Dilla Time

1. For example, the Afro-diasporic religions condomblé and santeria would spawn the musical lineage that led to polyrhythmic genres such as samba and bossa nova in Brazil and rumba and son cubano in Cuba, respectively.

2. A phenomenon called notes inégales in classical music and the dragged second beat of the Viennese waltz are two of those exceptions.

3. Conant Gardens was not insulated from its white neighbors’ brutality. The federal government planned a new housing project there for working-class Black families during a World War II housing shortage. The project was initially opposed by Conant Gardens’ Black middle-class community organization, but facing white opponents’ unequivocal bigotry (“We want our girls to walk on the street not raped,” read one leaflet), Black residents united against an armed white mob in early 1942. The Sojourner Truth Homes began taking Black tenants a few months later under the protection of the National Guard. The conflict presaged the anti- Black race riots that racked Detroit the following year.

 

3. Play Jay

1. Dewitt’s ex-wife Alice Scarbough Yancey says that she witnessed Dewitt writing this song; and members of the Yancey and Hayes families have long taken Dewitt’s authorship as a given. I was unable to find corroboration for this story from anyone on the Motown side. None of the people I interviewed who were involved in the recording of “It’s a Shame”—including Dennis Coffey, Paul Riser, and G.C. Cameron, the lead singer of the Spinners—have a memory of Dewitt Yancey or his involvement. Cameron’s narrative of the song’s creation is quite specific: “When I came home from Vietnam in ’67, Stevie Wonder became my best friend … One night … we were at a club somewhere hanging out in Detroit … and he said, ‘Look, man, I got this tune for you.’ And we came back to his mother’s house. He lived in the basement, because houses in Detroit had beautiful, big basements. That’s where he kept his clavinet. And he sat down on the stool of the clavinet, and he went [sings the melody that would become Dennis Coffey’s guitar intro]. And I say, ‘I like it.’ They called us the next day and said, ‘Stevie needs you guys in the studio to record tomorrow.’ And on the third day I recorded ‘It’s a Shame.’ That was 1970.” Though it was not unheard of for Motown songwriters to buy others’ work and present it as their own, the only way for Dewitt Yancey’s story to be true is if Stevie Wonder, one of the most prolific and original songwriters of the twentieth century, also engaged in this practice. Did Stevie Wonder get this song from Dewitt Yancey? A representative of Wonder, his brother Calvin Hardaway, relayed this answer to me through Paul Riser: “No.”

 

5. Dee Jay

1. Waajeed does not remember this event happening in front of his house, though Que.D is certain of it. In T3’s version of this story, both the meeting and the “battle” happen around or in his grandmother’s house.

 

6. Sample Time

1. The full complement of producers who advanced harmony in early 1990s hip-hop are too numerous to list, but also worthy of mention here are Diamond D, Large Professor, and Dr. Dre.

 

7. Jay Dee

1. A moment that Paul Rosenberg would memorialize nearly a decade later in the movie he executive produced, 8 Mile.

2. Many J Dilla and Slum aficionados refer to this song as “The One for You,” or “The One for Me,” but the actual name is derived from an acronym: Homosexual=Hoes, I want to get mo’ sexual. Quod erat demonstrandum.

3. “I Got Ta” is the original name for “And I Go,” released by Slum Village in 2017.

4. The piece of music James sampled is the first few seconds of Keni Burke’s “Risin’ to the Top,” and the song he built from it is Slum Village’s “Keep It On.”

5. In later iterations of this album, this song is also referred to as “Forth & Back (Rock Music)” and “Forth & Back (Remix).”

6. Though Que.D claims to have heard this track in James’s basement studio in some form, none of the people I queried in James’s inner circle actually witnessed him working on it. James told T3 a modified story: that he had composed the bass line of the song, but not the whole track. Micheline Levine, who would have been involved in any Ummah business dealing, recalls no fee or nondisclosure agreement. No one whom I have interviewed who was indisputably involved in the creation of this song has contradicted Jam and Lewis’s story. Q-Tip is on the record in his Moovmnt.com interview corroborating Jam and Lewis’s story and denying that it is an Ummah production (see Reporter’s Notes and Sources for link).

 

8. Dilla Time

1. In particular, Jay Dee’s 1998 beat tape, sometimes called “Another Batch,” shows a marked turn toward this new time-feel.