Happy Dilla Day! + Waajeed's Top 10 Dilla Flips
Every day is Dilla Day at okayplayer. In fact each of us recognizes our very own Dilla Day--that's the day we first had our individual minds blown by a J Dilla composition. Or perhaps it was the day we realized that the ongoing series of mindgasms his beats inspire had, in actual fact, changed our lives forever. Still it is only right and meet that on the day Dilla was born we should break out of our individual nerd-boxes and celebrate his musical legacy collectively. On dancefloors, on radio, and most of all, in the kind of conversations--the kind that can only be had near a turntable, punctuated with snatches of drum or synthesizer and interjections of 'listen to this shit'--which seem to lie behind every single Dilla production. So without further ado, we would like to share--courtesy of our homies at Bling47 and Ego Trip--Waajeed's Top 10 Dilla flips (after the jump). Jeedo's 10 favorite Dilla flips will not be your favorite Dilla flips (hell, they're not even mine) but if you find yourself having a friendly argument and digging a little deeper in the catalog to come with something Jaydee freaked a little harder, a backwards-masked harmony that is a little more mindblowing--then you have opened your heart to the true spirit of Dilla Day.
Slum Village ft. MC Breed – “Do You” (Priority, 2004)
Sample Source: Zapp – “More Bounce to the Ounce” (Warner Bros., 1980)
Waajeed: I don’t know how he managed to separate those parts. That’s kinda why I picked it. ‘Cause there’s something going on in there where he kinda pulled [things from out of the recording, and] it felt like separation. I know the time when he made the beat was when he had just signed his deal with MCA and the dude at Guitar Center, Johnny Muhammad, had just hooked Jay up with all this incredible software. I know he had mentioned at one point – because we weren’t record shopping as much together at that time – some program that allowed you to pull stuff out from the left-hand side of a track or some fuckin’ craziness. That’s what I think that he did in order to get those kind of separations like that. You just can’t do that by sampling a record. So just on some production wizardry shit, that’s certainly one of my favorites. How he fuckin’ flipped that shit? Crazy. [By using "More Bounce"] that was like the other big challenge within our crew: for cats to re-do joints that people had [already sampled]. In some ways I guess it kind of adds on to that boredom thing – how do you impress your peers by rippin’ up something that’s already been done. You gotta really make an effort.