J Rocc - Play This Too by stonesthrow
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Kanye West
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
*****
by Matthew Cole on November 20, 2010
"I fantasized about this back in Chicago" is the first thing that Kanye West says on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and it's the only thing close to a context for the 13 tracks of delirious hip-hop decadence that follow. For the remainder of "Dark Fantasy," he's freely mixing the materialistic ("Mercy, mercy me, that Murcielago") and the existential ("Hey teacher, teacher/Tell me how do you respond to the students?/And refresh the page and restart the memory?/And re-spark the soul and rebuild the energy?"). The track might not answer a lot of questions, but it's a dynamite beginning to an audaciously complex rap masterpiece, on-point thematically and, even more so, musically, with Kanye mashing up G-funk and baroque pop while huge, anonymous voices pop in to ask, "Can we get much higher?" like a stoned soul take on a Greek chorus.
The effort to canonize My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as one of hip-hop's all-time high points is already underway, and I'm confident that Kanye's new album can weather the backlash that all potential classics must confront. That said, insisting, on whatever grounds, that Kanye has released one of rap's great milestone's doesn't do the album justice, at least insofar as doing so invites impossible challenges (is it really better than Fear of a Black Planet or Illmatic? Who could definitively say?) without drawing due attention to the strengths on which the album might meet them. So let me offer the following, slightly less generous superlative: No rap album I've heard can boast better production than this one. The music is exhilarating, often abrasive, never predictable, at times stunningly gorgeous. These are the finest tracks that any group of rappers has yet to rhyme over, and if the album doesn't make Kanye any more of a contender for the title of Greatest MC than he was two years ago, it handily confirms that he's rap's greatest producer.
Even when Kanye was working as an in-house beatsmith for Roc-a-Fella, he showed a savant-like knack for sample-based hip-hop. It turns out that was only the earliest manifestation of a much more encompassing talent. For Kanye, the internal logic of pop music must be nearly transparent: He doesn't seem to get what makes every genre work, nor does he get all of them as well, but he has an intuitive sense of how to construct more kinds of songs than any other producer working today. He looks good in grimy hard rock on "Hell of a Life," pulls off arena-sized pop pomp on "All of the Lights," and still finds time, with the posse cuts "Monster" and "So Appalled," to kick out the two hardest rap tracks of his career.
Even when Kanye looks back, the results can be stunning. On "Devil in a New Dress," he perfects the sampling style he invented, manipulating the pitch and tempo of Smokey Robinson's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" until it crawls luxuriantly out of the speakers like wine poured in slow motion. It's a gorgeous slow burner that turns tragic in its third act, as Kanye's rhymes swap lust for heartache before distorted guitar lines and a muscular verse from Rick Ross close it out (that's Kanye acting tough, but it's clear he's really hurting).
Wisely chosen as the album's centerpiece, there's no question that the following track, "Runaway," is Kanye's most arresting showcase as a songwriter. The self-lacerating lyrics, including a filthy first verse ("She find pictures in my email/I sent this bitch a picture of my dick"), are far too off-putting to count as anti-hero posturing, much less as self-pity. The sense of uncomfortable proximity, that maybe Kanye isn't aware of just how much he's oversharing here, is reinforced by his unpolished and sometimes tuneless singing. After three verses plus a chilling interlude from Clipse's Pusha T, apparently as ruthless a boyfriend as he is a coke dealer, Kanye sounds drained.
The "Runaway" single ends there, but the album version undergoes a remarkable transformation, as the lonely piano figure that introduced the song is joined first by menacing cello and then, surprisingly, by an utterly weightless violin section. When Kanye returns, he's singing through a vocoder, and where his voice strained and cracked before, it now becomes a purely melodic instrument capable of making its own joyous contribution to the track. Kanye sounds disembodied, as though "Run away from me, baby" wasn't a directive to a mistreated lover, but the cry of a man trying to exit the black hole of his own implacable ego. The coda to "Runaway" is a fantasy of escape through pure catharsis, with the vocoder literalizing Kanye's ability to transform his personal shortcomings into art.
