In October 2023 Hip Hop producer Vice Beats began his first 3 city tour called “An Afternoon of Dilla”, an annual event that celebrates the life and music of the late great Detroit based producer J Dilla through live performances, DJ sets, talks, and a Dilla-themed cypher. The tour is in support of the James Dewitt Yancey Foundation; which was setup in his name by his family to support community music projects and access to music technology for young people.
For the 2025 tour Vice Beats got together with uchi to create a J Dilla T shirt for the events held in Bristol and London. The design is layered and complex, much like Jay Dee’s music. The background text features the names of Dilla’s tracks, including production and remixes. The smaller, darker layers of text feature his collaborators, including early career artists.
The t-shirts, sweatshirts and art prints as with the events, are an official collaboration with Ma Dukes (Maureen Yancey) Jay Dee’s mum, who developed the James Dewitt Yancey Foundation. Each item sold donates profit to the foundation to further support their work.
Here’s some old and new. A look back at the original uchi classic T shirt No 18 – Now We May Begin and the 2016 remix, Now We May Begin Again.
Although the original T shirt design uses four overlaid images and the remix only three, there were originally 36 photographs shot in sequence documenting the vinyl selection process (Natural Selection), to the needle dropping on the record, as shown on Always Use Clean Needles. The remix is more subtle – the “sample” – the first verse from Randy Crawford’s song of the same name has been removed and the lines redrawn for a bigger print.
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I usually don’t pay much attention to other Hip Hop brands, or at least I try not to. Not following what others are doing has merits and drawbacks.
If you are not distracted or influenced by what others are doing, you can carry on, safe in the knowledge that whatever you make is all “you”. You can be blissfully ignorant of the fact that someone else may have the same idea. Worse still, someone may have the same idea and execute it more skilfully than you.
As any artist will tell you, what they see around them will probably creep into their work in some form or another, eventually, whether they are conscious of it or not.
Sometimes, it’s more deliberate. You may be inspired to take a sample from Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give it Up’ and create a completely original ‘Blurred Lines’ single.
Or, like Banksy, use the Mona Lisa or a Constable to create great urban art with its own context. How many renditions of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can or his Marilyn Monroe screen prints are there?
