Dilla Time

10. Joylette Hunter claims that when she inquired about the existence of a will shortly after James’s death, Maureen Yancey told her there wasn’t one. Maureen rejects this claim, saying she never had a conversation about the will with Joylette. Frank Bush recalls that when he arrived in California for the memorial, the talk was that not only had Joylette called Maureen about the will, but it was the first thing she asked about. Joylette maintains that her first question to Maureen was about plans for the funeral.

11. It should be noted that in her filing, Joylette Hunter suggested that James’s eldest daughter might also be entitled to a similar allowance; and that Arthur Erk filed a brief in support of an allowance for both children. This allowance was not paid for nine years, until Joylette Hunter reached a settlement with the estate in 2017, when Ja’Mya was sixteen years old.

12. There are a tangle of conflicting stories about this incident. Tom Bacon, who suggested the amount of the donation to Kindra after she initially asked for much less, says that when he called Maureen Yancey, he got the sense that she was having some misgivings about Kindra, the details of which Maureen did not articulate to him. Maureen recalls that she was concerned that Kindra had solicited a large sum of money from Tom Bacon without telling her. Kindra Parker says that Maureen had to know she was soliciting donations because it was Maureen herself who had provided Bacon’s information for this very purpose. Maureen also says that there were people close to her telling her not to trust Kindra’s motivations.

13. Jeff Bubeck, the owner of UHF Records, emailed Maureen Yancey when he realized that the records and tapes were part of J Dilla’s collection, but he didn’t hear back from her immediately and proceeded to put the records on sale with special “J Dilla” labels. Many Detroit DJs and friends of Dilla’s were outraged when they found out—Aaron Halfacre called Questlove and urged him to buy the collection whole in order to save it. The sell-off became a local and then a national news story. Bubeck was approached by a “lawyer from California” (likely Sheila Bowers from the estate) claiming possession of both the record collection and the original music, and soon by Maureen Yancey and Jonathon Taylor. Ultimately, Bubeck did what he had originally intended to do: he donated the original music to Maureen; gifted her the most valuable-looking records from the collection, like test-pressings; and made the rest available to her for an internet auction, a portion of the proceeds going to cover the $6,000 he paid to buy the contents of the storage locker and to the record store for covering the fulfillment costs.

14. Maureen Yancey and Jonathon Taylor each maintain that they had no problem with House Shoes prior to the Rebirth project. But Taylor says that Maureen at their first meeting ordered him to “get House Shoes out of my family business”; he says he did not believe that Shoes had done anything wrong, and wanted him involved. Maureen denies she had any issue with the DJ before his back-and-forth with Taylor. After speaking to many of the people involved, this reporter has not found any evidence nor confirmed any specific stories that House Shoes took more than his fair share of fees from his DJ gigs or, in another allegation, “sold” Dilla beats to people. My own sense is that the accusations about DJ House Shoes are the result of a virtual game of “telephone” in which jealousies about House Shoes’s perennial presence and offense at his high-handed manner became suspicions about his motivations and actions. Those suspicions became rumor, and rumor became accepted truth. Those accusations often conflated collecting Dilla beats with owning Dilla beats; sending people Dilla beats with selling people Dilla beats; and getting paid to work while raising money for a cause with getting paid to work from money raised for a cause.

15. It is notable that some of the most compelling tribute and derivative work around J Dilla has come from outside “official” channels, among them: Suite for Ma Dukes (2009); the Roots’ Dilla Joints (2010), instrumental re-creations of J Dilla beats; Bowls’ The Token Jazz Hour (2013), a mixtape of J Dilla’s sample sources; Bullion’s Pet Sounds in the Key of Dee (2011), a mash-up of songs from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds with J Dilla tracks; and Waajeed’s Bling 47 Dilla Edition videos (2012, 2013).

16. This notion also referred to the posthumous fans whose Dilla journey began only with Donuts, whose connection seemed more about conforming to a trend, and who wore their fandom like a T-shirt, sometimes literally. One widely circulated internet meme, over a stock photo of a fresh-faced collegiate white boy, lampooned them: “J Dilla Saved My Life. Who’s Slum Village?”

17. Jonathon Taylor explains the symbolism of the number: 2/07/74, James’s birthday. He says he remains proud of this product.

14. Micro Time