He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialised in symphonies and taught at universities. In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted childhood in Detroit, to his rise as a Grammy-nominated hip-hop producer, to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death; and follows the people who kept him and his ideas alive. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years.

written not simply a biography but, rather, an unconventional, journalistic documentation of musical sounds and their progressions in history and culture. And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel that he created on a drum machine, but one that changed the way traditional musicians play.Culled from more than 150 interviews about one of the most important and influential musical figures of the past hundred years, Dilla Time is a book as delightfully detail-oriented and unique as J Dilla's music itself.

Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and “see” the rhythm of Dilla’s beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla’s music itself. He scaled the mountain of Dilla’s complex career and sent back instructions so that others could make the climb. Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new. Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century.Charnas’ book is also an ethnographic key to the funk-da-fide Detroit family and community which nurtured and skilled Dilla in the science of soulful music production from the cradle to his tragic deathbed– preparing the artist to forge his own Cubistic, canonical and revelatory extension of the architectonic Motown legacy. An outgrowth of a course on J Dilla he developed at NYU in 2017, the book’s roots go back to Charnas’s time in the record business, when he traveled to Detroit in 1999 to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee.