The initial meeting between the two producers might have been somewhat anticlimactic, but a late night bus ride was about to change not only Dilla’s life, but Q-Tip’s as well.
On days off from Lollapalooza, Tribe performed shows with longtime friends and colleagues De La Soul. It was leaving one of these shows that Q-Tip popped in the tape that Dilla had given him back in Detroit.
“I had my whole set up in the back of the bus. We’re driving off to the next city, and I was listening to it like, what the fuck is this shit? It was a Slum Village demo. And then I looked … to see if anyone was around, cause like, this shit is ill! … [Dave from De La Soul], he was the first person I played Dilla shit for. I was like, ‘Yo, this dude is ill, right?’ He’s like, ‘Uhhh, yeah. Yo, it sounds like your shit but … Just, better.’”25
In Dilla’s music, Q-Tip saw the familiarity of his own influence and that of his peers, famed producers like Pete Rock, Large Professor, and DJ Premier, but with a less rigid, more organic, more human approach.
“The way he had shit [equalized], the way that it was programmed … it was the most authentic feeling; he was programming it, but it felt live, the swing of it, his time signature[s] … the way that he had the swing percentages26 on his beats and shit; like the way he had the music partitioned—he had bass where it needed to be, the kick was where it needed to be, the hi-hat … he was just clean, you know what I mean? He had an understanding of it that he could manipulate it any way that he wanted to.”27
Armed with that demo, Q-Tip began playing the music for colleagues and collaborators: the other members of Tribe and De La Soul, the soul singer D’Angelo, California rap crew The Pharcyde; without exception, Dilla’s beats were turning heads.
“Slowly but surely I started playing it for people, and I called his house, I was like, ‘Yo, man, people gotta hear your shit somehow. We gotta figure something out,’” said Q-Tip.28 To that end, he invited Dilla to join him in The Ummah, a production collective that also included Tribe’s DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad and former Tony! Toni! Toné! member Raphael Saadiq. With Q-Tip spreading the word and his work catching the ears of everyone who heard it, Dilla was ready to step out into what would be his first golden age.
Waves
Once upon a time, no one knew where hip-hop music came from. Thousands bought the records but, for most, the kicks and claps coming out of their stereos were anonymous, built in service of the true attraction: the MC. The first breakout rap singles featured session players performing original compositions or recreating the disco hits of the day, emulating the loops and breaks popular at the block parties where rap was performed. One of these session players was Larry Smith, a bassist from Queens, New York, and early partner of future Def Jam Records co-founder Russell Simmons.
Smith had played on a few hits for rap superstar Kurtis Blow in the early 1980s, but his partner was losing patience with the prominent aesthetic in the hip-hop of the time, all disco grooves and uptown fashion. Simmons believed rap should reflect the sound and the look of where it came from, and, as work began on a demo for his younger brother Joe and his buddy Darryl, Simmons urged Smith to strip away at his arrangements, making them sparse and beat-driven, with little care for melody.
Smith ended up taking the beat from the single “Action” by his band Orange Krush and programmed it into a drum machine. He called it the “Krush Groove.” Joe and Darryl wrote some rhymes about their skills on the mic and the wackness of their competitors, and didn’t bother with a hook or chorus. Nothing more than a beat and rhymes, the success of Run-DMC’s “Sucker MC’s” snatched rap away from the disco and planted it firmly on the block, establishing the percussive focus that would come to define the music.
Following the success of “Sucker MC’s” and Run-DMC’s other early singles, Smith signed on to produce the sophomore album for Brooklyn crew Whodini after Russell Simmons took over their management. Where Smith’s approach in Run-DMC was decidedly minimalist, Whodini were looking for a wider audience, something for the b-boys and the clubs, and encouraged Smith to take the pounding drums of “Sucker MC’s” and reintegrate the melody and instrumentation of the earlier party records. The resulting album, 1984’s Escape, earned the group their first gold record and established Smith’s diversity as a producer.
