Pay Jay in your own way
Dilla Month and hip hop revisionism
This article was originally written in February 2013, and published by Playground Magazine. It has been edited and is republished here two years later as I feel its message is still relevant. It is not meant as an attack or dismissal of anyone working to keep the memory of James Yancey alive, simply as a way to think and discuss what the “movement” means as we approach the decade anniversary of his passing. Thank you Jay Dee.
George Orwell, writing in 1944, argued that “history is written by the winners,” and winners have a habit of twisting history about. Hip hop is no exception.
The history of hip hop has often been subject to amends, revisions and debates. The involvement of hispanic minorities in the early days of hip hop for example became lost with the music and culture’s ascendance. Various efforts were made in the 1990s and 2000s — via print and increasingly the internet — to set the record straight and establish for posterity that hip hop was not just started by African-American minorities in the boroughs of New York City.
Revisionism, the critical examination of historical facts, has negative connotations yet it’s also a necessary part of the process of (re)writing history. If the winners are the ones doing most of the writing, facts will often be ignored in favour of certain narratives that reinforce the status quo. The internet, for all its flaws, has helped to democratise, and hasten, this process. While hip hop’s early years were a focus of historians throughout most of the culture’s first decades, people are now able to set the record straight online quicker. Though such democratisation still comes at a price.
One of the biggest case of revisionism in hip hop started seven years ago and centred not around a group, local scene or historical happening but around one man, and his musical legacy.
James Yancey (the artist known as Jay Dee, J Dilla or simply Dilla) was one of hip hop’s greatest producers. To many, he was its greatest. His death in February 2006, at the early age of 32, was tragic. In the seven years since his death, Yancey has ascended to the top of hip hop’s production pantheon, eulogised by his peers and those who knew him well. Yet things weren’t quite as clear cut while he was alive.
Jay Dee’s work spanned generations of hip hop’s evolution: the mid-1990s’ “golden era,” the Neo Soul movement — which his close friend Houseshoes jokingly referred to as “Dilla beats” in a recent video — and hip hop’s more modern mutations in the early 2000s. Throughout, he operated at both underground and mainstream levels. Crucially he seemed to evolve with hip hop, presaging trends and aesthetics. Where fellow legendary producers such as DJ Premier, Pete Rock or Diamond D maintained a certain sound over the years from which they accrued their status, Jay Dee seemed capable of doing anything and everything. As Houseshoes put it in the All Ears documentary:
“Nobody could do what [Jay] did. But he could do what everybody else could, pretty much better than them.”
Despite showcasing such phenomenal production talent, Yancey remained in the shadows of the mainstream. There was the now infamous un-credited production for Janet Jackson and the sour deal with MCA, to name just two. As for the underground, he only ever found himself in the spotlight of certain parts of it for brief moments. All of which changed almost overnight following his death.
Since Yancey’s passing, February has become “Dilla month,” a celebration of the man’s life during the month of his death (which is also the month of his birth, he passed three days after his birthday). With it comes a smattering of club nights in cities across the world dedicated to celebrating Yancey’s work alongside what feels like endless amounts of on/offline chatter and discussion. Then there are the obligatory post-humous releases, which started almost as soon as he passed. Topping it off is the “J Dilla Changed My Life” t-shirts, something that started as a show of affection from one of Yancey’s German fans but has since grown into a, perhaps inevitably, point of contention. Some argue that the message has been re-appropriated by people whose lives were perhaps only superficially changed after Yancey’s passing. Such reasoning may seem trivial (and it is to a degree) but as the years go by and debates rage on about where the money raised via these various celebrations goes and what the motivations behind them are, it’s easy to see how it might start to grate on those who knew Yancey personally. After all they have been better placed than anyone to see his genius immortalised after being ignored while he was alive.
As part of an ongoing book project, I’ve spent the past week discussing Yancey’s perceived impact with various people in Los Angeles who knew and worked with him. Amid feelings of tiredness with regards to how his work and name has been used since his death, I came across some information that helps to show the extent of the revisionism that followed Yancey’s passing, and how quickly it manifested.
Three days before Yancey’s death, Stones Throw released the Donuts album. Made on his deathbed, Donuts was a beat tape, though that title belittles the richness of the work. Yet it was precisely because of its format that the UK press officer apparently became reluctant to work the release. Combined with additional apathy from the press and the larger public, the album’s sales numbers (scans) for its first week in the UK reached 115. These numbers offer a stark contrast to the reception and praise Donuts received once Yancey had passed. More people claimed it a masterpiece than bought it in its first week.
