All over the place people are observing, remembering, and rememory-ing J Dilla’s life, a DJ and producer some would say belongs on the Mount Rushmore of DJs in the Hip Hop tradition.  This link, taken from The Sound Studies Blog, begins to put down some context and explain what makes Dilla’s imprint on late 20th/early 21st culture such a deep one.

So here’s my one time for Dilla:  I wonder what an “intellectual beat tape” would look like.  I mean this in all the ways it might seem:  the artifact, the practices, and the networks of people who come together in the studio to produce them--and then get out of the studio in underground and semi-underground spaces to exchange them.  Here’s one element I’m most interested in:

Early beattapes were not meant for public consumption or as cohesive projects. It’s important to remember that at the time you didn’t finish productions in a home or project studio.

So the question for me becomes:  how can we build spaces for intellectual work that plays in the raw elements--beats, hooks, riffs, chord changes, all of the elements that later become songs (and therefore, texts), that celebrate the *play* with ideas, the unfinishedness of production, and a willingness to be unfinished as an important part of the process.  And as intellectuals, street intellectuals, public intellectuals, academic intellectuals, how can we use these notions of play, the unfinished, and the studio as a place to literally chop it up, to rebuild community? 

Yancey, we see you, young Ancestor.  Keep shining your light so we can see.