Since reading Dilla Time, I have been listening to J Dilla nonstop. In particular, I keep coming back to “Get Dis Money” by Slum Village.
I first heard it on the Office Space soundtrack. It didn’t really grab me at first. In fairness to me, it’s a pretty weird piece of music! Let’s dig in.
“Get Dis Money” is built around a sample of Herbie Hancock’s “Come Running To Me,” from his much-maligned 1978 album Sunlight. The sample is at 2:08.
Here’s my transcription.
There is a lot happening here, harmonically and rhythmically. All these long vocoder chords start on weak beats, which makes it hard to stay oriented in the meter. The D/E chord functions as E9sus4. (This same chord appears in a Gary Burton recording that Dilla sampled in three different songs.) The Db/E chord defies analysis. The C/E is just an inversion of C. The next three chords are the relative minors of the first three, and they function similarly: Bm/E is like E9 with no third, Bbm/E can’t really be analyzed, and Am/E is simply an inversion of Am. It’s weird, but it’s weird with a structure.
Dilla complicates the metrical strangeness further by beginning his sample slightly before the fourth beat of the first measure. He also slows the sample down, thereby lowering its pitch four semitones. Herbie’s phrase is eight bars long, but Dilla only samples seven bars of it. He pairs this odd-length loop with a seven-bar synth bassline and a one-bar drum loop. Here’s my transcription. I did my best with the microtiming.
To further confuse your ear about the meter, the bassline doesn’t enter until more than halfway into the first bar. Also, there is no kick drum on the downbeat of each measure, in violation of iron-clad hip-hop convention.
Here’s how the beat looks as an audio waveform. The basic pattern seems simple: a straight eighth note groove. However, the magic is in the details. Notice that the claps on beats two and four are early. Because the claps are the loudest and clearest elements in the beat, your ear orients itself around them, and everything else sounds late. The off-beat hi-hats on the “and” of one and the “and” of three are actually late, which contributes to the dragging feel.
I also recreated the beat in MIDI view. The hi-hats are doubled by pitched-down shakers or maracas. I only noticed them because they disappear unexpectedly for a couple of bars during the third verse.
Dilla plays the synth bassline very far behind the beat. Several of those notes are an entire 32nd note late. The high-pitched buzzy part of the synth kicks in slightly after the low-frequency part, further confusing your sense of time.
The Herbie sample has some processing and filtering (beyond being slowed and lowered in pitch.) Dilla uses auto-pan to move the sample between the left and right stereo channels every sixteenth note, creating a bubbling effect. He also uses a high-pass filter to cut out Herbie’s bassline and kick drum. During the first verse, he introduces a low-pass filter, which makes the sample sound like it has slipped below the surface of the water. I tried to recreate the movement of the filter cutoff:
The cuts and breaks in the bass, drums and sample don’t seem to follow any obvious pattern; it sounds like Dilla is muting and unmuting tracks improvisationally.
Usually a rap song will have phrases that are multiples of four bars long. Verses and hooks are usually eight or sixteen bars long, or sometimes twelve or twenty-four bars. This is not how “Get Dis Money” works:
- Intro – seven bars
- Hook 1 – eleven bars
- T3’s verse – ten bars
- Hook 2 – six bars
- Dilla’s verse – twelve bars
- Hook 3 – six bars
- Baatin’s verse – fifteen bars
- Hook 4 – thirteen bars
Together with the seven-bar groove, this makes it hard to predict what is going to happen from one bar to the next.
You would expect that such abstract music would be accompanied by abstract lyrics, but Slum Village songs are about day-to-day reality. Their undemonstrative, laid-back delivery does suit the vibe, though. The hook has the three emcees chanting together, but all on different pitches. It’s a kind of very loose three-part harmony. I won’t even attempt to transcribe it, but it contributes to the woozy atmosphere.
Point of order:
I like these, but I have one issue with this one (which is unsurprising, since I am a microrhythm-researcher). When you use "late" and "early" here, there's nothing that the "late" and "early" is in reference to. We don't feel or hear the grid, so what's the ruler deciding "late"
— Dr. Kjell (@kjellandreas) March 16, 2022
To be clear: I’m using the hi-hats on the downbeats as the anchor points. I guess you could anchor the snares on the grid and have everything else be further behind, but it just seems more logical to me to define the first sound in the bar as the downbeat. This is new conceptual territory!
Update: Dilla also does a pretty wonderful flip of “Watermelon Man” on “Zen Guitar.”