But he was also young and learning-by the end of his way-too-short life (he was thirty-two when he died of Lupus in February 2006), Dilla had done a lot of maturing as Charnas points out, traveling, among other things, will do that to a person. As a biographer, Charnas is careful to present these actions in context-and at times, Dilla was, frankly, a lout: slapping his first girlfriend, spending more time at the strip club than with his kids. Though Charnas initially planned to co-author a book with an NYU colleague, Dilla Time is a rich, thorough biography, with some outliers from that initial proposal-we learn, with graphs, just how differently the producer approached rhythm (he would keep one element regularly paced while slowing another, the contrasts striking sparks), and the early history of Detroit is illustrated with maps.īut it’s the bio that absorbs. J Dilla was such a prolific beat maker and artist that it takes a book to see him in full.ĭan Charnas’s Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm was released to glowing reviews in February.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |