WC: 1505
"Who’s this? Ahmir lost his phone so I am taking messages…."
Great, I just turned into one of "them." I just can't believe I found myself playing the "Hollywood" card. I've been in L.A. since the end of January. As I sat at homebase headquarters (Roscoe's on Gower) with my production partner in crime James Poyser, I received a call from an unfamiliar 323 number.
I was semi-confused. (I'll be honest, if I don't know the number off the bat, chances are I will just ignore it.) But because it was award season I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing out on free shwag. [I’d hoped] it was a rep from Nike about some gear I ordered.
The number rang again.
All kinds of questions raced in and out.
Riiiiiiiiing.
Shit. This time they sent a text message:
"Yo Get At Me"
Out of panic I did the "Hollywood" thing: I responded back pretending to be my own girlfriend.
“Who This? Ahmir Lost Phone So I Am Taking Messages.”
"It's Dilla"
Yo!!!! I was too beside myself. It had been a year since Valentines 2005 when I somehow talked myself into not going inside the entrance doors of Cedar's Sinai [hospital] to pay Jay a belated birthday visit. I kept making excuses and then decided to turn back around. It wasn't because I couldn't face the fact that his health had taken a sharp turn for the worse leaving him frail and unrecognizable. It was for the best—simply because I knew that I couldn't hold back the temptation of asking him all the technical questions I had about his legendary "Motown" beat CD I had just gotten my hands on some days before. I mean what would Momma Yancey think If I started asking, "How in the hell did you manage to time compress Michael Jackson's voice on that "Dancing Machine" chop to make it sound like Mike was regurgitating?” Or "How long did it take for you to rearrange the first 40 seconds of James Brown's ‘My Thing’ to the point you managed to get rid of every last bit of ad lib between James and his horn section?” Even if you don't know "beatmaking," pretty much everyone knows that if someone can talk a hole in your ear on wax, it’s James. And somehow you created a fucking miracle by using every PAINSTAKING millisecond in that song to create an instrumental.
See the thing is….the last round of beat CDs I got from you were so mind-boggling. So complex. Only a choice few could even sound natural rhyming over them. And while most would pick something more Dilla-acceptable like the Pharcyde's “Runnin’” or perhaps even Common's “The Light,” I had a feeling this was something much more than “a beat CD.”
I've been honored to receive your beat CDs (or "treats" as D’Angelo, James, Rashaad Smith, Common, and the entire musician community affectionately refers to them) since we first met back in ‘96. To get your hands on that as a writer’s-blocked musician was like the post-spinach effect on a certain sailor man. Some cats were so desperate for whatever trick you had up your sleeve. I remember some of them had a collection of your outgoing answering machine messages in case you were nice enough to throw us a "treat" as you said, "Leave a message.”
I mean we used to sit in a circle like our parents would do in the ‘40s looking at the radio asking over and over again: "What the fuck was on his mind?!??"
Even my obsession got to the point where I have zero shame in saying that I got five record agents across the globe not only searching for the records you used to make your beat CD—but I got them looking for that artist's whole discography in case there were some scraps in their catalogue that too could posses me to be as musically bold.
Strange thing is…I don't even think YOU could explain your eccentricity. I think you had an extra "drive" file in your left brain that forced you to push the boundaries. Even when all of us took and took and took and took and borrowed and stole from you, you never sweated it. You just Pied-Pipered us to a whole ‘nother style of beatmaking. I've seen cats sit by helpless as the world just took from them (see: Das EFX, Erick Sermon, De La Soul to name a few) and some cats remained stubborn refusing to travel another creative direction simply because they were afraid of change. But very few embraced
"Change."
You embraced change like it was the newest pairs of Jordan's on the block.
You went from the post Tribe Crack Drums/Filtered Bass/Rhodes samples to Cold Kraftwerk Synth patches to playing all the instruments yourself one bar at a time to—well…your last opus: taking it back to Motown.
When I say "Motown" I don't mean all the loops are based on Motown stuff. But that Motown feeling.
If Kanye had ushered in the RZA's 94 soul dreams into full circle some ten years later—then you took that vision and created the impossible.
I mean from song to song (those who live on the Internet know there are about three Munchkin prequels that prepared us for the beautiful mess that is Donuts) you were going all over the place: 99 bpms would become 49 bpms and 50 bpms were going in reverse. You would manipulate words like a CIA wiretap agent (My favorite? Breaking down a line from "Walk On By" 'If I Seem, Broken And Blue' down to its simple compound
broke…n…blue without missing a damn beat) then a commercial would come on—most of this occurring in under a minute. Then in a heartbeat sirens were blasting everywhere like fireworks on the 4th of July. It was like if the Bomb Squad broke into the reel room at Hitsville….after taking 23 hits of acid…in a row.
I mean as I was listening to it and all I could keep asking is: "Who in the world does he expect to rhyme over this??!?!?" Has he heard what the radio is doing? Surely he missed the Coligpark memo that said: if "less" is "more" then "none" is the new "pink."
Then it all dawned on me. For the first time in the history of me collecting these beat CDs, could Dilla not be looking to sell these beats more than him giving us a message? I mean that had to be the logical answer.
Now what was the message? For sometime I thought it was his passive aggressive way to show all the new jackers that not only did he have the balls…but he had the boldest, biggest balls ever. Even if the world didn't bow down, the ones who always paid attention to Dilla (the “producer's producer”) would get the message loud and clear.
But Dilla was too cutting edge and too humble to even resort to these mid-life crisis games. There had to have been a deeper message.
It was only after his death that I realized the message was clear all along: Donuts was Dilla's crafted swan song. He knew it. It all makes sense now: His determination to get this done even while in pain at the hospital. The message snippets: "You're gonna want me back" ("Stop!”); "People the time has come….hold on!!!" (“People”); “Time is
running out I’m afraid" ("Glazed"); the "I don't really care" line that was perfectly crafted at the minute mark of "Airworks."
I could go on. Was "Don't Cry" a beautiful flip? Or a musical hug to his mother while at the same time showing us how no one but him can flip shit that effortless? And what about Wolfman Jack's talk of "the end of the world" and "who will take responsibility" because this is "too much too soon”?
Of course, I could be reading too much into all this. For all we know Dilla probably saw this as a fool-proof plan to keep the beat jackers at bay from rhyming over four clean bars for their mixtapes.
Time will soon tell if Dilla will be bestowed the legendary status given to the historic figures who lived in obscurity only to see their legend established once gone from this earth. I, for one, will always spread the word about his talent and his complete selflessness. The most humble beatmaker I've known. Never complained, always was positive. Even in my "Hollywood" bullshit he managed to humble himself:
Me: Yo Man! I can't believe it’s you and shit!!! We got to get up yo! I got mad projects for you. You down?
Dilla: Yep!
Me: You sure? I mean with you being Jesus H Christ and all (we on our
10th Donuts listen)---we just wanna know if we worthy to be in your presence and all, sir. lol
Dilla: man u crazy I'm tryna make y’all level.
Dilla, you were past our level.
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