Nearly as accomplished—and equally as obsessed with the vocoder—is "Lost in the World," Kaney's much-anticipated reworking of Bon Iver's "Woods." It's astounding how he takes the strangest sample on the album and crafts it into a defiantly giddy dance number, complete with tribal drumming in the verses and group choruses that sound massive. It's a mad stroke of brilliance to take Justin Vernon's solitary ode to alienation and use it as the centerpiece of a catchy, communal reverie. It's experimental, to be sure, but it's also the closest the album comes to pure pop indulgence. All the more surprising, then, that the song is interrupted by a seething political missive from Gil Scott-Heron, his "Comment #1," the sample of which eventually derails "Lost in the World" entirely and runs headlong into the album's closing track.
By this point, Kanye has pimped on Mt. Olympus, married a porn star, and made love to the Angel of Death, and instead of wrapping up the album with its most joyous track, he tears back the curtain and leaves us staring at a grim and recognizable present. Heron's words: "All I want is a good home and a wife and a children and some food to feed them every night...Who will survive in America?" The pop-star decadence is shown to conceal the familiar country of predatory lending, teen pregnancy, mandatory minimum sentencing, blighted inner cities, racial profiling—and the confounding question is what power fantasies like Kanye's have to do with it. Perhaps they sustain the men and women who fight for survival even as they prop up the system that forces us to combat one another on its terms. And where this question applies to all forms of escapism, it seems especially appropriate for rap to confront, as it has aspired to give black America a voice, a soundtrack, a language, and an escape.
The truth is, like Jay-Z recently told Jon Stewart, rap is an art form. And I think that, like Stewart suggested in response, there are plenty of people who already recognize it as such. But vindicating rap—or, for that matter, comic books, video games, or music videos—as belonging to the ever-expanding family of acknowledged "art" is less important than rap's defenders realize. On the other hand, it's absolutely crucial that rappers and producers are actively exploiting whatever artistic potential rap does have. It matters that artists like Kanye are finding new frontiers in rap precisely because there are so many people interested in policing rap's borders, making sure it doesn't get too violent, or too queer, or too smart. And as long as they're winning, it doesn't matter if rap is blasted out of playground stereos or dissected in college English classes: Rap's status as art is a matter of demonstration, not definition.
So as to avoid sounding conspiratorial, let me be clear about who is handicapping rap in the year 2010. It's the easy-target A&R guys, sure. But it's also, more powerfully and more frequently, the fans. It's especially those fans who believe that realness is definitive of good rap and refuse to accept anything less than a one-to-one correspondence between life and lyrics. For the twentysomething black male to whom rap is most often marketed and by whom rap is most often performed, realness is as much a matter of asserting ownership as it is of relating to the music. Though, ironically, some of the people most invested in keeping rap tied to realness are middle-class white folks who like rap precisely because they don't relate in any literal sense to its message, but rather because it provides the edgiest musical escapism on the market. Keep those groups in mind and you start to realize the subversive genius of Lil Wayne's choice of protégés in Nicki Minaj and Drake: The first group finds nothing more threatening than a female rapper (except, as Nicki has pointed out herself, a gay rapper) and the second is just as threatened by a rapper who is unabashedly educated and privileged. Rap critics of many colors and income brackets also deserve some blame, for soft-pedaling paternalism when they praise rappers for "channeling raw experience" or for "unflinching realism," which can amount to saying that the best rap is either autobiographical or journalistic, but never idiosyncratic, poetic, or performative. For 20 years, rap's aesthetic has been monopolized by authenticity, and it's high time it got a bit of competition from fantasy.
From that perspective, I see Kanye as nothing short of a hero, and I see virtually no danger of critics praising My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy too much. Kanye spent the last decade or so pushing himself and his fans to come to terms with a vision of hip-hop so wildly expansive that it could annex whole genres, swing to any mood, freely mix piety and pitch black humor with snarkiness and swag. His unfailing ear for beats meant that, for three albums in a row, we were all too busy nodding our heads to see how powerfully the game was changing: It wasn't until 808s & Heartbreak that anyone noticed, and only then because Kanye's ego finally got the better of his musical talents (this was, after all, the record that introduced "solipsism" to the vocabulary of rap criticism). With My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy complete, even that misstep finally looks purposive, as though Kanye first recorded an album as sonically and emotionally distant from his previous work as possible in anticipation of later finding a place for its instrumental digressions and painful candor.
