>Absolutely not. I'm saying that even when it was at the
>forefront it was still as a supporting role. It's like the
>basketball assist. The assist itself could be bigger than the
>shot it spawned, but it's still just an assist. Dilla drove
>to the basket in a role reserved for the assist. Not the
>first again, but....

You need to give concrete examples to prove your point because you already have agreed that he wasn't the first to put production at the forefront. You have to emphatically show what he did that puts him in a special category by himself.



>I can see this point, except for, where are the Pete Rock
>beattpaes? The Premo beattapes? Etc. Anyone before him could
>have been in that spot, but it was his work that made it so.
>Consequential sure, but nonetheless.


Did Pete Rock and Premo even give out beat tapes? I never worked with them so I can't say with any certainty but I can tell you that Beatminerz used to give out "beat tapes" to artists they were interested in working with. Just about every producer I worked with back in the day has done this at some point in time as well. When I was working as an A&R for a record company I used to get beat tapes in the mail every month from cats who were looking for production work. I also know some cats didn't like to give out tapes because they feared people would steal their ideas. From what I know this still is a concern today with many producers. Perhaps Premo and PR fall into this category.



>DJ hasn't been at the forefront in a long time. And neither
>was the producer. GumDrops is right though there are a lot of
>producers that had more of an impact on the masses. And made a
>name for themselves that surpassed the artist they worked
>with, but they were still making assists. Consequentially,
>Dilla took it a step further.


You have yet to explain how he took it a step further though. I think his death has given him a level of mystique that he wouldn't have received if he didn't pass so young. As you know, this isn't an uncommon thing within music. I remember some of his friends (who happened to be famous artists lol) talking about the influence he had on them musically but that is to be expected since they personally knew him and worked with him closely. What I think happened though is that because those friends garner a certain level of media attention, hipster outlets and certain Hip Hop circles latched onto that genuine mourning as some kind of "movement" as it was the "cool" and "trendy" thing to do at the time. I think alot of these so called Dilla fans who now sing his praises are highly suspect though as far as their motivations for doing so. Alot of it comes across as disingenuous in my eyes.


>You could say Paul C. or The Bomb Squad before that too. But
>there's something else in what Dilla did. But again I'm not
>going to talk about this much here.

No problem.