Thelonius

If, like me, you are a Thelonious Monk fan, you will be sad to learn that this song has very little to do with Thelonious Monk. J Dilla compares his greatness as an emcee to Monk’s greatness as a pianist, and “Thelonious” kind of rhymes with “microphonist.” That’s the extent of the connection. Regardless, “Thelonius” is a pretty amazing track.

Common tells the story of its creation here:

The beat is deceptively simple: a one-bar drum machine pattern, a two-bar synth bassline, a half-bar piano loop sampled from a bonkers George Duke tune, some vocals, and an atmospheric synth sampled from Steve Miller. And yet, it’s richly mysterious. This is because the rhythmic placement of the various elements makes it hard to tell where the downbeat is, and that gives the whole groove the feeling of floating in zero gravity.

Here’s my transcription of the beat. It doesn’t convey the microtiming or tuning, and of course it’s nowhere near the right timbres, but it’s enough for conversation purposes.

Here’s the groove in MIDI view:

Usually a groove begins with a strong accent on the downbeat from the kick drum, bass, and other foundational elements. In “Thelonius,” however, the kick, bass and piano all hit an eighth note before the downbeat. From there, the drums play a standard backbeat pattern, but the kick never hits on the downbeat. It does hit on beat three, so your ear is constantly wondering if that isn’t actually the downbeat. See what I mean on the Groove Pizza: it takes a lot of focus to hear slice one as the downbeat rather than slice nine.

The piano loop undermines your orientation too. It’s a simple string of quarter notes, but they’re shifted half a beat to the left of where you’d expect them. The bass is playing an alternating pair of riffs that culminate half a beat before the downbeat rather than on the downbeat.

Here are the drums, bass and piano on a polar grid:

The strongest beats here are the downbeats of bars one and two, immediately clockwise from the twelve o’clock and six o’clock positions. Notice that there are no drum beats except a hi-hat, no bass notes and no piano onsets in those spots. There are accents in all these instruments at three o’clock and nine o’clock, though. Your brain is getting conflicting metrical information. The effect is weird and cool.

The off-kilter beat seems to have inspired the emcees to be metrically creative. The song has a loose, improvised-feeling structure to it. In a conventional rap track, the verses are eight or sixteen bars long, and are interspersed with eight bar hooks at regular intervals. In “Thelonius,” there is no repeating hook. J Dilla repeats the phrase “Thelonius, super microphonist” a few times, but he never does it the same way twice, and there isn’t any apparent pattern to its placement in his sections. Here’s how I would describe the structure of “Thelonius,” counting the first eighth-note pickup as measure one.

• Measures 1-12: J Dilla’s first “hook.” Genius labels it a “verse.” 
• Measures 13-26: T3’s verse
• Measures 27-34: J Dilla’s second hook
• Measures 35-53: Common’s verse
• Measures 54-59: J Dilla’s third hook
• Measures 60-77: Baatin’s verse
• Measures 78-104: J Dilla’s verse

Even this is approximate – the sections are feathered and overlapping. The lyrics don’t excite me as much as the music, but the sound of them is full of ear-grabbing details: the way T3 says “aaaaiight,” the way Common splits the word “dope… ness” across bars and the way he interpolates “1999” by Prince, Baatin’s call-and-response vocal doubles. I put the song into Ableton so I could listen to it on a seamless loop for an hour, and I would recommend doing that.