1.Wrong
Twenty years before the Roots became the house band for NBC’s The Tonight Show in 2014—placing them at the epicenter of the American cultural mainstream—they were an obscure hip-hop act promoting their first album on the road, opening for only slightly less obscure hip-hop acts.
The Roots’ twenty-three-year-old drummer, Ahmir Thompson, was their de facto leader, with his trademark afro their de facto logo. The world would later come to know him as Questlove. But on this evening in 1994, outside a small North Carolina venue, he was an unknown.
After the Roots’ performance, Questlove settled into a car, en route to an interview at a nearby college radio station, while the headliners, the Pharcyde, took the stage for their set. As the beats from the club drifted out into the parking lot, Questlove asked the driver to wait. He rolled down the window to listen. Something in the drums sounded … wrong.
* * *
What was Questlove expecting to hear? What all who listen to popular music expect: a steady beat.
One sound—whether the bang of a drum or a note struck on a piano or a bird’s chirp—doesn’t become music until a second sound occurs; either at the same time, called harmony; or at another moment in time, called melody; the ordered spacing of those sounds in time called rhythm.
Thus all music begins with the second event. The indivisible number of rhythm is two, for it is the space between the first and second beat that sets our musical expectations and tells us when to expect the third, and so on.
The common rhythm of our popular music is counted in multiples of either two or three. Most often, we count in “measures” or “bars” of fours: one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. But in that rhythm, the back-and-forth of the one and two stays well defined. In modern popular music, we tend to stomp our feet on beats one and three (the downbeat), and clap our hands on beats two and four (the backbeat). So it sounds something like this: STOMP-clap!-STOMP-clap!
TRY IT YOURSELF: A STEADY BEAT
Outside that North Carolina nightclub, what Questlove heard was different. The claps, which should have carried that steady backbeat, slid into place just slightly after he expected to hear them. Each clap sounded like a book falling down onto its side just after being set upright on a shelf. The weirdest part was the kick: the drum sound played with the foot to carry that “stomping” downbeat. The kick drum was chaotic. It would appear on the “one” and then not show up when he expected it to hit on the “three.” Instead, it would pop into view in irregular places, not places that felt familiar or safe to a drummer, the musician most responsible for delivering a stable, dependable pulse. He’d never heard a drumbeat so inconsistent in a rap song, a genre of music made on machines, all with dependable digital clocks. It sounded, as Questlove would later describe in colorful language, like what would happen if you gave a baby two tequila shots, placed her in front of a drum machine, and had her try to program a beat. Nothing was exactly where he expected it to be. And that’s what made it exhilarating.
Questlove ran to the stage door. After convincing the security guards that he was, in fact, one of the musicians, he stood backstage and listened to the song. The next day he asked his tourmates: What was that first song y’all did where the kick drum was all over the place?
That was “Bullshit,” they answered, one of the songs from their new album. Produced by that kid we told you about, Jay Dee.
Questlove flashed back to his conversation a couple of weeks prior with the four members of the Pharcyde backstage at Irving Plaza in New York, when he told them how excited he was that Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest—one of the most popular and creative groups in hip-hop and Questlove’s musical “North Star”—was going to be producing tracks for their upcoming album. Not Q-Tip, they replied. Tip’s boy from Detroit. They pointed to a rather unremarkable-looking young man sitting on a couch nearby. And Questlove recalled being disappointed, and rather disinterested in meeting whoever it was.
Now he was interested.
* * *
The next year, the recording engineer Bob Power sat behind a mixing board in New York’s Battery Studios during a recording session for the fourth album from A Tribe Called Quest. Power was middle-aged, Jewish, a trained musician who had forged an unlikely creative partnership with the three Black kids from Queens since the beginning of their careers. They gave him a crucial education in the methodology of hip-hop beatmaking. And the members of Tribe, in turn, found in Power a trusted ear, a sound man who helped them combine disparate sampled sounds from dozens of different records into seamless songs, and could navigate the tangled terrain of electronic music production, coaxing different machines with different clocks to synchronize with each other.
Power had developed a rhythm with the group’s two producers, the lead vocalist, Jonathan Davis, who performed under the name Q-Tip, and the DJ, Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Power knew what to expect from them and they shared a language to communicate musical ideas. But that dynamic changed on this album with the addition of another, outside producer. Some new kid Q-Tip found in Detroit named Jay Dee.
Power listened to one of Jay Dee’s tracks for a song called “Word Play” as he recorded those sounds from a digital drum machine onto a huge, two-inch-wide reel of magnetic tape able to hold twenty-four separate tracks of audio at once.
Power squinted. Something sounded wrong.
The drums were … weird. The snare drum on the backbeat landed a little off, but the kick drum just bounced all over the place. The whole thing sounded sloppy, like the kid didn’t even care where the drums fell. Like he didn’t really have much musical or technical knowledge.
Power wanted to say something, but he knew he couldn’t. Q-Tip and the guys in the crew seemed to be keen on Jay Dee, and Power was always wary of overstepping his bounds. So he held his tongue.
