Black Thought Remembers Working With J Dilla in Untold Story

Wednesday (Feb. 10) marked the 10 year anniversary of J Dilla's death, and while Black Thought, the lead vocalist for The Roots, headlined J Dilla Weekend in Miami last week, he also shared a personal memory of the highly influential producer, captured in the video above. While backstage at Dilla Weekend, Thought recounts visiting Jay Dee in Detroit at the end of every year to get his pick of beats before other MCs. In 1998, the visit yielded two songs for The Roots, "New Year's @ Jay Dee" and "Dynamite!" off their fourth album Things Fall Apart.

As Black Thought remembers, there was a set of new Gucci crystal champagne flutes someone had given Dilla as a gift and so that became the Moet and Aliza visit in his mind.

"He started digging, trying to come up with a beat for the new Roots album and we came up with the 'Dynamite' joint," he said. "We had that loop and then were still digging for something else and that's when we just started freestyling over some beat that him and Pete Rock and Questlove had popping. I think that 'New Years' song came from me doing an impression of what Busta was gonna be like when he got this new batch. So it was me kind of doing a Busta Rhymes impression where the last couple words of each measure were the only words and the rest was kind of just scattered. I imagined that’s how Busta Rhymes wrote his songs. And come to find out, that is how he writes his songs."

Later, Black Thought works to break the boundaries of labels and terminology, saying that Dilla's influence is much bigger than birthing neo-soul. "There’s a lot of terms we come up with for the music that we’re making because we want something that’s going to be definitive. Often there is no word to encapsulate the emotion that the music represents," he said. "I don’t know that Dilla was the father of neo-soul as much as he was highly influential in that time when he was doing what he was doing at his best....Dilla’s influence transcended genre and it transcended region. It was something that we were all willing to foot the bill in order to travel to Detroit and go to this grown man’s mother's basement to experience. You can call it what you want...everything that came as a result of what we were doing, Jay Dee was like the blessing that made that possible."

Watch the full interview above and check out our list of Dilla's best beats.

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