But where 808s & Heartbreak's stunted emotional arc expressed little more than an egomaniac's bile for his ex-girl, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy allows Kanye a thematic palette broad enough to confront his pride and anguish. The album dwells on the surreal ("Dark Fantasy" imagines a shopping-mall séance and a sky eclipsed by herons) and the religious (next to Kanye himself, it's Satan who gets the most name-drops here). It's all in the service of an exhausting contest between self-aggrandizement and self-effacement, Kanye embracing his singular pop-star/super-villain persona while struggling to connect with the creative potential that made him worth our attention to begin with. This much he confesses on "Power": "I just needed time alone with my own thoughts/Got treasure in my mind but couldn't open up my own vault." With My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, there's no question that he's found the key.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
NEVER TRUST A BIG BUTT AND A SMILE
Promotional photo of Richard Pryor in the film In God We Trust (1980)
Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic: The forthcoming exhibition at Tate Liverpool, inspired by Paul Gilroy's influential book about the black diaspora, explores the history of black modernity. TATE ETC. asked a cultural critic to look at the role of wit in this history.
Context:
Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool, 29 January - 25 April 2010Oh yes, the Negro has got jokes. Furthermore, dem N*g*as over there got jokes too. If anyone but a Negro or a N*g*a had written those words, they would be considered outright offensive. Since one did, they can be described as outrageously cheeky, reliably colloquial and obviously vernacular. Given the topic at hand, these are all acceptable rhetorical strategies and conceits for brother-man to begin an essay on all things dark and comical.
As the luck of the Irish would have it, we’ve been asked by our family members at Tate to write about Black humour in the context of modernity. Truly a fool’s bargain this, since writing about humour is never quite all it’s cracked up to be. First because humour derives from a Greek word meant to identify the vital juices thought to give folk the capacity to laugh. Secondly, because while laughter is indeed good medicine for the soul and all that, and a Negro not only have jokes but know how to laugh at them, there’s a problem with simply writing about laughter. Namely that any fool or group of fools can be found who will laugh at just about anything. So why not make a slight shift then; why not take on Black Comedy instead? There unfortunately we run into more semantic confusion. Signifyin’ on “Black Comedy” in a high art domain such as this one could lead to confusion in some readers’ minds about whether the matter at hand was going to be on the firm of Foxx, Pryor, Cosby, Rock and Chappelle, or that of Messrs Beckett, Barthelme, Vonnegut and Pynchon.
Even once we’ve sorted all that out, other problems abound. The main problem with riffing on stand-up comedy is that you have somehow to translate the verbal and physical comedic genius of a Richard Pryor or a Dave Chappelle to the page, and then likely provide a host of very boring, very bloodless, unfunny and academic reasons why the work is both sharp and hilarious – a fool’s task indeed, and never a “good look” from where we sit.
It can never be said enough that great comedy is all about timing, but great comedians not only say those funny things at exactly the right moment, the very way they say things is funny too. Meaning the Pryors, Rocks and Chappelles of this world are people who can provoke guffaws from the moment they saunter, swagger and shuffle (often all at once) on stage before nary a punchline has been produced. Great comedians tend to be world-class clowns whose entertainment arsenal is overstocked with funnyass faces, funnyass minds, funnyass bodies, funnyass tongues and, of course, funnybones. They are also rhythmic and musical artists in their own way, who know, as jazz giant Miles Davis knew (no stranger to the brutal delivery of one-liners himself ), that the most important notes are the ones you don’t play. So add deadly comedic pauses to their wicked storehouse of weaponry too. Rendering all that on the page for the casual reader without becoming a lethal knave is damn near impossible. (In our humble opinion even Zadie Smith, one of the most drop-dead funny satirists of our time, couldn’t write about comedy without getting a bit maudlin.) That’s why in no shape or form will any analysis of Black Comedy as an art form be our bailiwick. So what will the nature of our dysfunction here be regarding things that make you go bananas (or, as you chaps say, “bonkers”)? To wit, dear friends, we are going to expound upon the subject of Wit – the Wit of the American Negro to be exact.