But Power thought: Man, this shit is fucked up.
Later it occurred to Bob Power that maybe that was the whole point.
* * *
In 1997, at another recording studio in New York City, the singer D’Angelo assembled a band to record his second album. In addition to Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, there were James Poyser on keyboards and Roy Hargrove on horns. The odd man out in this crew of young Americans was the London-based bassist Pino Palladino.
Palladino had started his career in the 1970s and worked as an in-demand studio and stage player for most of the eighties and nineties with artists like Eric Clapton, Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, and Phil Collins. But in all his years as a professional sideman, Palladino had never quite played the way D’Angelo was now asking him to do. “D” wanted Palladino to place his notes far behind the beat, meaning that Palladino’s bass notes would drop just after the listener expected to hear them. Palladino understood this as a technique from jazz, backphrasing. But what was different here was how severe it was and how it deliberately clashed with Questlove’s metronomic drums.
Palladino came to understand that the time-feel D’Angelo was pursuing owed a great deal to another, transient figure in Electric Lady Studios—someone whom all the accomplished musicians in the sessions, especially D’Angelo, regarded with a kind of reverence; not a musician, actually, but an electronic beatmaker. Questlove in particular had come to worship Jay Dee as a guru who liberated him from the idea of keeping perfect time, and instead imparted a permission to be loose, to be human, to be wrong.
Over the course of the next several years, Jay Dee would become the rhythmic patron saint of that studio band—a collective that would collaborate on myriad projects. Palladino left in 2002 to join the legendary rock band the Who, a gig that lasted for the next fifteen years. But the sessions with D’Angelo, Questlove, Poyser, and Jay Dee—who had taken to calling themselves the Soulquarians—were among the most transformative and liberating Palladino had ever experienced, and these tracks would end up being a career-defining body of work for him, influential to countless musicians thereafter for the rhythms that Palladino himself described as “wobbly” and “messed up.”
When Palladino played the songs for musician friends of his, they invariably remarked:
The timing is kinda weird.
* * *
Sloppy. Drunken. Limping. Lazy. Dragging. Off.
Questlove had heard all these terms used to describe the music of Jay Dee, who in midcareer switched his sobriquet to J Dilla.
But it wasn’t until he came to Detroit to visit Jay in his home studio that he understood that the producer wasn’t sloppy at all.
In the basement of a small ranch house on the corner of Nevada and McDougall in a neighborhood called Conant Gardens, Questlove witnessed J Dilla the craftsman, with an almost spiritual devotion to repetition, process, and order. Every day, no matter how late Jay stayed up, he rose at 7:00 a.m. From 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. he swept, wiped, and dusted every inch of his studio while listening to music, usually records that he had recently purchased, listening for sections to sample and manipulate on his Akai MPC3000 drum machine. He didn’t just skip through the records, “needle-dropping” for interesting parts. He listened to entire songs, listened and listened. His vigilance was almost always rewarded by an element deep within a track. From 9:00 a.m. until noon, he made “beats,” or individual rhythm tracks for rappers to rhyme on or singers to sing over. He created them quickly, one after the other, finished them, and then moved on. At lunchtime, he took a three-hour break. Sometimes he’d use that time to pick up visiting musicians and artists at the airport and take them back to his home studio. Then he’d work again from 3:00 p.m. until 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., and use the rest of the evening to hang out—go eat, go to the strip club—often returning to make more beats. That routine yielded both innovation and a prodigious body of work. J Dilla was prolific, producing hundreds upon hundreds of individual beats.
The young Detroit producer had other behaviors that seemed eccentric to his collaborators, friends, and family. When they ambled around his home, they found what many of them describe as the cleanest house they ever saw. If they walked to his bedroom, they’d find his clothes ordered and displayed in an almost boutique-like fashion. If they opened his refrigerator, they’d see everything in it organized just so, the soda cans lined up in straight rows, the labels all turned to face the same way. He kept notebooks filled with drafts and revisions of lyrics; with lists of tasks and sample ideas and detailed song arrangements. Anyone who ever got close to J Dilla discovered the truth about the man and, by extension, his music. Not a single thing was out of place. Everything was exactly where he wanted it to be.
* * *
J Dilla’s rhythms were not accidents, they were intentions. Yet even the biggest fans of his style initially heard them as erratic. Why? Their reactions had everything to do with those rhythms defying their expectations. To understand the music of J Dilla, we must examine that process of subversion.
How our rhythmic expectations came to be is as much a tale of geography as it is musicology. Our musical expectations are governed by our location: where we’re from, and where we’ve been. So, before we meet James, we need to first take an important journey—from Europe to Africa to America—and on that trip we are going to need maps. In positioning J Dilla, a map of one place in particular tells us much of what we need to know.
