroy A Tribe Called Quest?” (the writer concluded he did not; many commenters disagreed). When Q-Tip veered in a decidedly more commercial direction for his solo debut Amplified, fan distaste only increased. It would not be the last time Dilla would be accused of “destroying” a beloved artist.

  By the time Common started work on the follow-up to Like Water for Chocolate, he was ready to cut loose and push his art wherever he could. Inspired by both his fellow Soulquarians and recording in New York’s historic Electric Lady studios, 2002’s Electric Circus threw rock, funk, soul, and even ragtime jazz into a blender, making for a raucous and eclectic album that was more ambitious than most were prepared for.

  “A lot of people didn’t really understand the Electric Circus album, but coming up with some of the music for that was crazy. Common wanted to go to the next level and be really experimental, and we were going there,” said keyboardist James Poyser, a member of the Soulquarians who played on the project. “That was an amazing time. There was so much music we made that couldn’t possibly be used for anything else, because it was so left field—things with different tempos, different time signatures. It was just really creative—extra creative. We tried to go as far as possible with it.”13

  “When we started to do Common’s [album], he was like, ‘Nah, man. I’m putting the drums away. I’m putting all that African sound away, and I’m going straight Kraftwerk; you coming with me?’” said Questlove. “At that point, it had taken me six years to establish a trademark sound, which everyone now instantly knew … But he was like, ‘Nah, man. Let’s go the opposite. Go the complete opposite of what you would do.’ And I was just like, ‘Why?’ He was like, ‘Cause, man, this is what you gotta do. Everyone has now caught up to what you’re doing, and for you to stay ahead of the pack, you’re going to have to get uncomfortable and just go there.’”14 While Electric Circus scored a healthy level of critical approval, the public seemed baffled, and the record was a commercial failure.

  Never one to sweat public opinion much, Dilla seemed uncharacteristically stung by the album’s reception in a 2005 interview: “[W]hat people don’t understand is … when I go in the studio, I just try to give the artist what they want. With Like Water for Chocolate, we were both looking toward the direction of where he started or what would have been rugged hip-hop at that time. Then with Electric Circus, he wanted to do something totally different. I would bring him a batch of beats, and he’d just be sitting there, then as soon as I make something crazy as hell, up-tempo, he’d be like, ‘Yeah, let’s use that one.’ I don’t want people to think this is all I’m giving him. I gotta give him what he wants. It’s kind of hard to read those reviews knowing that they don’t understand that shit.”15

  Life on a major label wasn’t working out as well as he would have liked, either. He’d signed a one-year deal on MCA with an option for a second, provided he turned in two albums the label accepted for release. Instead of repeating the format he’d used on Welcome 2 Detroit, he didn’t plan to produce any of the music for his sophomore solo effort; he just wanted to rap over beats by other producers. Any beats he made for MCA were set aside for the second project, a full-length album titled 48 Hours by his childhood friends Frank Bush and Derrick Harvey, who performed together as the duo Frank-n-Dank.

  Why would an artist signed on the strength of his production work choose not to produce any of the music on his next solo effort? Why would an artist with his connections opt to produce an album for a pair of rappers few outside of Detroit had ever heard of?

  The latter question might be easier to answer. By 2002 Dilla was at a point in his career where he could devote his energies to projects he was passionate about, and his passions were sending him back to the underground (and turning down offers from the likes of N*SYNC, Diddy, and Dr. Dre). The early endorsement from Tribe, association with The Soulquarians and his decision to make music oppositional to what was popular at the time meant he’d been saddled with the “backpacker” label, even though his sensibilities were always more corner than conscious. As Dilla recalled to XXL in 2004:

  It was kinda fucked up [getting that stamp] because people automatically put us in that [Tribe] category. That was actually a category that we didn’t actually wanna be in. I thought the music came off like that, but we didn’t realize that shit then. I mean, you gotta listen to the lyrics of the shit, niggas was talkin
g about getting head from bitches. It was like a nigga from Native Tongues never woulda said that shit. I don’t know how to say it, it’s kinda fucked up because the audience we were trying to give to were actually people we hung around. Me, myself, I hung around regular ass Detroit cats. Not the backpack shit that people kept putting out there like that. I mean, I ain’t never carried no goddamn backpack, but like I said, I understand to a certain extent. I guess that’s how the beats came off on some smooth type of shit … and there was a lot of hard shit on the radio so our thing was we’re gonna do exactly what’s not on the radio.16

  Working with Frank-n-Dank not only gave Dilla the chance to give his childhood friends an opportunity to share in his good fortune, it also gave him the chance to reconnect with the part of himself looking to hang with “regular ass Detroit cats.”

