Sunday Music: Dilla’s Best Beat Tape

Dan Charnas has become the Dilla authority. I, in turn, have become the great consumer of all things Dilla-adjacent that Charnas puts out (and shoutout to Questlove for his many contributions too). It’s fantastic. Sorry. It’s fan-tas-tic. Yeah.  

To me, the most important aspect of Dilla is philosophical. Or at least that’s the way it’s been re-revealed to me ever since I finished Charnas’ book (sometime in mid-2023). Yes, Dilla is the completion of the circle from created music, to sampled music, and back to sampled music changing how people create music. 

But philosophically, Dilla represents how we sample ideas from others, reposition them into our own compositions, and circulate them out into the world. How it’s changed how others do their same version of adjusted sampling. And it’s not just copying and pasting (think: Puffy’s production). There’s added nudges and nuances, and it’s come so far, it’s changed the entire act of artistic creation forever. 

In 1998, Dilla’s evolution reached full form. On the previously hard to find beat tape, Another Batch, all the tricks and techniques are fully apparent. As Charnas puts it, 

Another Batch marks the consummation of the composer’s three timing techniques: decelerating samples to reveal human error, playing freehand to add randomness, and the crowning tactic, displacing sounds using the timing functions of the machine.

To reiterate - before Dilla, there was a little of this going on. But after Dilla, nobody sampled quite the same way again, and nobody made music quite the same way again. It feels like life before and after social media. It’s a BIG deal. 

And it happened to be part of the soundtrack to my high school and college years, so it’s extra cool (to me). 

But still - nowhere near as cool as the stories Charnas has - like this one, on how he got his actual cassette copy(!), 

I got my copy from Raphael Saadiq’s manager Ruth Carson sometime in 1999, while I was executive producing an album for the rap artist Chino XL. Carson was shopping beats on behalf of Jay Dee, whom many of us in the hip-hop business had come to revere for his tracks with De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, the Pharcyde, and Busta Rhymes, and I was amped to preview his latest material.

…

After hearing Another Batch, I flew to Detroit with Chino XL to meet Jay. We descended into his subterranean studio to find Common there, crafting the album that would become Like Water for Chocolate. Jay was quiet, and Chino and I tried to entertain him over dinner with stories of our years working with Rick Rubin, and how we got ourselves thrown out of Canada the previous night. It was a brief sojourn, and Chino ultimately walked away with two beats selected from the 60 tracks on our version of the tape, which became the songs “Don’t Say A Word” and “How It Goes” on his 2001 album, I Told You So.

Yeah. I was not doing THAT. 

But even in the moment, it makes me happy Charnas also found it hard to understand. That’s the thing with different things. They’re tricky like that - 

But I had a bizarre physiological reaction to Another Batch—one especially surprising for hip-hop. I fell into a kind of woozy, meditative state. Beyond the hiss and flutter of the tape, there was something innately ethereal about the tracks themselves, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on yet.

I had never heard this tape until February 2024. It’s like finding a Miles Davis recording from right before one of his eras, or pick your musical equivalent. Playing it now, it plays like magic.

Woozy magic. Out-of-time magic. Fan-tas-tic, uma-free, voodoo magic. 

Read Charnas’ post, The Obscure J Dilla Beat Tape That Changed Music Forever. And more importantly, press play on this. Thank the gods for YouTube making this available. It’s just so cool.  You know what love is.