J Dilla dies

Why it matters

J Dilla's death on February 10, 2006, came three days after Donuts came out. Donuts was the album he had assembled, beat by beat, mostly from a hospital bed. He had been in and out of Cedars-Sinai for the previous two years with complications of lupus and TTP. The combination is what killed him. He was 32. Dilla's catalog is one of the most studied producer bodies of work in rap. The Pharcyde records. The Tribe records. The Slum Village records. The Common records. The Erykah Badu and D'Angelo records he produced for. The Welcome 2 Detroit album he released as Jay Dee in 2001. The Ruff Draft EP. The Donuts album. The collaborations with Madlib that the Jaylib project produced. The Champion Sound LP. All of it is in the canon now. The technical thing Dilla did with drums (the deliberate timing-shift that became known as Dilla Time) is the lineage. Every producer who came up after 2006 in any rap-and-soul adjacent space is in conversation with what he was doing. You should hear at least one of the Dilla beat tapes (Donuts, Welcome 2 Detroit, Ruff Draft). The work is the explanation.