“I was talking rather than listening,” Charnas said in a recent video interview, “and so the big shift for me is that I’ve had to do really, really careful listening over the past four years to try to get this story.”ĭilla, who came to attention via his work with the Pharcyde, A Tribe Called Quest and his own group Slum Village, died in February 2006 from complications of a rare blood disease three days after he turned 32. He remembered going out for Mongolian barbecue with the rapper Chino XL, Dilla and Common, who was in town to work with Dilla on what would become his album “Like Water for Chocolate.” But that’s about it. He remembered Dilla crouched over his MPC3000 sampling drum machine in the basement studio of his family’s home in the Conant Gardens neighborhood of Detroit. But Charnas, the author of the 2010 book “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop,” could barely recall anything that J Dilla, born James Dewitt Yancey, said during the one occasion they spent together, in the summer of 1999. 1 that thoroughly examines the hip-hop producer’s unique approach. The writer Dan Charnas conducted nearly 200 interviews to write “Dilla Time,” a 400-page biography out Feb. In the 16 years since his death, the aura around him has only grown.
Followers spoke of him reverentially and with enough hyperbole that he could feel inaccessible to listeners who didn’t quite get it. He was an open secret, an under-acknowledged force shifting and shaping modern music. Even during his lifetime, there was something unexplainable about J Dilla, the Detroit-born hip-hop producer and M.C.
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