7 takeaways from best-selling new bio on producer J Dilla

The first time you hear an instrumental track produced by the late beatmaker J Dilla, it will likely sound a little … wrong. Drunken bass drums. Swaying snares. Off-kilter cymbal crashes. Vocal samples that enter at weird times.

A world away from the precise beat patterns and samples enabled by drum machines and modern recording software, the tracks that Dilla produced starting in the mid-1990s in collaboration with artists including Pharcyde, A Tribe Called Quest, the Roots, Common, Erykah Badu and Madlib seemed to wobble within the rhythmic grid as if the machine’s innards were made of Jell-O.

The artist, born James Yancey, is the focus of the new book “Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm.” Written by bestselling author and NYU associate professor Dan Charnas, it vividly outlines the ways in which J Dilla shifted the notion of rhythm in the digital age.

“It was elastic — like the feeling of going faster, then slower, then faster, then slower, but never actually varying one’s speed,” writes Charnas of one rhythmic technique Dilla perfected.

Dilla died at 32 of the rare blood disease TTP (thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura) in 2006 at his apartment in Hancock Park, but not before establishing himself as a fearless innovator. His ideas on the power of precisely imperfect beats and the ways that looseness generates a certain swing have informed contemporary music ever since.

This month, “Dilla Time” debuted in the top 10 of most major bestseller lists, a feat few could have predicted in the immediate aftermath of the producer’s death. He never produced a top 10 record, but in the 16 years since, countless high-profile fans and former collaborators have adamantly argued for Dilla’s place in the pantheon, including Questlove, Pharrell Williams and Peanut Butter Wolf.

In the introduction, Charnas makes a grand claim about the artist’s influence, writing that J Dilla “is the only producer-composer to emerge from hip-hop and, indeed, all electronic music to fundamentally change the way so-called traditional musicians play. And the core of Dilla’s contribution is a radical shift in how musicians perceive time.”

That innovation, Charnas explains, is called “Dilla time.”

What follows are seven takeaways from the book, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.