  The decision to dedicate his solo project to rhyming may have been more personal. While Dilla’s musical output was typically well received, his skills as a rapper were less warmly embraced (SPIN magazine claimed in 2000 he “may be the worst rapping producer since Warren G”;17 the AllMusic Guide called the rappers dated and uninteresting18).

  “Nobody was really feeling [Slum Village] lyrically, in comparison to the beats that Dilla was making,” said Ronnie Reese. “People didn’t really understand the style of rapping that Dilla, Baatin, and T3 were doing. Coming out of that classic Rakim, Gang Starr mentality, you hear Slum for the first time you’re like What the fuck is this?”

  Despite the criticisms, MC’ing was an essential part of Dilla’s musical identity, a way to let loose, to have fun with the music in a way that his relentless creative drive might not have allowed.

  “Definitely an alter ego,” said Karriem Riggins. “He called him Niggaman … he’d start talking about ‘Yo, I got the [Range Rover] … with the fifth wheel on the back, that was Niggaman all day.’ ”19 Dilla even calls the alias out explicitly on Welcome 2 Detroit’s “Shake it Down.”

  The MCA album would have been a deliberate thwarting of expectations, and Dilla recruited an impressive roster of producers he knew and admired to provide beats, including Pete Rock, a young Kanye West and a rising underground star from Los Angeles named Madlib.

  “That would have been his defining moment,” said House Shoes. “Everyone was fronting on his lyrics.”20

  His defining moment would have to wait. The absorption of MCA by Geffen Records the year after Dilla signed his deal left him and other hip-hop acts in the wind; turnover in the A&R department was so frequent no one knew who was responsible for what, and both projects ended up shelved.

  Frustrated and fed up, Dilla threw himself into music for its own sake, crafting the songs that would make up the Ruff Draft EP (allegedly in a week) with a deliberate aesthetic in mind, a philosophy explicitly outlined in the album’s introduction. Ruff Draft was for people who wanted “real live shit,” but more tellingly, was to “sound like it’s straight from the motherfuckin’ cassette.” In ten tracks over 20 short minutes, Dilla again overturned any expectations fans and listeners might have had about what his sound should be. As was his habit, he looked at the clean, sleek production of The Neptunes, Dr. Dre, and Irv Gotti, turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Live instrumentation was put back on the shelf in a return to sampling obscure, experimental synth, disco, and rock records. He coated the songs in a film of tape hiss. He abandoned traditional song structures, tracks could alternately have no hooks (“Let’s Take It Back”) or consist of nothing but (“Nothing Like This”). Lyrically, the album was a mission statement designed to finally separate himself from the ideas people had of him based on who he worked with, rapping “and these backpackers wanna confuse it cause niggas is icy, it ain’t got nothing to do with the music,” on “Make’em NV.”

  He pressed a small run of vinyl with his own money and released it on his own Mummy Records label, scoring distribution through Groove Attack, a tiny German distributor now one of the largest in Europe. Dilla found the experience of working with small, independent labels to be far preferable to the machinery of a major. His comments around that time seem to presage the direction the music industry would trend toward, at a time when online distribution was seen as more of a threat than a tool.

  “You know, if I had a choice, skip the major labels and just put it out yourself man!” he said in a 2002 interview. “I tell everybody it’s better to do it yourself and let the indies come after you instead of going in there and getting a deal and you have to wait. It ain’t fun, take it from me. Right now, I’m on MCA but it feels like I’m an unsigned artist still. It’s cool, it’s a blessing, but damn I’m like, ‘When’s my shit gonna come out? I’m ready now, what’s up?’ They’re just like they gotta wait on this person and this person and they’re firing this person. It’s getting crazy. I woulda did a lot better just not even fucking with them, keep doing what I was doing before.”21

  Hard lessons weren’t the only takeaway from the MCA experience, however; it also sparked the creative partnerships that would define the remaining years of Dilla’s life.