Now the beauty of essaying on Wit as opposed to Comedy is that you can actually measure Wit by an almost scientific standard and not be under much burden of transatlantic comedic translation. No one has to laugh at your wit; they just have to be convinced you’re not a twit or a wit by half. This, you see, is because examples of Wit don’t labour under the necessity of proving they’re as funny on the page as they were on the stage. Wit can be visual or it can be verbal, but all you have to prove when proclaiming Wit Found Here is that your examples are occasionally clever, mildly poignant and not even profound, a touch barbed and, most of all, well-aimed. (It further helps that Wit needn’t always have a decent target. Should Wit come cruelly lancing its intended victims, they need not be appropriate or even especially opprobrious. They need only be punctured with accuracy, aplomb, verve and a wink and a nod of venom.)
Fortunately for this writer, the best examples of Negro Wit in Black Modernity can be readily found in the lyrics of the many hiphop songs he has spent far too many hours memorising since those ancient times, the 1980s. Who here remembers the two-woman stand-up hiphop team Salt-N-Pepa? Or that they once made a delirious track titled Never Trust A Big Butt And A Smile? Many of us then found great wit in the spicy duo being women in possession of both attributes in such voluptuary abundance that many a man of our acquaintance would have risked betrayal by their grinning posteriors without a second thought. One also thinks of the late great lyricist Biggie Smalls, who made a small art form out of describing acts of pure thuggery in the most shameless but witty terms possible. My own number one favourite example from Big’s felony-assault oeuvre would have to be “I been robbing motherfuckers since the slave ships” – primarily because that lyric violates every politically correct ancestor-worshipping bone in my pro-Black Pan-Afrikanist Socialist body and dares me not to love the prickly sensation. In this genre of malice towards all and offence for everyone, there are also the witticisms of Ice Cube to consider, a guy whose idea of fun was first laid bare in the song Fuck Tha Police when he was in the band with the wittiest name in the history of hiphop, N.W.A., short for Niggers With Attitude (as if any without attitude would be arrogant enough to presume success in American pop culture would naturally follow calling themselves the N word!). Biggie and Ice Cube are hiphop’s premiere representatives of that branch of wit we tend to describe as mordant, the sort of wits who charm and delight us while mocking the faces of death.
Ice Cube and Ice T in a promotional photo for the film Looters (released as Trespass) (1992)
Some rappers are too serious-minded to deal in the sort of deadly low-comedy favoured by Big and Cube, but the best of them don’t lack for gut-busting punchlines either. One thinks of Public Enemy’s Chuck D, who ingeniously injected several lines of sly and witty wordplay into a rather melodramatic song about a prison riot – most notably: “My plan said I had to get out and break North/ just like Oliver’s neck I had to get off.” (You may need to Wiki “The North Star” and “Oliver North” to apprehend just how witty that line seemed in 1988, and also take an African American history class with special emphasis on the Underground Railroad.) Some fellow scholars of hiphop verse find even more clever the militant nonchalance of the song’s opening lines: “I got a letter from the government the other day/I opened and read it/It said they were ‘Suckers’./ They wanted me for their Army or Whatever/Picture me giving a damn/I said ‘Never’.” We, on the other hand, find ourselves more partial to the grace under pressure and dry wit Chuck displays in his follow-up lines: “I wasn’t with it / But just that very minute / It occurred to me / The Suckers had Authority.” (Harvard’s Professor Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama might now concur.)
