On Friday I texted a few friends about the J Dilla SummerStage tribute in Von King Park. Each responded with some variation of cool, followed by holy shit Dilla would’ve been 50 this year? His 2006 death — of lupus, days after his 32nd birthday — is vivid among men of a certain vintage, incipient rap fans who pirated his music on blogs and message boards. When he passed, he was more than twice my age; he had, from my vantage, lived several lives in hip-hop. I’m older now than he was then. Most of the guys I texted on Friday consider their hip-hop years — as writers, consumers, appreciators — in the past tense.
Dilla’s legacy is hard to define. He was commercially unsuccessful, his most beloved work credited to B-list acts from his native Detroit and adopted home of L.A. His moment passed too soon, or never quite arrived — like RFK, if RFK had done the “Get a Hold” drums. His endurance in the pop firmament owes to Donuts, a whimsical, heartbreaking instrumental tape composed in his final days. If his influence is elusive, his sound is instantly identifiable, marked by Doppler-effect key changes and a loose, lively swing — a miracle, per Dilla Time author Dan Charnas, of meticulous drum programming, the deliberate approximation of human flaws.
Critically bulletproof in life and in death, Dilla’s stardom — as it were — was the product of a decentralized internet. Music snobs loved him; poptimism held no currency. In his absence, a cottage industry of neighbors and past collaborators clung to his name. The depth of tragedy, the loss of such promising, unsung talent, came to outweigh the man himself. Dilla’s ailing mother, Maureen Yancey, was saddled with medical bills. In 2012 I attended a benefit show headlined by Robert Glasper and Guilty Simpson in Maryland. Visibly weak, Ms. Yancey presided from a balcony box, the guest-of-honor and next-of-kin. It was a celebration, but it was also an appeal.
Friday’s SummerStage event promised appearances from the latest iteration of Slum Village, and some version of the Pharcyde. A modest, amorphously charming Detroit outfit produced by Dilla in the late ‘90s, Slum Village has toured for the last decade with the surviving founding member, T3, and Young RJ, the son of a former label exec. (I interviewed them in 2015, and wish them all the good things. Pullquote: "We're kind of like a cover band of our own stuff.") Delayed by a passing thunderstorm, we reached Von King at 6:30 only to learn we’d missed their set. Evidently, we weren’t alone — the Parks Foundation apologized and shared set times for the following day’s program.
The Pharcyde occupies even stranger territory in the Dillaverse. Until recently, the group’s legend was staked to their spectacular 1992 debut and its brilliantly beguiling follow-up. Although the success was short-lived, their catalog posed a smirking retort to the sneers of N.W.A and Public Enemy, presaging a broad spectrum of alternative hip-hop. Achieving art-scene credibility alongside respectable sales, they overshadowed Dilla (who totaled all of six production credits on their second album) by virtually any metric. Nevertheless, they too have become apostolic figures in the Dilla mythos.
The original Pharcyde lineup cleaved in half around Y2K, the inferior of the splinter sects — Bootie Brown and Imani Wilcox — somehow retaining the trademark. Not that they did anything with it: they disappeared after a single, derided indie effort in 2004, re-emerging only for anniversary-tour cash grabs. For a while there were competing Pharcyde tours, Fatlip and Slimkid3 performing with affiliates J-Swift and L.A. Jay as Bizarre Ride. I saw that lineup play the Howard Theater in 2013. They ran their debut album from front to back, “Quinton’s on his Way” through “Jiggaboo Time,” spotlighting all the weird little corners of that remarkable record. It was a blast.
Since the SummerStage show was billed as The Pharcyde, I figured we were getting the Bootie/Imani version, and the internet didn’t offer much evidence to the contrary. So you can imagine my surprise when, at quarter to eight, Fatlip emerged front and center, flanked by Slimkid on his left and Imani on his right. The trio was in top form, a kinetic web of stage energy — just watching Imani dance from fifty yards away made my knees hurt. Fatlip is a star, and better yet, a self-aware one: he curtailed his graphic verse in “4 Better or 4 Worse,” imploring the audience not to “cancel” him for lyrics recorded during the first Bush presidency.
That (satirical) verse notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine a rap act better suited for a park jam in 2024. Watching the Bed-Stuy crowd — young and old, native and transplant — sway to Bizarre Ride’s party cuts and Labcabincalifornia’s singalongs, it occurred to me the Pharcyde would not have drawn such a congregation in their prime. Californian in origin and flavor, they never had a Top 40 hit or platinum-selling album; they were self-styled nerds, wary of cops and bullies. Had they brought their flower-power act to Von King in 1995, I suspect they would’ve been booed or worse.
Last summer, waiting for the walk signal at the corner of East 2nd and Avenue A, I found myself standing beside a pair of twelve-year-old boys rapping “Ya Mama” at each other. It was a little rip in the space-time continuum; we’d done the same thing on the bus twenty years earlier, as had countless middle-school miscreants a decade before that. These ingots have embedded themselves, improbably, in a certain American psyche. “There she goes again, the dopest Ethiopian”: an exclamation of unbridled lust, objectifying and exoticizing, and yet it’s none of those things. It’s a lament of self-hatred, a resigned Charlie Brown sigh at the futility of it all. Call it progress — the internet, which is to say history, has been kind to the Pharcyde.