  There’s a video of Dilla, Frank, Dank, and Common in Dilla’s home studio in Michigan’s Clinton Township, date unknown, likely 2003. Frank and Dank are acting as hosts, narrating what’s going on, taking the camera on a tour of the facility, showing off the pool table, the vocal booth, the drum room filled with records. In the video’s closing moments the duo are swapping stories to Common about how they would go dancing when they were younger. And in the back corner, seated by a turntable and his MPC sampler, is Dilla, laughing as his friends clown and crack jokes. He’s obviously paying attention to the conversation, but his hands never stop moving. He puts records on the turntable, places the needle, listens for what only he knows he wants, removes the record, meticulously places it back in its sleeve and into a protective plastic bag. He looks, to a certain extent, like a man apart.22

  It’s isolating, being a genius. To devote that much energy to your craft, to obsess over it, to commit to the Gladwellian 10,000 hours and master it in the way that Dilla had means there are large parts of yourself that other people, even your closest friends, are never going to understand, part of you will always remain unknown. It’s a rift of necessity; for artists to create at that caliber they have to sequester themselves from everything but their art. For an artist to meet someone who can create at his level, someone he can respect as a peer, not elevate as an idol, is to find someone who understands that which defines him at his core. Meeting someone like that could change your life.

  In many ways, Dilla and Otis “Madlib” Jackson were the mirror images of each other from opposite sides of the country. Prolific beatmakers well versed across genres; celebrated for their music but maligned for their MC’ing; reserved, silent types who only spoke when they had something to say. They were that rarest of things, artists each confident enough in their own abilities to see the other as an inspiration, not a threat. They were Byron and Shelley, Basquiat and Haring, or (to borrow and tweak an analogy Madlib once used) Coltrane and Miles.

  After hearing Madlib’s work on his group Lootpack’s debut album, Dilla invited him to fly out to Detroit in 2001 and work on his vocal project.

  “Just to know that Madlib did that stuff on the SP1200 [drum machine/sampler] freaked me out because the only cat I knew that could really freak that machine was Pete Rock,” Dilla told URB magazine in 2004. “That [Lootpack] album was crazy. Me and my partners rode that shit for the longest time. As soon as I popped my deal with MCA, I went looking for him.”

  Speaking on Fan-tas-tic Vol. 1, Madlib told the same interviewer, “At that time, I ain’t heard no producers like that, doing the same shit as me. It was completely different from my stuff but still the same, you know? Like it’s always raw and soulful and it never sounds too computerized.”23

  In Dilla’s beats, Madlib found something that inspired him in a way nothing else had: “I can’t rap to too many other people’s beats, and I can barely rap to
my own. But when I hear his shit, there’s just something to it that I connect with. I could just write to it all day.”24

  At the time of their first meeting, Madlib was working primarily with the indie label Stones Throw Records. After starting as a means for founder Chris “Peanut Butter Wolf” Manak to release music he made with his late friend Charles “Charizma” Hicks, by 2000 Stones Throw had moved from the Bay Area to L.A. and centered around the four-man team of Wolf, graphic designer Jeff Jank, General Manager Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, and Madlib as the marquee artist. Their base of operations was a house in the Mount Washington neighborhood where the four lived, complete with a 1950s-era bomb shelter Madlib used as a studio.

  Dilla’s reputation on the West Coast was already established by that point, with L.A.’s underground community embracing him with an enthusiasm his hometown never did.

  “Back then, like ’96, early ’97, there was already a community of Dilla heads,” said J. Rocc, co-founder of L.A.’s Beat Junkies DJ crew. “So [demos were] already floating around. I told Madlib I had one … so I dubbed it for him, [and] he went and made a bunch of songs over those beats.”25

  One of those songs was eventually called “The Message,” and featured Madlib freestyling over one of the most notorious beats in Dilla’s career, a flip of Stereolab’s “Come and Play in the Milky Night,” previously used officially by Busta Rhymes on 2000’s “Show Me What You Got.”

  “I remember at the time [photographer] B+ was the one hipping us to it, like, ‘Man, you guys aren’t listening to Stereolab?’” Egon recalled. “I’m like, ‘Man, that’s the shit that the fucking kids at my college radio station are listening to. I’m playing boom-bap hip-hop, or funk,’ … [But Dilla] was grabbing from everything and Madlib was the same … you know, no boundaries, that was just the way those guys worked.”26