I recently finished reading Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time. It’s a good one! If you are interested in how hip-hop works, you should read it. The book’s major musicological insight is elegantly summed up by this image:
“Straight time” means that the rhythms are evenly spaced and metronomic, like a clock ticking. (Think of a Kraftwerk song.) “Swing time” means that the halves of each beat are alternately stretched and shrunk. (Think of a Duke Ellington tune.) “Dilla time” means that there are multiple rhythmic feels simultaneously, some straight, some swung, some on the grid, some ahead of or behind the grid. (Think of, well, a J Dilla track, like the ones discussed below.)
You frequently see Dilla time described as “unquantized” or “drunk.” My favorite description is from the intro to Kendrick Lamar’s song “Momma.” As its heavily Dilla-influenced beat plays, producer Taz Arnold says, “I need that, I need that sloppy, that sloppy, like a Chevy in quicksand, yeah, that sloppy.” Poetic though it is, though, this is not accurate. Dan Charnas makes clear that Dilla was never sloppy in his rhythms, that their deviation from the grid was intended and meticulously executed. Dilla “misaligned” his beats because it sounds good. But why does it sound so good? I am trying to figure that out.
One thing to know is that Dilla time did not originate with J Dilla. Jazz and funk often use several different grooves at the same time. But in those musics, the time is organic and stretchy. I have tempo-mapped many jazz recordings in Ableton Live, and the time feel is never exactly the same from one measure to the next. Dilla was programming beats with computers, however, so his microrhythms are repeated identically, many times per song. Clyde Stubblefield might generally rush or drag his snare backbeats, but he won’t rush or drag them by the same precise amount in every bar. Dilla beats do, and the repetition magnifies the impact of his microtiming. For Dilla, sometimes this was a simple matter of identifying a sample with a particular groove and looping it; sometimes it meant programming drums himself; and often it was a combination of the two.
I have been hearing Dilla tracks since the 1990s without realizing it, thanks to his production work for The Pharcyde, Erykah Badu, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, and various others. When I started hearing Dilla’s name from my musician friends, I downloaded a few of his tracks at random. The first one that I connected to strongly was “Bars & Twists”, from the Donut Shop compilation.
This turns out to have been a weird entry point. It is more experimental and less straightforwardly funky than most Dilla beats. It is also completely undocumented; I can’t find one sentence about it in Dan Charnas’ book or anywhere else. The only sample I can identify is the Mantronix siren. I asked some Twitter friends where the other samples come from, and they responded by gently trolling me. The message was: go dig the crates yourself.
I have also been enjoying “E=mc2”, featuring Common:
There are many points of interest here, starting with Giorgio Moroder’s vocoded voice. Also, the voice at the very end is George Harrison, of all people. That’s all very cool. But the main thing is that rhythm. I don’t even know how to describe it! Here’s how the intro looks in Ableton. The big spikes with the yellow markers are snare drums, which I lined up with the grid. Everything else is a kick or hi-hat. Look at the light grey tick marks on the timeline: none of those drum hits are on the grid at all.
And then, thirteen seconds in, the much louder Manzel beat enters, and that doesn’t line up with the drum machine beat. It is closer to being on the grid, but it isn’t in straight time either: you can see how the little markers are mostly late.
That is a lot of rhythmic dissonance, and that is before we start talking about the Giorgio Moroder sample, or Common’s flow, or anything else happening in the track.
Most of the grooves that Dilla fans point to are less flamboyantly wonky than these two. The microrhythms are usually more micro. Here’s a more representative example, “Get Dis Money” by Slum Village, with its gorgeous Herbie Hancock sample. (Dilla loved vocoder vocals.)
Here’s how the groove looks in Ableton.
This is very close to being straight eighth notes. However, the backbeat claps are just a tiny bit early. Because they are the loudest and clearest elements in the beat, your ear tends to orient around them, and that makes everything else sound late or dragging. The hi-hats on 1.1.3 and 1.3.3 are actually late, too, which contributes to that sense of dragging. Why does this sound good? It “should” sound bad, based on everything I know about rhythm. I clearly do not know enough about rhythm. I have a lot of listening to do.