Talking with Rime magazine in 2003, Dilla cited Larry Smith’s drum work as the spark that ignited his interest in beat-making: “When I heard ‘Sucker MC’s’ and [Whodini’s] ‘Big Mouth’, it made me curious to how the beats were made. Those songs were the first time I heard the beats that weren’t melodic—just drums. Being someone who was taking drum lessons at the time, that made me real curious. That led me into deejaying, which slowly led to me doing parties and that led me into production.”1
One aspiring producer who was less enamored with the sounds of the 80s was Marlon “Marley Marl” Williams, a DJ on radio legend Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack show on New York’s WBLS.
“In those days, Kurtis Blow was the king as producer … They started throwing little singing hooks in there, havin’ them Linn and DMX drum beats—all that dumb shit soundin’ stupid. But I was Magic’s DJ, and since [Kurtis] was his man I had to play all these wack records that I hated. I was like, ‘Yo, man, I can make better shit than this.’”2
Quality is subjective, but Marley did change the face of production forever when he ran a sampler through a drum machine, using it to trigger previously recorded acoustic drum sounds instead of the preloaded electronic instruments.
“I was trying to sample a vocal for a chorus and the snare went in accidentally. And I started playing the snare along with the track and it made it sound better. [It was like], ‘Do you know what this means? We can take any drum sound off of any record, manipulate it, make our own patterns off of it.’ And immediately I went and got [The Honey Drippers’] ‘Impeach the President.’ … I always noticed that every time I would play “Impeach the President” at a party it was the banger. I probably made like ten records with those drum sounds. In the same week.”3
It cannot be overstated how much Marley’s innovation shattered every previously established rule of hip-hop production. The limitations forced on producers by their equipment were removed and replaced with a freedom restricted only by the creativity of the individual. The entirety of recorded sound became the producers’ toolbox, and they attacked and pillaged their record collections, working every classic party-rocking break they could find into their songwriting with a nuance and flexibility they’d never had before. Hip-hop would never sound the same.
Marley was also a canny self-promoter: MC’s dropped his name in their lyrics, he made cameo appearances in their videos, he even recorded the occasional introduction or ad-lib in the gravelly high-pitched tone of an old-timey prospector. The strategy worked, and by the late 1980s most rap fans knew that, if they saw Marley’s name on the record, it would be worth a listen. Popular singles for members of his “Juice Crew” posse as well as his work with acts like Eric B. & Rakim solidified Marley’s track record as a hitmaker, so much so that Cold Chillin’ Records offered him a deal to produce a solo album, 1988s In Control Volume I. The album featured ten tracks produced by Marley, showcasing new and established members of the Juice Crew, most successfully on the monster posse cut, “The Symphony.” In Control established the producer as something more than a shadowy figure buried in the credits of a record: he was an artist in his own right, a curator and director able to express his personality through his collaborative choices.
“It was definitely an important thing to have a producer thought of as an artist, especially [in 1988]. Up to that point, the vocalist or MC was the person that an album was about. Positioning me like that on the album was something different for the whole game,” said Marley. “I had never thought of doing my own album, but with In Control I was one of the first producers to actually step up as an artist.”4
Following Marley’s success with In Control, producers began to assert themselv
es as personalities in front of the mic as well as behind the boards: Q-Tip and Dr. Dre rhymed as well as produced for their respective groups; Gang Starr’s DJ Premier used his skills as a turntablist to add his own sonic signature all over their records; Prince Paul, who assisted and directed De La Soul’s first three albums, was the honorary fourth man of the group, appearing in, and inventing the concept of album skits, and showing up in early videos as a Rod Serling-like host, offering bizarre philosophical conundrums before the featured attraction started.
