Dilla Time
I recently finished reading Dan Charnas' book Dilla Time. It's a good one! If you are interested in how hip-hop works, you should read it. The book's major musicological insight is elegantly summed up by this image:
"Straight time" means that the rhythms are evenly spaced and metronomic, like a clock ticking. (Think of a Kraftwerk song.) "Swing time" means that the halves of each beat are alternately stretched and shrunk. (Think of a Duke Ellington tune.) "Dilla time" means that there are multiple rhythmic feels simultaneously, some straight, some swung, some on the grid, some ahead of or behind the grid. (Think of, well, a J Dilla track, like the ones discussed below.)
You frequently see Dilla time described as "unquantized" or "drunk." My favorite description is from the intro to Kendrick Lamar's song "Momma." As its heavily Dilla-influenced beat plays, producer Taz Arnold says, "I need that, I need that sloppy, that sloppy, like a Chevy in quicksand, yeah, that sloppy." Poetic though it is, though, this is not accurate. Dan Charnas makes clear that Dilla was never sloppy in his rhythms, that their deviation from the grid was intended and meticulously executed. He misaligned his beats because it sounds good. But why does it sound so good? I am trying to figure that out.
One thing to know is that Dilla time did not originate with J Dilla. Jazz and funk often use several different grooves at the same time. But in those musics, the time is organic and stretchy. I have tempo-mapped many jazz recordings in Ableton Live, and the time feel is never exactly the same from one measure to the next. Dilla was programming beats with computers, however, so his microrhythms are repeated identically, many times per song. Clyde Stubblefield might generally rush or drag his snare backbeats, but he won't rush or drag them by the same precise amount in every bar. Dilla beats do, and the repetition magnifies the impact of his microtiming. For Dilla, sometimes this was a simple matter of identifying a sample with a particular groove and looping it; sometimes it meant programming drums himself; and often it was a combination of the two.
I have been hearing Dilla tracks since the 1990s without realizing it, thanks to his production work for The Pharcyde, Erykah Badu, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, and various others. When I started hearing Dilla's name from my musician friends, I downloaded a few of his tracks at random. The first one that I connected to strongly was "Bars & Twists", from the Donut Shop compilation.
This turns out to have been a weird entry point. It is more experimental and less straightforwardly funky than most Dilla beats. It is also completely undocumented; I can't find one sentence about it in Dan Charnas' book or anywhere else. The only sample I can identify is the Mantronix siren. I asked some Twitter friends where the other samples come from, and they responded by gently trolling me. The message was: go dig the crates yourself.
I have also been enjoying "E=mc2", featuring Common:
There are many points of interest here, starting with Giorgio Moroder's vocoded voice. Also, the voice at the very end is George Harrison, of all people. That's all very cool. But the main thing is that rhythm. I don't even know how to describe it! Here's how the intro looks in Ableton. The big spikes with the yellow markers are snare drums, which I lined up with the grid. Everything else is a kick or hi-hat. Look at the light grey tick marks on the timeline: none of those drum hits are on the grid at all.
And then, thirteen seconds in, the much louder Manzel beat enters, and that doesn't line up with the drum machine beat. It is closer to being on the grid, but it isn't in straight time either: you can see how the little markers are mostly late.
That is a lot of rhythmic dissonance, and that is before we start talking about the Giorgio Moroder sample, or Common's flow, or anything else happening in the track.
Most of the grooves that Dilla fans point to are less flamboyantly wonky than these two. The microrhythms are usually more micro. Here's a more representative example, "Get Dis Money" by Slum Village, with its gorgeous Herbie Hancock sample. (Dilla loved vocoder vocals.)
Here's how the groove looks in Ableton.
This is very close to being straight eighth notes. However, the backbeat claps are just a tiny bit early. Because they are the loudest and clearest elements in the beat, your ear tends to orient around them, and that makes everything else sound late or dragging. The hi-hats on 1.1.3 and 1.3.3 are actually late, too, which contributes to that sense of dragging. Why does this sound good? It "should" sound bad, based on everything I know about rhythm. I clearly do not know enough about rhythm. I have a lot of listening to do.
(By the way, here's another great Herbie sample flip by Dilla, and a more subtle usage of Herbie's vocoded singing.)
There are two reasons why my fellow academics should be engaging closely with J Dilla's music. The first is just cultural literacy; Dilla was influential and is more widely imitated with every passing year. The second is maybe more important: we don't have the analytical tools to study this music, and we need to develop them, because there is a whole world of microrhythm and groove out there that we have been neglecting. Right now, "music theory" classes are really harmony classes (and usually that harmony is limited to the historical practices of the Western European aristocracy.) But rhythm is at least as important as harmony, and in some musics, significantly more so. There is a persistent belief that rhythm is "less intellectual" or "more instinctive" than harmony and therefore less worthy of serious study. That is pure atavistic racist nonsense, but it also means that it is hard to do better, because we don't have the vocabulary or the methods to study rhythm in the depth that it deserves. If we can figure out how to talk about Dilla time, then that will open up a lot of other kinds of time as well.
Update: Dan Charnas reads my blog! He even cites it in Dilla Time!