(By the way, here’s another great Herbie sample flip by Dilla, and a more subtle usage of Herbie’s vocoded singing.)
There are two reasons why my fellow academics should be engaging closely with J Dilla’s music. The first is just cultural literacy; Dilla was influential and is more widely imitated with every passing year. The second is maybe more important: there are not widely used analytical tools for studying this music, and there is a whole world of microrhythm and groove out there that the music academy has been neglecting. Right now, “music theory” classes are mostly harmony and voice-leading classes, and that harmony is too often limited to the historical practices of the Western European aristocracy. But rhythm is at least as important as harmony, and in some musics, significantly more so. There is a persistent belief that rhythm is “less intellectual” or “more instinctive” than harmony and therefore less worthy of serious study. That is pure atavistic racist nonsense, but it also means that it’s hard to do better, because we don’t have the vocabulary or the methods to study rhythm in the depth that it deserves. If we can figure out how to talk about Dilla time, then that will open up a lot of other kinds of time as well.
Update: Dan Charnas reads this blog! He even cites it in Dilla Time!
I've been reading @ethanhein since before I ever conceived "Dilla Time," so this was a treat. https://t.co/NV7V4xTkJ3
— Dan Charnas (@dancharnas) March 23, 2022
Why do you consider it “racist” to prioritize harmony over rhythm? Harmony has more inherent complexity to it, and it really is more cerebral and less visceral. It has nothing to do with race, in my opinion. Rhythm is more for dancing to than thinking about on an intellectual level, and rhythm doesn’t express emotion the way harmony does. It’s not a coincidence that when an a musician, even a modern pop musician, wants to write a song that is more emotional/sad, they ease up on the percussion and focus more on harmony and melody.
Some examples
Compare Michael Jackson’s “Childhood” to “Billie Jean”. “Childhood” has much more harmonic interest than “Billie Jean” does, because Childhood is supposed to be an emotional/sad song, whereas “Billie Jean” has a better beat, but it’s not really meant to be emotional in the same way.
With Bruno Mars, you could compare “Uptown Funk” to “When I Was Your Man”.
There are some rhythmic things that I find interesting, but harmony is way more important, at least to me. (This is a big part of the reason I don’t really listen to rap. Alice in Chains, for example, did a lot of cool stuff with meter (having sections of the same song in different meters, using exotic time signatures like 7/8, etc…)
I would definitely say Alice in Chains was far more musically and lyrically sophisticated than rap from the same time period.
“Harmony has more inherent complexity to it, and it really is more cerebral and less visceral.” Nope. Empirically untrue. No part of music is more or less “cerebral” than any other. You use the same widely distributed network of brain regions for all of it. Harmony and rhythm aren’t even really separate things. Chords are very fast polyrhythms. The long-standing belief that harmony is “intellectual” while rhythm is “visceral” is an atavistic holdover from European white supremacist ideology designed to “prove” that Europe’s culture is superior to the people they were colonizing. If you personally find harmony more interesting than rhythm, and you prefer Alice in Chains to rap, good for you. That does not make harmony more interesting than rhythm, though.
While you may use the same brain regions to hear all music, what I meant was that harmony lends itself to interpretation better. There is much more you can analyze with harmony. For example, the final chord of “Javert’s Suicide” from Les Miserables is D-Eb-Ab-C-D. Is it an Ab major triad with D in the bass? Is it a D half diminished seventh chord missing the third with an added ninth? Is it better analyzed as a tone cluster than as an actual chord with harmonic function? The previous chord is an A major triad, so it could easily be analyzed as an incomplete tritone substitution (Instead of A7-Ab, like a normal tritone substitution, the 7th is missing from the A chord and the bass still resolves to the expected D whereas the tritone substitute is played on top of that).
Harmony and rhythm are separate things. Sound and color are both waves, does that make them the same thing? Water and strychnine are both made out of atoms, does that make them the same thing?
Rhythm is more bodily and less intellectual, which has nothing to do with colonialism. Chord progressions don’t make people want to dance, beats do. The kind of dancing that people do when listening to rap music isn’t exactly what I would call “high art” on the same caliber as ballet or even traditional folk dances from around the world. It’s fine for its purpose (background music at parties where people are drunk/high), but it’s like elevator music you can dance to, not high art.
