J.Dilla is one of many black artists being honored by Google for thie year’s Black History Month.
On Tuesday (Feb 3), Google released a short Doodle music video set to a custom track by Dilla that celebrates the art of hip-hop beat making. The animated production shows Dilla using his MPC, a primary instrument for sampling, sequencing, and drumming. Colorful doodles change with each beat as animated Dilla workshops various production.
Google stated, the video highlights “how hip-hop producers have innovated techniques for mixing and looping sound.”
J.Dilla, born James Dewitt Yancey, became a renown producer with his ability to combine soulful samples, percussive loops and future-sounding synth tones. The Detroit native primarily used the Minimoog synthesizer and Akai MPC to create a unique style of music that would become a signature of the Native Tongue and resurgent soul movements in hip-hop and R&B music throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
In the late 1980s, Dilla with two friends from high school, Baatin and T3, formed the hip-hop group Slum Village and together they would record several critically acclaimed albums. In the decades that followed, J. Dilla would become a Grammy Award nominated producer working with artists that included, Janet Jackson, Pharcyde, De La Soul, D’Angelo, The Roots, Erykah Badu, and A Tribe Called Quest as a member of the music production collectives, The Ummah and Soulquarians.
Dilla passed away on February 10, 2006, from complications from lupus, three days after the release of his final album, Donuts. Revered by fans and critics for his contributions to hip-hop and r&b, Dilla’s cult status remains strong and his music continues to be celebrated throughout the world.
The doodle music video is only one installation of Google’s efforts to highlight Black culture. The search engine giant currently features Black art on their Chrome Black Artists Series in addition to their portal on Black History and Culture with Google Arts & Culture.