An interview with J Dilla while on tour in The Netherlands
It's in four parts, so make sure to check them all.
I've heard snippets of this interview here and there, and it's apparent that this conversation with J Dilla is of vast importance to the hip hop community. He speaks extensively about his relationship with Slum Village, his encounter and subsequent collaboration with Madlib, and the issues of intellectual and artistic ownership in hip hop.
I'm not writing much because I'm watching it myself! Check ya'll tomorrow...
This is an interview of Elzhi by The Hip Hop Chronicle UK. Decent interviews of this cat are hard to find.
Why is the camera moving around so much!? Hold still!
What's best about this dude is his genuine sense of humility and gratitude. I don't think Elzhi ever really planned to be as much in the (relative) limelight as he finds himself now. He's a former member of one of hip hop's most legendary groups, consistently mentioned as one of the most gifted rap lyricists working in this era, and is part of a small number of very talented emcees who carry torches for Detroit hip hop. I think all he ever hoped was to be a dope emcee and give some hot live performances. I have an immense amount of respect for this cat's accomplishments so far, but most especially for not losing himself along the way.
In addition to this video, I've found this written interview of Elzhi by Kevin Nottingham. (See here.) This is a very smart interview and fills in a lot of information most of the videos don't capture. I encourage you to have a look.
I remember living in Atlanta when Slum Villiage's sophomore effort Trinity (Past, Present, Future) was released in 2002. The big news with Slum Village at the time was the departure of J Dilla and the addition of a new emcee to the group, Elzhi. In those days, I would frequently visit the Saturday night radio show of my good friend Marcel and hang out at the station until the wee hours. It was during one of those visits when Marcel tossed me a station give-away copy of Trinity. I popped it in the cd player of my Jeep Cherokee and had a listen.
I think it took me until track four, "La La", before I fully integrated this gravity of Elzhi's introduction. But after I heard El say, "Gat slangin' with my arm in the shape of an 'L', lettin' my fingers walk/I never been down to earth, I just been deep in thought," I knew I was witnessing the emergence of an incredible artist. And even though Elzhi had been making the usual rounds in the Detroit hip hop scene, his involvement with Slum Village between 2001 and 2010 thrust him into the view of the most well-respected music makers in hip hop. He is the proverbial "favorite rapper's favorite rapper".
One thing to note about Elzhi's process is that he is a writer; he rarely, if ever, works in spontaneous rhyme. Therefore, finding a clip of him performing a non-written freestyle is next to impossible. (If you come across one, let me know!) So here's a quick clip of a written freestyle of his that was posted to youtube about a year ago. Check 'em out. He's ill.
So it's bedtime for me. My 45-minute ride home from rehearsal took two hours tonight due to maintenance on the bridge I took back to town. The traffic when from four lanes to ONE lane, so you can imagine the bottleneck that ensued.
So, to keep me company I spun my iPod up to DJ House Shoes and his album called King James Version Chapter 1: Verse I-V. Essentially, it's a collection of samples used by J-Dilla, all strung together to give the listener a fascinating and unique musical landscape through which to explore Mr. Yancey's body of work. Have a listen to Verse I.
This album is available for purchase on Amazon.com. If you're a fan of J-Dilla and/or interested in having a bit more understanding as to how hip hop producers turn old records into new ones (in which case you'd have to also buy some Dilla records), pick up this album. It's brilliance is quite underrated.
A few months ago my homie Marcel sends me a copy of a mixtape from these new southern California rap cats named Pac Div (short for Pacific Division). He says, "You need to check these cats. They for real." I'm like, "That's what's up. I'll get to it."
However, it's no secret to Marcel that I'm notorious for sleeping on new music. If I'm listening to music, I'm usually playing stuff from three or four years ago, if not longer. I think I might have played the Trinity album by Slum Village for an entire year and half. There's something comforting to me about listening to familiar lyrics and instrumentation. I like to rap along with the track, move to musical elements I can anticipate, and search for hidden nuances in established material.
I'm also pretty lazy about putting new stuff on my iPod.
So as I was trying to figure out which emcee(s) I'd like to highlight this month I thought back to that Pac Div mixtape sitting on my desktop. So I unzipped the file, threw it on my Pod, and had a listen on my way to work Tuesday.
Man, am I glad I did. 'Cause these cats are solid.