I would say that grunge in the 90s was the last time rock was the most important part of American popular music.
It is not true that harmony lends itself to interpretation better. You may not have the vocabulary for interpreting it, but that does not mean that the vocabulary doesn’t exist. When you say that rhythm is “more bodily and less intellectual”, you are repeating a white supremacist axiom that has no basis in reality. If it’s the same brain structures processing the different dimensions of music, then how is one dimension more or less “bodily”?
If you think that rap is only background music for parties, you need to learn to listen to it more closely. (Though there is absolutely nothing illegitimate or invalid about social music.)
“If it’s the same brain structures processing the different dimensions of music, then how is one dimension more or less “bodily”?” – because you move your body to the beat. You don’t move your body to the harmony.
There is nothing illegitimate about social music, true, but it’s not great art. I turn on Muzak all the time when I am cleaning the house, cooking, etc…but I would never call it great art, or intellectually stimulating. It’s aural wallpaper.
There is no meaningful difference between the brain activity that moves your arms and legs rhythmically and the brain activity that parses out harmony. It’s the same brain activity. People can and do move their bodies to harmony, it’s a basic technique in early childhood music education (e.g. Orff and Kodály). A significant amount of music cognition is done by the motor cortex – not just rhythm cognition, but harmony cognition too. You are operating under a widespread but completely incorrect belief, that there is some distinction between mind and body, between your brain activity from the neck up and your body from the neck down. No such distinction exists.
If you think that rap is aural wallpaper, you need to listen more deeply and more widely. Have you ever heard a track by Kendrick Lamar, or Noname, or Lil Simz, or J Dilla, or Clipping?
Thanks for the tip on an interesting new book to check out!
Do you think that your analysis of micro rhythm might be better understood in terms of analog recording processes that relied on human drummers and percussionists, who couldn’t play perfectly on the beat, and producers who didn’t have the technology to “correct” their performances? In other words, rather than a conscious or intentional concept of “micro rhythm” at play here, we’re dealing with the happy accidents of humans performing their instruments in an imperfect way that is more appealing than mechanical adherence to a rhythmic structure?
This is a complicated question! It’s such new musicological territory for everybody. It wasn’t even possible to talk about these things before computers. Now that it’s so easy to visualize and play back these ultra-specific time feels, it becomes possible to make a distinction between regular human sloppiness and deliberate microrhythms. So, for example, we have always understood that swing was a deliberate deviation from straight time rather than “sloppiness”, because everybody in the Duke Ellington Orchestra was deviating by the exact same amount all the way through the tune. On the other hand, it was more ambiguous whether Cootie Williams dragged a particular note as a deliberate expressive device or because that’s just how it happened to come out of the trumpet. In the case of Dilla and other producers of computer music, it’s significantly more clear when something is a choice, because everything is a choice. When you are using an MPC or a DAW, it’s effortless to correct your timing, so when you hear uncorrected timing, you know that it is intentional. (It’s like how, in the age of Auto-Tune, out-of-tune singing has become a deliberate aesthetic choice.) Unlike in jazz or funk, a J Dilla beat will have exactly the same microtiming deviations repeated throughout the song, and the mere fact of that exact duplication changes the meaning of the deviations.
The mythology on Dilla was that he was playing his beats live on the pads and then not quantizing them, letting his human imperfections show. Dan Charnas argues pretty convincingly that Dilla exercised a great deal of control over these rhythms, that nothing about them is accidental. I have been experimenting with the ideas in the book, and it’s true, you can create that limping Dilla feel quite deliberately by programming a beat on the grid and then moving your snare drums a 32nd note early, or by juxtaposing straight and swung 16th note feels. Also, Charnas shows how Dilla selected samples of rhythms that were played sloppily to begin with, and then turned them into deliberate microrhythms by looping them and slowing them down to exaggerate the deviations from metronomic time. The book made me go back to James Brown or Herbie Hancock grooves with fresh ears, trying to parse out the difference between swing, more subtle rhythmic choices, and human imperfection.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I take your point about producers making conscious decisions in digital production. I’ve done similar experiments in digital percussion programming as well. Can’t wait to check out that book!