URB Magazine March 2004 Previous Page | Next Page
When Madlib and Jay Dee, the celebrated hip-hop producers who collaborate under the Jaylib moniker, come together, you'd expect sparks to fly. But the Detroit-based neo-soul architect and the astro-travelin' Angeleno ' are soft-spoken cats who move in near-silence and let the music speak for itself. 1. Back to Back Jay Dee and Madlib are standing on a rickety table on a rooftop in LA's downtown artist district, their backs to each other, sharing a blunt. Madlib takes a generous toke and swings the joint around to Dilla who accepts with a gracious nod. Back and forth, back-to-back, the men breathe in the bud, their eyes grazing over the squat warehouses that surround them, not saying a word. Perched at their feet, a photographer aims a Lens at his subjects, urging them to stop slouching. With no joint Left to occupy them, the producers are uncomfortable, unsure what to do with their hands. Brought together at the end of a year-long cross-country collaboration, you might expect Madlib and Dilla to be trading tall tales and cracking jokes like a couple of schoolboys. Instead, they have few words for each other, acting like a pair of friends who've said all they needed to say. According to Stones Throw Records' head honcho Peanut Butter Wolf, the men who make up Jaylib are among the least verbal people he knows but that doesn't mean they can't communicate. "Both of them are pretty mysterious people who carry this special aura about them," explains Wolf, who, like practically all of his Stones Throw associates, speaks in whispered tones. "They're the sort of guys who draw people to them without having to say much. They just Like to let the music speak for itself." Music, of course, is its own language, and while that might be a cliché uttered one too many times by globe-trotting trance DJs, it holds true in the case of Jay Dee and Madlib, the men behind last year's Champion Sound. After a year spent trading hundreds of beats back and forth across the country, what use are words? 2. The Eyes Have It Everywhere Madlib goes, Visine goes with him. An infamous weed fiend, the man born Otis Jackson Jr. carries an eye dropper with him at all times, and while he walks with a loping stride, he wields that tiny bottle like a gunslinger, wetting his eyes and holstering the solution in one fluid motion. Madlib guards his eyes in more ways than one, often swinging his head low and averting his gaze from those around him. When he's talking to me, the Oxnard, CA native is polite but guarded, averse to look directly at me - except when the topic turns to Dilla. "We're like lost cousins," claims Madlib ensnaring me in his doe-like gaze. When we first met, it was crazy how similar we were. We're both low-key but still kind of crazy, too." The first time Madlib heard a Jay Dee beat, it was like he was looking in a funhouse mirror, recognizing himself in Dilla's music, but only barely. "At that time, I ain't heard no producers like that, doing the same shit as me," he says of Dilla's work on Slum Village's 1997 street tape, Fantastic Volume 1. "It was completely different from my stuff but still the same, you know? Like it's always raw and soulful and it never sounds too computerized." Five years after discovering his Detroit-based doppelganger, Madlib got handed a CD's worth of Dilla instrumentals by the Beat Junkies' J-Rocc. While Madlib had been keeping up his typically prolific rate of beat manufacturing, he'd fallen into a rut on the rhyme-writing front, finding little inspiration in his own instrumentals. For a man struggling to find his poetic voice, Dilla's pat- ented soul-clap minimalism proved a bracing stimulus. "I can't rap to too many other people's beats," admits Madlib. "And I can barely rap to my own. But when I hear his shit, there's just something to it that I connect with. 1 could just write to it all day." And that's exactly what he did, penning an album's worth of verses and spit- ting them over Dilla's beats. Once finished, Madlib burned himself a copy of the results, scrawling the word Jaylib on the disc. Soon after, Peanut Butter Wolf pressed up 300 copies of white-label wax featuring "The Message," Madlib's Dilla-fied rewrite of the Grandmaster Flash classic. Cue the underground buzz. Back in the D, Jay Dee caught wind of "The Message" and reached out to Stones Throw for a copy of the Jaylib CD-R. Duly impressed with his counterpart's vocal tactics, Dilla expressed interest in working on a full-length collaboration. Thus was Jaylib's Champion Sound born. Dilla's respect for the SoCal beatmaker extends back to 1999, when Lootpack dropped their debut, Da Antidote. "Just to know that Madlib did that stuff on the SP1200 freaked me out because the only cat I knew that could really freak that machine was Pete Rock," explains Dilla. "That album was crazy. Me and my partners rode that shit for the longest time. As soon as I popped my deal with MCA, I went looking for him." That was in 2001, when Dilla (aka James Yancey) was being hailed for his bass-heavy work with Slum Village and artists like Q-Tip (check the echo-chamber bounce of "Vivrant Thing"), Common (the crisp cymbal 'n' bass hit "The Light") and De La Soul (the psych-tinged boom-bap of "Peer Pressure"). After leaving Slum - from whose MC T3 he'd grown disconnected - Dilla hooked up with MCA and started work on his first solo album. But like so many others in the game, the producer got squeezed out of his deal after 9/11, leaving him nowhere to go but underground. "This is a game that can literally break you down into tears," says Dilla with a weary shake of the head. 'Everyone knows about all the politics with labels, but I've literally had cats laugh at me on the phone like I was a joke." It's hard to believe that anybody could find Dilla's work laughable, especially given his track record with The Pharcyde and A Tribe Called Quest, never mind his renown as the architect of neo-soul. As the brains behind D'Angelo's canonical Voodoo and the genre-defining remix of Janet Jackson's "Got Till It's Gone," Dilla could have chosen to focus on his smooth soul sound, but just as Madlib dabbles across genres - from house to jazz to broken beat - so too does Dilla dally in fields afar, an approach most gloriously audible on his 2002 BBE debut, Welcome 2 Detroit. Here, listeners found Dilla at his most eclectic, whether retouching Donald Byrd's soul-jazz gem "Think Twice," indulging his inner techno freak on "B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)" or channeling an ancestral drum circle on "African Rhythms." Under the acknowledgments in the liner notes for that album, Dilla wrote, "They wanted a thank you list, but if it were up to me I'd give 'em a fuck you list." Given those defiant words and his reputation as a media-shy recluse, I approach the Detroit native with uncertainty, gingerly sidling up to him for our interview. But far from the surly antagonist I feared, Jay Dee proves impossibly gentle, and if I glean one insight from my time with him, it's that the music business is toughest on the pure of heart. In the weeks leading up to his West Coast visit, rumors were swirling that the producer was in ill health. When I meet him, Dilla does not look his best, especially his eyes, which are the very embodiment of hangdog dejection. Where Madlib guards himself by averting his gaze, Dilla's eyes bare all, telling the tale of a man who's just had the hardest year of his life. The year 2003 started off with the completion of his Ruff Draft EP, a collection of rude street bangers featuring Dilla's gotta-get-paid spitting. Upon his return from a stint of DJ gigs in Europe, the producer fell ill. Figuring he might have fallen prey to pneumonia, he checked himself into a hospital in Detroit.
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