The dead musician Kanye West works on behalf of
Kanye West has lost a lot of his heroes through the years.
“It’s amazing,” he reflected during an interview shot for 2013’s Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton: This Is Stones Throw Records documentary. “How could we lose Biggie, Pac, Dilla, Steve Jobs, Michael Jackson? It almost feels like the Devil’s winning.”
Clearly these men were all, to one degree or another, massive influences on Ye, but, during the interview, he focused on J Dilla specifically. Kanye revealed that, whenever he’s working on new stuff, he imagines how Jay Dee would have reacted to it if he was still around.
“We gotta think, ‘If Dilla was alive, would he like this?’” Ye said of his contemporary, who died in 2006. “I have to work on behalf of Dilla.”
During this same interview, Ye opened up about encountering Dilla for the first time. “I met J Dilla at Common’s crib just down the street here in LA,” he remembers. “They were staying together, and I just remember looking at that MPC.”
By MPC, Ye would have been referring to Dilla’s Akai MPC, a music workstation that Dilla used to create his music. Describing the beats that Dilla had created using that device, Kanye was clearly awed. They were, he said, “arguably the best drums in hip-hop history.”
Despite Ye’s obvious, almost overwhelming admiration for J Dilla, this first meeting apparently went smoothly. “I just remember vibing with him and having so much respect,” Ye said, “and just wanting to work with him more.”
Elaborating on his love for Dilla’s production and the sounds he managed to create throughout his career, Ye said, “He had the organic feel but still the sonics were breakthrough, and he could give you a warm sound that still cut through speakers. It’s like he was making Quincy Jones production sessions inside his MPC.”
According to Common, who worked with both Ye and Dilla on his 2005 album Be, the feeling was mutual between the two producers. Speaking on Ebro in the Morning, Common said, “Dilla had a lot of love for Ye. And Ye had love for Dilla.”