Hiphop is also where one is most likely in Black Modernity to find examples of that style of wit known as absurdist. The lyricist known as MF Doom is perhaps our most uncanny contemporary purveyor of Afro-absurdism. Not only because he struts about onstage and off wearing a metal mask obviously modelled after that of the Marvel Comics villain Dr Doom, but because he also sends younger, thinner and even whiter-looking acolytes onstage to lip sync his songs – a gambit which has brought no shortage of ire and consternation from paying fans who demand the “real” Doom be brought before them, not quite getting the conceptual postmodernist joke that’s on them. Doom’s pointed send-up of current rap’s rather dull devotion to theatrical naturalism or “realness”, as we say here in the surreal ’hood of Harlem, is surely doomed to be lost on the witless. (Doom, it should be noted, also deploys not just his own gruff speaking voice to tell his tall tales, but also does neat impersonations of mousy cartoon characters, cornball office plebes, mentally challenged persons, super heroic talk show hosts.) His sort of absurdism piles on so many silly in-jokes and obscure references that you may at first feel fanboy smart for catching all of them, until you realise you’re this surrealist’s idea of a punchline. Being able to footnote Doom’s roll-call of cultural waste products marks your cranium where signs of intelligent life are dubious: “How they gave his own show to Tad Ghostal /Any given second he could go mad postal / Stay wavin that power band space cannon/And have the nerve to jump in the face of Race Bannon./Since when the Way-Outs included Zorak/Way back when he used to rub his thorax in Borax.” (Space Hoes, from the album DangerDoom.) As with Monty Python, only a genius could have transformed that post-McCluhan compost heap into a verbal joyride; likewise, pity those among Doom’s admirers out to build a cult around this anti-Kanye – an iron-masked rapper in pursuit of virtual invisibility.
The history of Wit in Black Modernity didn’t begin with hiphop of course. Where we find first evidence that African Americans were going to confront the collective’s tragedy with a comic twist was found in that uber-body of Black literature known as the Slave Narratives. There one finds letters such as the following written by our long deceased brother Jourdon Anderson. Some would say ex-slave; we being more PC say “a self-liberated person of African descent”. This missive was composed and mailed to his former concentration camp warden, one Colonel PH Anderson of Big Spring Tennessee, on 22 August 1865. Anderson’s letter was apparently written in response to one from the Colonel asking if Jourdon and his family would consider returning to their former confinement facility. The record shows no evidence the Colonel ever replied:
Sir:
I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harbouring the Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbours told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
…Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly – and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you.This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy ,our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V.Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio.
We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows…
P.S. – Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson
Hiphop has also globally popularised that branch of Black Comedic thought known as “the dozens”, more commonly described as “Yo Mama” jokes. As in“Yo Mama so fat that she went floating in the ocean and Spain claimed her for the New World”. As in “Yo Mama so poor she went to McDonald’s and put a milkshake on layaway”, and so forth. Because the best ripostes from the realm of the dozens are spontaneously invented and tossed about in rapid-fire street corner contests, it’s easy to see how the practice has evolved into those fractious battles of Wit we in hiphop know as The Freestyle Contest – hoi polloi colloquiums where contenders wittily volley insults at one another and nimbly do so on the beat. In the most exacting of these rituals one is not even allowed to use obscenities or profanities, and the contestant’s gifts for imaginative insult are truly put to an extreme sporting test. When one moves to the arena of the Professional Black Comedian, the Mount Olympus of Comedic Black Modernity, that realm where the deities of African funnymen and funnywomen dwell (the Pryors, Rock, Sykes, Mableys, Chappelles, Katt Williams et al) here is where you’ll find living fusillades of bebop fluency who combine all manner of comedic form into a seamless, eloquent and fluid stream of nonsense and common sense where nothing is sacred and no remorseless transgression of social norms will ever come begging forgiveness.
All that said, we can think of no greater homage to the depths and shallows of Black Comedic form and tradition than transcribing a story once told by Black Comedy’s paramount master of narrative, the late Richard Pryor. The story in question “stars” Pryor’s elderly Southern raconteur Mudbone. In it two Negroes reputed to have the largest penises in the world go out in the world to measure up, as it were, to finally decide in fact, and not brag, which of them indeed has been gifted with the “biggest dick”:
“They were trying to find a place where they could have they contest, see? And they wasn’t no freaks – didn’t want everybody looking – so they walking around, looking for a secret place. So they walking across the Golden Gate Bridge and Niggas seen that water and made ’em want to piss, see?
