Photo Credit: NHS (YouTube)

A Gen Hoshino-hosted music culture show from Japanese channel NHK discusses J Dilla in their inaugural episode.

Jay loved Japan. And Japan loves Jay. In the first episode of new Japanese show called Gen Hoshino’s Music, Japanese singer Gen Hoshino talks about the legacy of J Dilla (written in Japanese as J・ディラ). The episode is a prime example of how Dilla’s influence transcended culture, especially on his second posthumous album Jay Loves Japan which released in 2007.

Here is the synopsis for the Dilla episode of Gen Hoshino’s Music featured on the NHK website. (We had to use Google to translate so admittedly it’s a little rough:)

“A new program to learn music by focusing on one “history-changing” musician with the puppet “Kaisetsun” who loves to explain music every time. The first theme is J. Dilla, a beat seeker. A closer look at the music and life of the legendary hip-hop producer!”

The show’s YouTube page also explains more:

“The first [episode is about] J Dilla, [who] produced many famous songs centered on hip-hop. The beats created using MPC and innovative sampling techniques have influenced musicians around the world, including Mr. Hoshino. It is a spillover story about the town where J Dilla was born and raised.”

You can watch part of the segment on YouTube. If you don’t speak Japanese there is an English subtitle option you can use. More than 15 years after his death and Dilla’s legacy is still as strong as ever. The new Dilla biography, Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, just made its debut on the New York Times Best Seller list. Earlier this month, author Dan Charnas spoke with Okayplayer about the late-producer’s innovations.

“He doesn’t have just one technique. He had three major techniques and playing freehand was only one of them. The other two were decelerating elements to reveal error,” Charnas said. “Whenever you slow something down — the slower it is the more you hear the variations in the timing. Any mistake is going to be elongated and he loved that. And then displacing elements, which is what he used the MPC for, he didn’t just turn the clock off. That’s why I wrote the book, that was the initial thing for writing the book. It’s as much calculation as it is feeling. There’s the love of Dilla and there’s the science of Dilla, and the scientist is the hero of this story.”