February 10 was the 17-year anniversary of legendary Detroit producer J Dilla’s death. Continuing to honor his contributions to the lo-fi, electronic sub-genre of hip-hop, the New York Times teamed up with FX and Hulu for a new documentary.
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On April 7, The Legacy of J Dilla will premiere at 10 p.m. ET on FX, and will later be added to Hulu the following day. Aligning with a year-long celebration for the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, The Legacy of J Dilla‘s announcement comes just as the two docuseries Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni & Tupac Shakur and RapCaviar Presents will come out on Hulu within the next month.
The producers for the upcoming J Dilla film are Christopher Frierson and Esther Dere, as the former recently put together a documentary about the late DMX, and the latter worked on a Notorious B.I.G. documentary in 2017.
For the doc, first introduced in a January press release by FX, family members of Dilla give never-before-seen interviews. His mother Maureen Yancey gave a quote about her love for her son ahead of the doc’s release. “I’m a Detroiter, and I’m a fighter,” she said. “I will stay in there, and I will fight. I won’t let anybody put my son down, what I do for him down, because I’m here to lift up his music, his legacy.”
Throughout his career, before and after his death, Dilla’s collaborators included the 1990s and 2000s hip-hop heroes like A Tribe Called Quest, Erykah Badu, Busta Rhymes, Common, and more. Passing away at the young age of 32, a lot of his catalog has been posthumous releases, even though his most popular LP to date, Donuts, arrived just days after his death.
Currently, fans are still awaiting the documentary Dilla Time, produced by Questlove and based on the New York Times best-selling book Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla. In the meantime, though, The Legacy of J Dilla will surely be a great, much-needed reminder of J Dilla’s massive impact.
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