J Dilla on drums, Soulquarian session ca. 2002
Today, February 10th, 2016, is that otherDilla Day. Today we mark the 10th Anniversary of J Dilla's passing, the unique talent known as James Dewitt Yancey having stutter-stepped off this mortal coil just a few days after his 32nd birthday in 2006. Like many Okayplayers and other music fans, we spent the day (and the week, and the month) listening to J Dilla beats, analyzing the drum break on Phife Dawg's "Ben Dova"; poking holes in the sample credit info for the Slum Village remix of Keith Murray's "The Rhyme" and arguing about which was his best remix (Spacek's "Eve" featuring Frank 'n Dank) or rap verse. ("F**k The Police." Just saying.).
We count ourselves lucky that some of the people we have the opportunity to build with include the DJs, impresarios and artists who in many cases were privileged to be there on the tour bus or in the studio when said beats were born, carriers of the torch and official-unofficial Dilla archivists. We love to hear the stories (again and again) but on this particular day, we had a more pointed question for these Dillapostles, namely:
10 Years Later, How Much Of J Dilla's Discography Is Left Unheard?
The word from the little bird is that DJ House Shoes is still "sitting on about 60 joints." We know countless artists received beat tapes and CDs with snippets during Dilla's lifetime and more were found in the record collection discovered in an unclaimed storage locker a few years ago and subsequently handed over to Ma Dukes and the Dilla Foundation. The recent release of Dillatronic and other posthumous projects begs the question: have we hit bottom? Is this just the tip of the iceberg? How much more is there? We reached out to House Shoes himself as well as the immortal Mutty Ranks AKA Phife of A Tribe Called Quest to ask that very question. Though no one person maybe speak on it conclusively, their answers might surprise you--including details on two forthcoming J Dilla projects coming in the near future. Read below:
Okayplayer: 10 years after his passing, how much J Dilla material do think is left?
Phife Dawg: As far as work that you haven’t heard? I really have no idea, to be honest. But I will say he was the Tupac of producers, if you will. And with Tupac, we all know he stayed in the studio and that was the same thing with Dilla. I cant imagine what else is left…but I’m sure there’s a lot that hasn’t been put out yet.
House Shoes: I mean there’s a lot of music. There’s a lot of music...I don’t know if anybody should hear it, though. His value has definitely lessened since he left, due to...I mean, his catalogue of music that he had full reins over is some of the most incredible shit you ever heard in your life. But all this other shit? Nah, bro. If he ain’t here to make the decision, it's kinda been broken. All the cats that really loved and cherished and respect and honor his music--before Donuts, before it turned into a freakshow, circus, you know what I mean---most of us don’t even. I was talking to somebody yesterday, who is one of the biggest Dilla fans I’ve ever met in my life, and he doesn’t even listen to it anymore. It just makes him sad.
OKP: Does that change at a certain point? When we start wanting to preserve everything--unfinished beats, sketches, ideas--for history's sake?
HS: I mean, he was so fucking serious about the sonic quality of his music—he was selling beats for five figures to major record labels and only giving them a left and right stereo 2-track--which is fucking unheard of in the industry! You don’t get paid for a 2-track, you need to send that session over. Or you need to send them reels over, nahmean? Over the years so many engineers fucking destroyed the mixes that at a certain point he was like, Nah. You want the beat you get a 2-track. I'm not gonna fly out to the studio and fucking mix that shit none of that shit. You can get the fuckin' 2-track shit and done. All this cassette shit, though—its cool that y'all found that shit. Everything does not need to be monetized. It's just way over.
OKP: Wouldn't you want a museum or archive to someday be able to document his full body of work, though?
HS: I don’t think that there’s anybody that will do that properly. And I’d rather than have it not done at all than have it done improperly. The #1 most important thing in dealing with a fucking icon who’s no longer on this earth is accuracy and when you continually, inaccurately depict his music, it continually lessens the value to damn near zero, nahmean? I mean ran into Madlib at the Do-Over last year and he told me that 10 of the beats on the SP-1200 box set--the shit that was like $500.00?--are Karriem Riggins' beats. So how fucking wrong is that, yo? You got motherfuckers who are the biggest Dilla fans, that love this motherfucker's music--and you got them ridin' around to music that’s not even Dilla’s music. That’s fuckin' disgusting. There's nobody in the chain of command that really knows fucking anything about his music so…just let it go.
OKP: Phife, in terms of beats you've touched since Dilla passed, how many were you were there in the studio for or got from him directly?
Phife: Honestly, the only thing I’ve touched since he passed is the beat for my next single “the Nutshell” which is coming out in a few months.
OKP: Had you heard it before though or did you go deep into the catalog and select that one?
Phife: It was basically a beat that Young RJ from Slum Village let us hear and my manager and I just ran with it. We did a track with them on their last album, and it was basically a trade off [Phife's manager DJ Rasta Root adds that it was licensed through Yancey Music Group -ed].
HS: The final piece of the puzzle to me is this MCA record--this Pay Jay record that I’ve been helping Egon (of Stone's Throw/Now Again records fame) A&R to make sure its what it was supposed to be—you know he had a record deal with MCA records around 2000, 2001, he had the 48 Hours with Frank 'n' Dank, he had the Pay Jay album, which now is finally going to be seeing the day of light sometime soon.
OKP: What about the sessions you were there for during his lifetime?
Phife: The only sessions I was really there for is the stuff he gave Tribe. There’s another one—basically I went out to Detroit to mess around with some beats or whatever and one of the beats he gave me was that Common "The Light" joint. So I was beggin' him and beggin' him and beggin' him for that and he was like, Nah. I just gave that to Rashid. And that ended up being the one record that really blew Rashid through the roof, pretty much. That was probably the only other joint I heard like that, everything else after his passing was like, news to me.
OKP: Was that for a Phife solo joint? We were just taking apart the drums on that 12" "Ben Dova" in the office the other day...
Phife: For a Phife solo joint. And the other joint that I wanted, he had gave to Busta not “Everything Remains Raw" but there was another one on When Disaster Strikes [rasps the whole verse and chorus of “So Hardcore” in Busta’s voice and flow] I wanted that beat, too.
Matter of fact, funny you asked that, 'cause that was around the same time he played that Common and that Busta beat—then he played that ["Ben Dova"] and I was like, Yo. Did you give that away? And he was like, Nah you could ha’ dat. So basically had to settle for that compared to the Common and the Busta beat. But I'm not mad at that one...!
OKP: Were you present at the time when John Salley was managing Slum Village and their tape got passed to Q-tip?
Phife: I didn’t even know John Salley was managing Slum. But what happened was, we was on tour on Lollapalooza ’94 with the Beasties [Beastie Boys] and Parliament-Funkadelic and my man Amp Fiddler was playing with Parliament. And he was the one that was telling us about Dilla and his group and so forth. So by the time the tour touched in Detroit, that’s when we met Dilla. He came on the tour bus and was playin' a plethora of beats--and the rest, as they say, is history.
