production that he was known for, his lyrics were overshadowed, and perhaps the person he was, was lost among them too. His brand of soul sampling drew automatic parallels with A Tribe Called Quest and Native Tongues, yet time and time again he revoked the Q-Tip/J Dilla comparisons in interviews, especially in his beginnings as Slum Village with T3 and Baatin:
“I mean, you gotta listen to the lyrics of the shit. Niggas was talking about getting head from bitches. It was like a nigga from Native Tongues never would have said that shit…It’s kind of fucked up because the audience we were trying to give to were actually people we hung around. Me, myself, and I hung around regular ass Detroit cats. Not the backpack shit that people kept putting out there like that.” (- J Dilla, The Lost Interview (2004), XXL Mag.) From the beginning Dilla wasn’t ’bout that backpack life, and time and time again he tried to reiterate that he didn’t want to be lumped into that world of conscientious boom-bap type of hip hop despite the rapid succession he saw with the collaborative efforts he made with Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Madlib, Common, the Pharcyde, De La Soul, Erykah Badu, House Shoes, and even his own idol Pete Rock. His beats made him his fame, but his raps helped keep him grounded back to Detroit. Throughout his “Ruff Draft” project with Groove Attack Records – a direct result of his folded album with MCA Records – Dilla enters his songs with: “For my real niggas only, straight cassette shit,” And continues on to talk about
whoever and whatever, all likeminded in that it was straight from the ghettos and for his boys:
“Gotta go and get these nuts, Yes it reads cheese or bust, Dilla with the gangsta shit, Now let me say it again, and say it with feeling, Dilla with the gangsta shit, here to spit the flame here to get the bank and split here to twist the dank and hit it Here to twist the game, here to flip this change spend it,” – “The $,” J Dilla (2003) This isn’t to take Dilla down from any worshipper’s makeshift Dillathrone, but more of a place to take a step back and think about how fans consume their idols – their art, their habits, their mentality, their culture, and how those components shaped them and their creativity. But as a fan you have to remember that they are people too; they have flaws, they have histories, they have their own trials and tribulations that they just managed to transform into mediums that most of us aren’t necessarily capable of. For Dilla, his music wasn’t just a way to hone his environment but to also take him
out of it, turning Detroit struggles into music that only people that have lived in his world would fully understand; a world with no backpacks and boom-bap. To really listen to any music can require the ability to garner a certain depth of translation – whether it’s picking apart the lyrics and dynamics of an album or picking apart its creator’s brain, music will always remain subjective. That exact subjectivity hardly remains up for the artist or the self-proclaimed critic to decide, but to the consumers that determine what art can decipher. It’s the consumers that can make or break you. They can martyr you or condemn you. And depending on the light shed upon J Dilla, it can be both.
“Let’s do it worldwide, show that shine, Get the cash, and flash like Kodak blind ‘em, If I get the urge to splurge or bling I do it, It’s nobody’s concern, they ain’t got a thing to do with this,” – “Make ‘Em NV,” J Dilla (2003)
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