Similar to how ghettotech artists found inspiration in Detroit's strip clubs, so did J Dilla and his friends. Slum Village's T3 recalled how Dilla and others frequented the many strip clubs Eight Mile offered before Chocolate City opened up in their neighborhood around the early 2000s.
"It was the first titty bar in our hood," T3 said. "It was owned by guys we knew in the neighborhood so we could go in there and kick it. We had our own VIP section. We could go in there and listen to songs we just made. We really utilized that place."
Although T3 refers to himself and his peers as outsiders, they were endearingly seen as the "music dudes" by not just Chocolate City's owners and clientele but the neighborhood. Their love of Chocolate City served as a testament to their duality: soulful artists who also acknowledged and embraced Detroit street culture.
"When you think about Dilla, you think about Slum [Village], it's urban dudes that are soulful," T3 said. "So we are still a part of our street culture even though we didn't do a lot of things a lot of cats did. But we still grew up in the same neighborhoods [dealing with] the same conditions."
Slum Village represented that in their lyrics. They wanted what some of those cats had: money, women, cars, clothes, homes and jewelry. This, in tandem with J Dilla's production, made for a fascinating pairing. But the group found itself typecast as an extension of the hip-hop being made by A Tribe Called Quest and the Native Tongues movement upon releasing their debut album, Fantastic, Vol. 1, in 1997. Even Q-Tip hailed the group as successors to Tribe at the time, something that J Dilla was displeased with.
"It was kinda fucked up [getting that stamp] because people automatically put us in that [Tribe] category. That was actually a category that we didn’t actually wanna be in," J Dilla told XXL in a 2004 interview. "I thought the music came off like that, but we didn't realize that shit then. I mean, you gotta listen to the lyrics of the shit. Niggas was talking about getting head from bitches. It was like a nigga from Native Tongues never woulda said that shit."
In that same interview, J Dilla speculated that it was his production that led to Slum Village being conflated with their East Coast contemporaries, his smooth and sample-heavy boom-bap beats not out of place alongside the likes of Tribe's "Bonita Applebum" or De La Soul's "Breakadawn."
Still, there's no denying how pivotal a role Q-Tip played in J Dilla's career, the former introducing the likes of Common, D'Angelo, and The Pharcyde to the producer's beats. But the beats didn't fully convey who J Dilla was, and when collaborators traveled to Detroit to work with him, the producer made sure that they got a better understanding of him by immersing them in his world. A part of this experience was Chocolate City.
Common has referenced his strip club experiences with J Dilla in a couple of songs, most recently on "Rewind That" from his 2014 album Nobody's Smiling: "Cook up some hot shit, then go to the strip club / Then we made 'The Light' and times got brighter." "The Light" was the second single from Common's Like Water for Chocolate and was nominated for Best Rap Solo Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards.
Two years prior to "Rewind That," Common specifically referenced Chocolate City on Big Sean's "Story by Common." The track, which appeared on Sean's Detroit mixtape, is an interlude where the Chicago rapper reminisced on the times he hung out with J Dilla in his hometown. In it, he offered an amusing anecdote about joining Dilla and Frank Nitt at Chocolate City: "I went to the club, and man they had some good chicken wings — man some good, thick girls, and it was right."
"That was a part of our process sometimes," Common said of Dilla's strip club excursions in an interview with 247HH. "You got to let Jay Dee do what he do, and he'll come back and cook up some of the best of the best."
Robert Glasper also spoke on how strip clubs were a part of J Dilla's creative process.
"[Dilla] is the first person that they had Bilal work with when he got signed in '99, and Bilal brought me out to Detroit," Glasper said during an appearance on Hot 97 where he recalled watching Dilla make the beat for Bilal's "Reminisce." "We went to eat, went to a strip club, came back to Dilla's basement around three or four in the morning, and he made this beat right before our eyes."
To most, J Dilla is remembered as a beat-making pioneer. He defined and redefined an era of rap and soul music through his unconventional sample selections and experimentation with the MPC, creating a sound and aesthetic that continues to influence producers. But those that knew him best and were able to work with him before his passing, understood how his love for strip clubs — especially Chocolate City — informed his love for making music.
"Dilla just happened to be a soul dude but he still had his Detroit roots, which was known for pimp shit and being flashy," T3 said before playfully imitating his late friend: "Like, 'this is why I'm so funky. I'm in the titty bar, that's why. I'm not just digging for wax all day.'"
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*This article was originally published on February 7, 2020.