2.Straight Time/Swing Time
La ville du détroit is what the French called the place: “the village on the strait,” a fur-trading post beside a narrow, straight passage between two great lakes, founded in 1701 by a naval officer named Cadillac. One hundred and four years later, after the English took le Détroit from the French and the American colonists took Detroit from the English, President Thomas Jefferson sent an emissary there to serve as the Michigan Territory’s chief justice. By the time Augustus Woodward arrived, the entire town had burned to the ground after a barn fire, its six hundred inhabitants huddled beneath makeshift shelters.
Woodward—who fetishized all things Roman and Greek, and who’d written a book called A System of Universal Science to organize all the knowledge of the human race—did not see the burning of Detroit as a human crisis, but as an opportunity to impose his ideals of perfection and order upon a tabula rasa. Woodward stood on a high boulder with his surveyor and envisioned a new city rising from the ashes.
He drafted a plan of interlocking equilateral triangles, each side exactly four thousand feet long. He began with the first triangle, the base of which ran parallel to the river. At this triangle’s center was the survey origin point near his rock, which he saw as a military parade ground he dubbed in Latin “Campus Martius.” Six avenues extended from the central square. The three points of the triangle would be rounded out for other, circular plazas and parks, each themselves the end points for other, inverted triangles.
Woodward’s design for Detroit was among the first radial city plans in history. It was practical, allowing the city’s expansion simply by adding more triangles. And it was beautiful: elaborated on paper in 1807, the City of Detroit unfurled as a resplendent mosaic of alternating triangles arranging themselves into tiled hexagons; their interior avenues, circles, and rectangular campuses forming flowers of latticework. It was a design of rigid mathematics, in multiples of three, imposing its order on the American landscape and upon everybody within it.
* * *
Imposing order, their order, was an obsession for the Europeans before and during the colonial enterprise. European cultures had developed precise rules for everything: in architecture, and in music. Some musical rules were governed by physics—for example: a vibrating length of string, cut in half, will produce a vibration twice as fast, resulting in a tone that seems to the human ear the same as the first, but higher in pitch.
But almost every other European “rule” about music was really a choice. The reason that the above phenomenon is known as the “octave” is that Europeans decided to devise a system making that higher tone the eighth step on a scale of seven degrees or notes. Europeans created a second tonal system, dividing this same distance into twelve smaller, equidistant steps. Again, a choice. Those choices—the seven- or twelve-note scale over even rhythms counted in multiples of either two or three—evolved over hundreds of years into a common practice that determined what Europeans would hear as musical and what they wouldn’t.
But there were other ways to conceive of music. The Greeks, much earlier, had devised a ten-tone triangular system of harmony called the tetraktys. Asian cultures divided the distance of an octave into scales with five, seven, twelve, twenty-two, and fifty-five steps.
African performance was less formalized and more participatory than the European system. The African concept of pitch was much more granular, what we now call microtonal. And Africans evolved a more complex rhythmic sense, wherein two different pulses were often laid on top of each other, played simultaneously, called polyrhythm; for example, a chunk of time counted in twos and threes at the same time. Polyrhythm was the sound of two or more strands of rhythm happening at once, at seeming cross-purposes to each other, but part of a whole.
Our musical expectations are governed by where we’re from. Pitting twos against threes in this manner was foreign to the European practice. What the Africans heard as music, Europeans heard as wrong, alien, uncivilized. When the Europeans came to impose their will upon the Africans, these cultural biases played no small part in their justification for what would become the most atrocious imposition in human history, the transatlantic slave trade.
* * *
The calculus of colonizers met new realities on the ground, and their schemes often yielded unintended consequences. The citizens of Detroit hated Woodward and his perfect plan, as did Michigan’s new governor, Lewis Cass. So they sabotaged it. Cass sold off new lots north of Woodward’s first triangle, blocking the plan’s inland expansion and decapitating the top half of what Woodward envisioned as “Grand Circus Park,” henceforth only a semi-circus. French farmers on either side of town sold their lands piecemeal, blocking the paths of many crosstown roads, their borders becoming long streets that preserved the farmers’ names—Beaubien, Campau, Moran, Chene. City merchants and politicians decided to ignore Woodward’s plan for the bottom of his triangle and developed it on a simple gridiron of streets at right angles to each other, the linear twos of the merchant class wedging a ragged interruption into the graceful rhythm of Woodward’s baroque threes, two things happening at once, at cross-purposes to each other. A polyrhythm of conflicting intentions.
TRY IT YOURSELF: MONORHYTHM/POLYRHYTHM
Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance Act required another grid, aligned with true north, an act of violence upon the land presaging another on Indigenous people. In Michigan the borders of these grid squares, measured in miles, came to be defined by roads running in long straight lines with no regard for topography. As Detroit grew, these became the “Mile Roads” that ran east to west across the city, conflicting with the crosstown roads that ran parallel to the river. Now Detroit had two, misaligned grids. Wherever Detroit didn’t name the mile roads, it numbered them by their distance from Campus Martius. When Detroit eventually finished expanding northward, it set its border at a road called “8 Mile.”
Copyright © 2022 by Dan Charnas