For more of a US perspective, Egon, general manager for Stones Throw at the time, recalls the situation in All Ears as follows:
“We were trying to sell an instrumental record by a producer most people had written off because he was sick. That’s the thing most people don’t say. People got tired of him being sick, and they stopped talking about him, they stopped using his music, it disgusted me.”
There isn’t anything wrong with the sort of collective revisionism that swept hip hop after Yancey’s passing per se. You could argue that he is at least receiving the praise he was always due. Despite this, a closer look at how he was viewed in hip hop’s public, and historical, sphere while alive shows a certain pattern across his career. In most cases, Yancey’s work was ignored or hardly celebrated while alive and then canonised after his death.
Jaylib, his collaborative album with Madlib, had nowhere near the impact it did post 2006. The work he did for A Tribe Called Quest in the late 1990s, working with Q-Tip as part of The Ummah, was seen by some as an affront to Tribe’s ‘sound’, a change of direction fans didn’t particularly approve of. Slum Village, the Detroit group Yancey co-founded in the 1990s, garnered a degree of underground acclaim in their early years, before Jay left the group, yet his work with them never really made the public impact it did after his passing. His more soulful contributions for the likes of Erikah Badu, D’Angelo, Janet Jackson and others are often shunned by hip hop purists.
The trend is clear to see, and runs deep. There just wasn’t that much hype or interest around Yancey in his lifetime despite his work shaping or influencing some of hip hop’s best known moments. All of which makes the clamouring around the man following his death all the more unsettling.
It’s hard to fault the logic by which one may argue that “‘if all these people are now so keen to applaud Jay’s work, where were they when he was alive?” It’s also arguable that the help any acclaim could have provided him may have made a difference.
Alex Chase, who runs Stones Throw’s European office, remembers the time following his death as quite a stunning experience. “I was amazed at how quickly he was deified. And then how thoroughly his production aesthetic was incorporated into the styles of a lot of music. At the time you’d go to a rap night or club and everyone would be playing the same records. Within a couple of months it changed and everyone was playing Dilla records all night.”
This change in attitude towards Yancey’s music has continued unabated for the last seven years, increasing in intensity as time went past. One of its weirdest manifestations is the term “‘post-Dilla,” coined by the press to describe the primarily instrumental productions that took flight in the wake of Yancey’s death and went on to form a scene and movement of their own in the late 2000s, after years of being relegated to the sides of hip hop’s main game. The term was often deployed, and still is at times, as justification for the validity of both Yancey’s legacy and the music made in its wake. No matter how you flip it, the term is little more than commodification of his work and aesthetic into a bite-sized buzzword.
While Yancey’s posthumous influence did have the benefit of forcing people to refresh their taste palettes, Alex Chase also points out to a negative side effect. “I feel it offered a way out stylistically for people who were stuck. I also feel it was a weirdly conservative mass movement in one direction, towards Dilla’s style. And this sort of conservatism was exactly the type of safety that Dilla shunned in his own work.”
A few years after Yancey’s passing, Brian Cross, a renowned L.A-based photographer and documentarian who knew and worked with the producer, helped organise Suite for Ma Dukes, a unique concert to celebrate Yancey’s work and legacy. The one-off concert reimagined parts of Yancey’s oeuvre in a classical format, something that had never been done before. The impetus, he told me, was driven by a wish to avoid conservatism.
“Miguel [Atwood-Ferguson] had thought of a new way to listen to Dilla. To me that was like ‘holy shit! Now we get to pay tribute in the way the man deserves, and we’re doing something new no one has thought of before!’ Miguel and Carlos [Nino] found a way to liberate something emotional out of this man’s music that no mixtape could do.”
Whether or not you agree with the revisionism that followed Yancey’s death is irrelevant. That’s a personal choice each ‘fan’ must make in light of his own story with Yancey’s music. What’s more important is to recognise that hip hop, as a whole, failed to celebrate his true worth while he was alive. And while there’s nothing new about this attitude — we rarely celebrate our geniuses while they’re among us —Yancey’s legacy and those of others like him have very real consequences. These consequences continue to impact the work of his mother and the foundation set up in his name.
The repetitive quality that the Dilla month concept now seems to primarily foster freezes his legacy for yearly reliving, something that ultimately diminishes its power. Repetition leads to less contribution, and Yancey was all about contribution, about giving us things we didn’t know hip hop could do.
According to German philosopher Hannah Arendt, art offers “a potential immortality, destined to survive the coming and going of generations.” Jay Dee is now immortal. His work will live on, for at least as long as hip hop continues to exist if not more. It’s time to acknowledge that his legacy is timeless and that it should be lived as he lived it until he had to leave us.
