Oh my. Just got an email about the death of J Dilla (a.k.a. Jay Dee), one of the world’s great hip-hop producers. I mentioned him and even linked to a sound clip in this article I did for Slate. At this point I know nothing about the cause of death. He had to have been really young.
From a March 2004 piece in URB:
Upon his return from a stint of DJ gigs in Europe, the producer fell ill. Figuring he might have fallen prey to pneumonia, he checked himself into a hospital in Detroit.
“I had never been so sick in all my life,” he recalls. “I had never been in the hospital for nothing. What happened was that the doctor told me that I’d ruptured my kidney from being too busy and being stressed out and not eating right. He told me that if I’d waited another day, I might not have made it.” While the ostensible cause of the beatmaker’s illness was malnutrition, Dilla figures the true culprit was music itself, […]
Comments are closed.