“One say, ‘Man I got to take a leak’. So he pulled his thing out, took a piss, other Nigga pulled his thing out, took a piss. One Nigga said ‘Goddamn! This water’s Cold.’ Other Nigga say, ‘Yeah, and it’s Deep too.’’*
At the end of the day finding humour where others might find shame, terror and horror is at the heart of the witty Negroes project and after Pryor, a wise man would know to take his bow.*
*Not to be drearily professorial, but upon further consideration we’ve come to believe that fully apprehending Pryor’s use of ellipsis and one-upmanship in his routine’s punchline may not require unpacking the assonances and resonances which form the ecology of his conclusions nor involve disinterring the double entendres of “cold” and “deep” found in standard African American slang – particularly as such researches seem quite terribly boffish and twee an enterprise given the unabashedly ribald buffoonery and chicanery (not to mention chi-coon-ery) found in his good man Sir Mudbone’s bawdy phallocentric spiel.
DOOM TOUR 2011: AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND
Following packed shows in Europe and beyond, DOOM is travelling to the other side of the planet in Spring 2011 for his debut tour of Australia and New Zealand. More details and ticket links here shortly.
Tue 22nd March – Zen, Aukland – NZ
Wed 23rd March – The Forum, Sydney – AU
Thu 24rd March – The Espy, Melbourne – AU
Fri 25rd March – Metro City, Perth – AU
Sat 26th march – The Governor Hindmarsh Hotel, Adelaide – AU
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
THE BATTLE FOR J DILLA'S LEGACY
- Kelley Louise Carter
- Vibe Magazine
- January 13, 2009
There's nothing Maureen Yancey wouldn't do for her children. But as she sits in the basement studio of her only surviving son's Los Angeles home, she struggles with the one thing she hasn't done since her firstborn, James Dewitt Yancey known in hip hop circles as Jay Dee or J Dilla - three years ago of complications from lupus. She just can't. She didn't do it when the ambulance arrived at the nearby house Dilla shared with. Common, and she didn't when they failed to revive him from cardiac arrest. She couldn't even bring herself to do it when she picked out which baseball cap she'd place by his coffin."When he left, I had an awful void," she says calmly. "I didn't grieve like you always think you'd grieve. I always had a joy and the strength to help others to get through it. But..." her voice trails off, hands smoothing down her jeans. "I haven't cried yet."
Still, the memories came flooding back when she flew from Detroit to visit the city where her son was buried at age 32. "I rejoiced in the fact that he wasn't sick anymore," she says, "and that he'd done what he came here to do. I do believe that. His purpose on earth was to come here and give us the music that he had in his heart and soul."
The equipment that surrounds her is Dilla's, the same gear he used to create the deceptively simple, unspeakably beautiful music that solidified his reputation as one of hip hop's greatest. As Busta Rhymes put it in 2007, "He wasn't just a producer, he was the best producer."
Many of her son's friends - Common, Busta, Erykah Badu - still call regularly, and keep her son's music in rotation. Q-Tip's latest single, "Move" (Universal Motown, 2008), was built around a Dilla beat, and her other son John Yancey, a rapper known as Illa J has released the powerful new album, Yancey Boys (Delicious Vinyl, 2008), which was produced by his big brother.
Meanwhile the 60-year-old woman everybody calls Ma Dukes faces health problems of her own, and financial challenges as well. Although numerous memorials and "benefits" were held in his name, the proceeds didn't change his family's life. Dilla left two daughters - Ja'Mya, 7, and Paige, 9 - to provide for, a sizeable IRS bill, and unresolved legal issues surrounding the use of his beats. Ma Dukes says she has never received money from her son's estate and that her plans to establish a foundation in his name were quashed by the executor of his estate. Somehow, she was not reduced to tears even after Dilla's attorney informed her that she had no legal right to use her own son's name or likeness for commercial purposes. Not even to support his family.
IN HIS NATIVE DETROIT, DILLA WAS THE MAN. The soft-spoken beatmaker was a pioneer of the Motor City hip hop landscape that struggled to gain national recognition before Slim Shady put the D on the map in 1999. Though he remains anonymous to the masses, Dilla is considered a demigod by his hardcore fans. His distinctive drum sounds and grimy, organic sound palette revolutionized hip hop production, and echoes of his innovative use of samples can be heard in the work of Just Blaze and Kanye West. "He can do a Primo beat better than Premier. He can do a Dre beat better than Dre, and he can out-rock Pete Rock," says fellow Detroit producer House Shoes. "But none of them could duplicate a Dilla beat. Much respect to those three. They were pioneers. But that's the fucking truth."