Pac Div is a hip hop group from Palmdale, California consisting of a pair of brothers, Like and Mibbs, along with their longtime friend BeYoung. Hip hop duos or trios are becoming a rarity in hip hop these days, so it's refreshing to see new groups emerging with a emphasis on collaborative longevity. Usually when I listen to emcees from the west coast, I'm hindered by the difficulty of adjusting to the west coast dialect, which isn't frequently heard in my music catalog. It's a challenge I need to address. I grew up listening to east coast and southern hip hop, so the west coast dialect almost sounds foreign, demanding me to give particular attention to the textual elements of the rhyme.
However, with Pac Div I found it much easier to listen to them without my habitual response to California rappers. Their dialects aren't any less pronounced than most of their west coast counterparts, but the arrangement of their instrumentals coupled with their exceptional lyrical ability allowed me to fall into the pocket of their music in very natural, organic way. I'm sure people in traffic were wondering what had me bobbing my head so hard!
Check out this freestyle session with Pac Div on The World Famous Wake-Up Show with Sway and King Tech. Yea, these cats are ill.
As this thing moves along, you will eventually realize that this blog is little more than an outlet for my somewhat uncontrollable addiction to youtube. I've spent HOURS over there. There was one night in Toronto where I watched the entire Star Wars trilogy in reverse (Jedi, Empire, New Hope) simply to calm my nerves. When Walta visited me during my spring break last year, we spent DAYS watching Ewan Mcgregor and Charley Boorman as they cycled (motorcycled, that is) their way from London to New York on Long Way Round. So it's safe to say I've wasted ample time and neglected many more important tasks because I was "'tubing."
So as I was basking in the glow of my newly born forum today, I began thinking about all the youtube videos I've wanted to share with my friends, family, and colleagues over the years. One that kept nagging me was this recreation of J Dilla's production for "Players" by Slum Village.
This is a very simple and extremely elegant demonstration of how hip hop is made; at least the instrumental aspect. For the uninitiated, J Dilla a.k.a. Jay Dee a.k.a. James Yancy was a hip hop producer from Detroit, MI. There are those in the hip hop community, including myself, who would consider J Dilla one of the greatest, most expressive, and most influential hip hop producers ever. His work included projects with numerous premier artists such as Busta Rhymes, Janet Jackson, Erykah Badu, Common, The Roots, A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. Sadly he passed away in 2006 of a blood disease called thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura or TTP.
Whenever I come across videos like this, I try to imagine what kind of story could have possibly lead to the discovery and creation of what I know to be the final product. I wonder what it sounded like in the room, what sights and smells where among the observers and/or participants, what time of day, what season. It's well known that J Dilla's studio was in the basement of his mother's house. I envision the other two members of Slum Village, T3 and Baatin, arriving at Dilla's, perhaps around 4:30 in the afternoon, and walking in not through the front door but the kitchen or even the carport. I wonder if Dilla's mom cooked for them; maybe they even helped. I'm sure she was happy they were into something that was keeping them occupied and away from more unfortunate influences. Judging from the feel of Slum's music back then, it seems they had space to breathe and room to stretch in such an environment. They could easily be in their own skin.
Perhaps this is a little naive or utopic of me. But I like to think that at least some of this were true.
The other aspect I can't escape is how much musical knowledge these guys must have acquired throughout their experiences working together. There has always been a dismissal of hip hop music in regards to the usage of sampling. But consider how long it must have taken Dilla to discover this record, how many records he may have listened to before stumbling upon this song, even how many trips to record stores, thrift shops, and garage sales it took before he even had the physcial vinyl in his hand. The sheer dedication and persistence required to make this discovery, and the vision to shape the discovery into a such a brilliant piece of musical expression, is phenomenal.
In a 2004 interview on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Mos Def (If you don't know who he is, don't worry. I'm sure we'll get to him soon.) had this to say about the practice of sampling:
It created connoisseurs. It created these young people who would become knowledgeable about music via the advent of sampling...I know guys with thousands of records from everywhere of every stripe and variation that you can imagine because they're all, as Afrika Bambaataa says, looking for the perfect beat wherever that may be. I've heard some of the most fantastic, exotic, obscure, amazing music in the basements and homes of hip hop producers.
I love these moments, these peeks behind the curtain. They continue to reinforce how imaginative and masterful these artists are and how difficult it is to be good at making hip hop music. These are marvelous times.
