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