Dilla grew up in the Conant Gardens section of Detroit's Eastside surrounded by music. His dad, Beverly Yancey, played piano and upright bass. "My mom and dad had a jazz a cappella group, and they'd sing in the living room for hours and hours," says Illa J, 22. "It was really laid-back and nonchalant. While that was happening, my brother would be downstairs in the basement doing his thing."
By the mid-1990s, Dilla was getting calls from some of the hottest stars of the day. He produced tracks for The Pharcyde, De La Soul, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest, and Q-Tip, with whom he founded the production collective The Ummah. Yet despite these high-profile projects, Dilla shunned the limelight. His love of music eclipsed any concern for dealing with industry politics. "He wasn't antisocial," says Illa J. "He was just quiet. That comes from our dad. A lot of his personality rubbed off on my brother. It was all about the craft for him. He didn't care about all that other stuff."
When Tribe's Beats, Rhymes, and Life (Jive, 1996) was nominated for a Grammy, Tip invited Dilla to the award ceremony. "I was like, 'Yo, this is a good opportunity for you, you should just go.' He was like, 'Hell no, I ain't going. Fuck that!"' recalls Q-Tip, laughing at the memory. "I said, 'You got nominated for a fucking Grammy. You are going to go.' He said, 'I ain't got nothing to wear!' But he went. He was so mad and disgruntled and angry about that. He was much happier doing it his way. That's who he was. He didn't really want to fuck with none of that. And I don't blame him."
DILLA REALIZED SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH HIS HEALTH IN JANUARY OF 2002. He'd just returned from Europe and thought he had a bad flu. Sick to his stomach and complaining of chills, Ma Dukes took him to the emergency room at Bon Secours hospital in suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. His blood platelet count should have been above 150, but it was below 10. Doctors told his mother they were surprised he was still walking around.
He tested positive for lupus, an autoimmune disease that can be fatal. To make matters worse, Detroit doctors diagnosed him with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, aka TTP, a rare disorder that causes blood clots to form in the body's blood vessels.
Despite his degenerating health, Dilla packed up his stuff and moved out to Los Angeles, where he lived with his friend and frequent collaborator Common. He set up a studio and got to work. But very few knew how bad life was for the soft-spoken prodigy. He poured himself into his work, doing his best to forget his health problems. Ma Dukes says there were several close calls. When she left him alone once, Dilla fell down and bumped his head. Because she refused to leave Dilla's side during his last days, she and her husband lost their house. She tried to file for bankruptcy to save the family home but didn't get back to Detroit in time to sign the necessary paperwork. "I wasn't leaving my son," she says."We lost the house. But I wasn't concerned. It didn't bother me at all."
At summer's end, 2005, Dilla found himself in a hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, the same hospital where The Notorious B.I.G. and Eazy-E died. He'd lost the ability to walk and could barely talk. His own body was killing him, and there was little to be done about it.
Sensing that death was coming, he told his mother he needed his equipment in the hospital with him. Ma Dukes asked his friends from the L.A.-based label Stones Throw Records to lug his turntables, mixer, crates of records, MPC, and computer into his room. When his hands were too swollen, Ma Dukes would massage his stiffened fingers so Dilla could work on the tracks, letting his doctors listen to the beats through his headphones.
Sometimes he'd wake Ma Dukes up in the middle of the night, asking her to help move him from his bed to a reclining chair so he could work a bit more comfortably. His only focus was finishing the album. Donuts was released on Stones Throw on February 7, 2006, his 32nd birthday. Dilla died three days later.
"It was crazy to hear all that soul," Illa J says of one haunting track called "Don't Cry." "I got to be in the right mode to listen to it. It's emotional for me. I can feel my brother talking to me through the music."