As DJs and producers took inspiration from Marley’s use of sampling, the first wave of source material began to dry up: how many ways could someone flip “Impeach the President,” or the James Brown catalog without it starting to grow stale, creating the same sort of sonic monotony that frustrated Marley enough to try and change the music in the first place? One way to avoid that particular problem was to cast a wider net, moving away from the funk and soul standards DJs might have heard coming out of their parents’ stereos, and going more esoteric, digging deeper into jazz, fusion, pop, and rock, never discounting a potential source because it didn’t originate in the traditionally sampled genres. Prince Paul and Q-Tip had already started down this road in the late 80s, but it was Mount Vernon, New York’s Pete Rock who perfected it.
Pete started as a DJ in high school, building a solid reputation, and caught a break filling in on Marley Marl’s WBLS radio show in 1988 when the regular DJ was injured in a car accident. He ended up keeping the job.
“Being close to Marley made me take all my work to a step higher—it brought me to that next level. He brought sampling to the world’s attention with the tracks he did, and so many cats followed what he did. I wanted to know, ‘Damn, how can I make beats like that but also have my own swing and aura to them?’ And after a while of doing beats on my own, I made my own identity. But I learned a lot from Marley, and from listening to guys like Larry Smith.”5
Pete’s approach to beats not only incorporated more instruments (primarily horns) into a predominantly drum and bass-driven music, but brought a serious crate-digging aesthetic to his sample selection.
“When I looked at [his] record collection, I was so mad!” said veteran hip-hop A&R man Dante Ross, who signed Pete and his partner CL Smooth to Elektra Records. “Not only did he have every record I had, but he also had every record I wanted. It was amazing.”6
Pete Rock’s two albums with CL Smooth (1992’s Mecca and The Soul Brother and 1994’s The Main Ingredient) sounded like little that had come before: The drums hit harder, the basslines were funky and filtered, the horns brought added musicality and sophistication to the compositions, and the samples were new and unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated vinyl collectors. They also paid close attention to sequencing, and would often include musical interludes before and after the tracks, usually short loops of jazz and soul records (not unlike what can be heard on Donuts). Pete’s interludes are a testament to his skill and dedication as a crate digger, a quick flash to remind listeners and competitors that for every hot track on the album, he could have added two more just as easily.
And he could brand himself as well as he could produce: where Marley Marl would drop the occasional ad-lib, Pete Rock’s voice was all over his records, sometimes rapping verses or laying down hooks, but most often operating in the back of the mix, punctuating the work of the MC’s, doubling their vocals or responding to a hot line with an “Aw yeah” or “Whoo,” just as a DJ or hype man would during a live performance. His remixes usually opened with a reminder to listeners that they were, in fact, about to hear “Another Pete Rock remix.” He seasoned his beats with his voice, removing the dividing glass between the artist and producer, while marketing himself in the process, a uniquely hip-hop technique that’s been appropriated ever since by contemporary beatmakers including Timbaland, Diddy, and Pharrell Williams.
Pete Rock’s approach to sampling and songwriting had a massive impact on the generation behind him, including Dilla, who often cited Pete as his idol. After hearing Dilla’s demo from Q-Tip, Pete hopped a plane to meet the up and comer: “[W]hen he first brought me his beat tape I was floored. I mean absolutely floored like who is this!? To the point that I had bought a ticket to go to Detroit just to meet homie.” Upon meeting the source of his inspiration, Dilla told Pete that when he started making beats, “I was trying to be you.”7 House Shoes summed up Pete’s influence with trademark candor: “Before I heard Jay, Pete Rock was Jesus Christ.”8
As sampling became the predominant method of making hip-hop music, an interesting thing started happening: An unspoken code of rules and ethics began to evolve among its practitioners. Not “ethics,” inasmuch as whether it’s appropriate to take one artist’s previously recorded work and reconstruct it into something new (obtaining legal permission, or “clearing,” samples being standard procedure by the early 1990s), but how those samples should be used: What you could take, how you took it, and it in what ways you could use it and still be respected by your peers. Through years of listening, longtime fans could instinctively pick up these codes based on what they heard in the music, but ethnomusicologist Joseph G. Schloss took pains to outline them in his 2004 book Making Beats: The Art of Sample Based Hip-Hop. Based on numerous interviews with producers and DJs, Schloss breaks the rules down to six commandments: No biting, no sampling from anything other than vinyl, no sampling hip-hop records, no sampling from records one respects, no sampling from reissues or complilation albums, and no sampling multiple instruments from the same record.
No “Biting”
While not the cardinal sin it once was, flagrantly copying or appropriating another producer’s work (or “biting”) is still not looked upon favorably, as it takes the work of another producer who found, sampled and re-arranged (“chopped”) the source, and presents it as one’s own. The general rule is not to sample a record already used by another producer, but, if one does, put in the appropriate work to make a new sound out of it. Controversies over biting can still flare up, as when Pete Rock took issue with producer B-Side for biting the beat to Pete’s best known work, “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” for Chicago MC Lupe Fiasco’s “Around My Way (Freedom Ain’t Free)” in 2011, calling it “fuckery,” and “corny,” on Twitter.9
Vinyl is the only acceptable sample source
In an era of digital, this rule might seem archaic and unreasonable, but its origins are twofold. For one, digging for records is considered by most producers a rite of passage, how up and comers develop their musical knowledge base,10 regardless of whether they sample records or make, “keyboard beats,” with drum machines and synthesizers. But there’s also practicality at work: hardware samplers generally have limited storage space for each individual sample (22 seconds each on Akai’s MPC 3000, for example). But by sampling a 33 1/3 RPM record at 45 revolutions per minute and then slowing it back down to the original speed, a producer could get around the equipment’s limitations and squeeze out more sample time at a lower quality, something a digital format wouldn’t allow. Additionally, much of the music people are interested in sampling is never released digitally; it only exists on vinyl copies that have since gone out of print.
Don’t sample other hip-hop records
Something as simple as a snare sound on a hip-hop record can be the result of hours of labor spent isolating, sampling, and equalizing the frequencies of the sample to get the desired sound. Sampling from hip-hop records is another example of letting someone else do the work, and can be seen as disrespectful to the producer who did.
Don’t sample records you respect
The logic being, if sampling a classic record doesn’t improve upon the original, it shouldn’t be done, and is usually not a sufficient challenge if it is, they’re too easily identifiable by the public. And if it was already dope to begin with, why risk messing it up?
Don’t sample from reissues or compilations
A corollary of sorts to the second rule, using reissues of out
of print records or compilations (such as the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series, which collected numerous songs with notable samples or breakbeats in one place) is considered unethical because, “[s]imply put, compilations are seen as a shortcut. They save the producer much of the effort that was previously necessary to make a beat.”11
Don’t sample more than one element from a record
As with most of these guidelines, taking multiple sounds off of the same record is considered lazy, and limiting: What new elements is the producer adding if he or she takes components that were already designed to fit together? It’s far more impressive to take disparate pieces and adjust pitch, tempo, and equalization to make them fit together.
These ethical codes, typically self-imposed by members of the production community, would seem to center around two axes: “Is it lazy?” and “Is it creative?” If it’s lazy, or a means of avoiding effort, the rule should be the guide; if breaking the rule results in something new and unexpected, violations can be forgiven.
Few producers seemed to flagrantly violate the established rules of hip-hop production like J Dilla. Those who speak of him often return to not only his almost monastic work ethic, but also the fact that he refused to be limited by anything when it came to how he made his music. Just as he discarded the equipment manuals in Amp Fiddler’s basement while he learned to make beats, Dilla cast aside any notions of what was expected of him as a producer if they weren’t of any use to him.
“The biggest thing with Jay was there were no rules,” said House Shoes. “When it started off he used to look for like a specific line of records but once he broke out of that, that’s when the fuckin’ shit really got wild.”12
J Dilla's Donuts (33 1/3) Page 3