THREE DAYS AFTER DILLA DIED, HIS ELDEST DAUGHTER, PAIGE, TURNED 6. "That was a low blow," says her mother, Monica Whitlow. "To have to tell my baby that before her birthday was the worst. We didn't get to say goodbye." The 29-year-old, who knew Dilla before his career took off, still lives in Detroit. She emphasizes that their relationship was never about money. "To have him back here, breathing and living, that's worth more than money any day," she says. "But it pisses me off, everything that's going on with this estate. It's ridiculous 'cause it's been three years, and my baby has not seen anything from this estate. Nobody has granted James his final wish."
Although Dilla's will stipulates that all assets be divided among his mother, his two daughters, and his brother, the executor of the estate is his accountant Arty Erk, and as back-up, there's his attorney, Micheline Levine and then his mother. Ma Dukes says she grew so frustrated that communications broke down between her and the executor. Erk explains that payments from the estate were delayed because Dilla has an outstanding tax debt in the "healthy six figures." He says he is negotiating a payment plan with the IRS and that a petition has been filed with the probate court in order to get family allowances paid to Dilla's children.
The other major issue facing the estate is that so many people are using Dilla's beats without permission. Dilla would often create beat CDs and hand them out to friends.
"It's been difficult to police," Erk admits, adding that he's at the tail end of litigation with Busta Rhymes. "An album was released by Busta on the Internet called Dillagence without authorization," Levine explains. "And, of course, we're now unable to use those tracks and exploit those downloads. Everybody downloaded it for free." Attempts to reach out to Busta were not returned.
Ma Dukes counters that Busta paid Dilla for those tracks years ago. "He got a raw deal," she says. "Busta didn't take anything from anybody." Ma Dukes says she feels bad that her son's friend had to go through such rough treatment by his estate.
The same scenario has played out several times since Dilla's death. The estate has settled "four or five" similar cases, negotiating what they believe is fair market value for the beats. "A lot of people are coming out of the woodwork with things that he did for them," says Erk, who took out an ad in Billboard magazine in April 2008, notifying people to stop using Dilla's material. The estate also sent out cease-and-desist letters to various entertainers as well as people throwing events in Dilla's name-including his own mother, she says. "Her dream was to open a camp where kids with lupus could have normal lives," says Joy Yoon, an L.A. journalist who interviewed Ma Dukes shortly after her son's death and later offered to help her raise funds for what was to be called the J Dilla Foundation. "But then she said she was put on hold by the lawyers."
Ma Dukes insists she will go on with her plans for the foundation, establishing it in her own name. "It's been over two years, and they're talking the same crap," she says. "I don't have a Ph.D., but I know how to use a phone and talk to somebody and make arrangements. It's just not an excuse. They have no respect for the fact that I had anything to do with bringing him into this world."
Meanwhile, she has voiced concerns about Dilla's will itself, which he signed on September 8, 2005, nearly six months before his death. "I don't even know if he really knew what he was signing," she says. "I don't think he would have signed anything if he'd known it would be like this now." She has hired an attorney who is also representing her son and Paige's mother, Monica Whitlow, who says that legal action is "in the works."
"His estate is fucked up," Q-Tip says. "I know the lawyers are saying that he had certain tax issues and all that stuff. But you were getting paid to represent him when he was alive, so it shouldn't be any of that. Ma Dukes ain't getting nothing, and the kids ain't getting nothing. It's a horrible thing."
During the last year of her son's life, Maureen Yancey tested positive for lupus. She says she's not worried about dying and has accepted the fact that she and her husband must now live in a rental property in a neighborhood she describes as "a war-torn zone." What keeps her up at night is her grand children. "I just want the girls to be taken care of," she says. "That's all."
In response to a petition filed by her mother, Joyleete Hunter, Dilla's youngest daughter, Ja'Mya, has begun receiving money from the estate, and Erk says Paige should start receiving payouts sometime in early 2009. "Oh really?" says Whitlow. "That's new information for me." She has had few conversations with Erk and says that when she informed him she was working with Ma Dukes' lawyer, he warned her, "This is going to get ugly." But she remains undeterred. "I gotta speak up for my baby 'cause I been quiet too long," she says."He hasn't seen ugly. I can show him ugly."
In the meantime, Ma Dukes says please don't cry for her. "It's really rough for everybody out there. But prayers help," she says with a sigh."Pray for my strength."
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