FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
J Dilla - Donuts
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THIS instalment of Vinyl Corner…
IN THIS PHOTO: J Dilla in his home studio/PHOTO CREDIT: Raph Rashid
is all about an album that turns fifteen on 7th February. If you have not experienced the late J Dilla’s Donuts, then you need to get involved! I would encourage everyone to buy it on vinyl, as it is such a magnificently rich and broad album filled with so many different sounds and samples. It is one of the last great sampling records in my opinion – something that was more synonymous with Hip-Hop of the 1980s and 1990s. Donuts is a largely instrumental album – there are short vocal snippets and phrases from various samples -, and it contains thirty-one tracks (that was how old J Dilla was at the time). Whereas a lot of sample-heavy albums are full songs with several samples in each track, Donuts is a collection of very short songs (between one and one-and-a-half minutes for the most part) where you get these amazing sketches and layers that all work wonderfully alongside one another. It is like you are scrolling through radio stations or a playlist and getting all these very different and intriguing songs! Despite the brilliance and originality of Donuts, there is sadness and tragedy behind the album. As we learn from Wikipedia, J Dilla was very ill in hospital for much of the recording – he died on 10th February, 2006 (Donuts was released on his thirty-second birthday):
“In 2002, J Dilla had been diagnosed with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), an incurable disease of the blood, while also battling lupus, which had been diagnosed a year previously. According to close friend and fellow producer Karriem Riggins, the impetus for Donuts came during an extended hospital stay in the summer of 2005.
In the December 2006 issue of The Fader, J Dilla's mother, Maureen Yancey, a former opera singer, spoke of watching her son's daily routine during the making of Donuts:
I knew he was working on a series of beat CDs before he came to Los Angeles. Donuts was a special project that he hadn't named yet. This was the tail end of his "Dill Withers" phase, while he was living in Clinton Township, Michigan. You see, musically he went into different phases. He'd start on a project, go back, go buy more records and then go back to working on the project again.
I saw him all day, everyday. I would go there for breakfast, go back to Detroit to check on the daycare business I was running, and then back to his house for lunch and dinner. He was on a special diet and he was a funny eater anyway. He had to take 15 different medications, we would split them up between meals, and every other day we would binge on a brownie sundae from Big Boys. That was his treat.
I didn't know about the actual album Donuts until I came to Los Angeles to stay indefinitely. I got a glimpse of the music during one of the hospital stays, around his 31st birthday, when [friend and producer] House Shoes came out from Detroit to visit him. I would sneak in and listen to the work in progress while he was in dialysis. He got furious when he found out I was listening to his music! He didn't want me to listen to anything until it was a finished product.
He was working in the hospital. He tried to go over each beat and make sure that it was something different and make sure that there was nothing that he wanted to change. "Lightworks", oh yes, that was something! That's one of the special ones. It was so different. It blended classical music (way out there classical), commercial and underground at the same time”.
It is such a shame that J Dilla (James Dewitt Yancey) did not live long enough to see the impact his album had and the way it inspired Hip-Hop. From tracks being taken from Donuts and used on the T.V. to other Hip-Hop artists borrowing its beats, this exceptional album is still providing nourishment and fascination after all of these years. I want to finish by bringing in an article but, before then, AllMusic’s review of Donuts:
“Donuts was made on a hospital bed and in a home studio, on a stripped-down setup with a stack of vinyl. Released on its maker's 32nd birthday, three days before he passed away, the album has a resonance deeper than anyone could've hoped for or even imagined. Some who were close to Dilla have said that there are hidden messages in the samples, the track titles, and who knows where else. It's impossible not to speculate about some things, like the track titled "Don't Cry," the looped "broken and blue" from a version of "Walk on By," the presence of Eddie Kendricks singing "My people, hold on," or the fact that there are 31 tracks, a possible signal that Dilla survived a little longer than he expected. Then again, for every possible message, there are two or three elements that could've been designed to throw any analysis off its trail. After all, if there's one single image that the disc brings to mind, it's that of Dilla goofing off, having fun with some of his favorite records, and messing with some heads in the process. (And you could probably make the album's title out to be a metaphor for the circle of life, but sometimes a donut is just a donut.)
Armed with sources that are either known to novice sample spotters or only the most seasoned diggers -- surprisingly, the former greatly outweighs the latter -- Dilla's also just as likely to leave his samples barely touched as he is to render them unrecognizable. It's fitting that Motown echoes, a predominant theme, are often felt, from the use of Dionne Warwick's Holland-Dozier-Holland-written "You're Gonna Need Me" (on "Stop"), to the shifting waves of percussion plucked from Kendricks' "People... Hold On" (on "People"), to the Stevie-like piano licks within Kool & the Gang's "The Fruitman" ("The Diff'rence"). Most of the tracks fall into the 60-90 second range. It's easy to be overwhelmed, or even put off, by the rapid-fire sequence, but it's astounding how so many of the sketches leave an immediate impression. By the third or fourth listen, what initially came across as a haphazard stream of slapped-together fragments begins to take the shape of a 44-minute suite filled with wistful joy. Like everything else Dilla has ever done, Donuts is not defining; in fact, elements of its approach bare the apparent influence of Jaylib collaborator Madlib. His mode has always been too slippery and restlessly progressive to be equated with any one track or album, but Donuts just might be the one release that best reflects his personality”.
Even if you are not a Hip-Hop fan and are a bit unsure about digging too deep, I would advise you to listen to Donuts as it is so accessible and varied. The sounds and sensations one gets from the album are so heady and memorable. It is a unique and hugely impressive album that is moving people fifteen years after its release. In 2016, Observer Music looked back on Donuts ten years after its release. The article consisted a fascinating discussion between figures who reflected on an awesome album:
“Participating in the discussion were renowned funk/soul/hip-hop DJ and Stones Throw CEO Peanut Butter Wolf, Stones Throw recording artist, veteran jazz drummer and longtime Dilla friend Karriem Riggins, acclaimed electronic music maverick Adam Dorn, who does business as Mocean Worker, and Jeff Parker, the mighty guitarist from Chicago post-rock legends Tortoise”.
“In your opinion, do you think Dilla had this magnum opus in his mind or was the creation of these beats done on a more cathartic level or therapeutic level for him that summer he was in the hospital?
Riggins: He would make the beats from his hospital bed at Cedar-Sinai. At that point, he wasn’t mobile.
Wolf: I think the pain and suffering he dealt with off and on through his final years contributed to the album he created coming out the way it did, but when he gave me the first Donuts demo on CD, he was in between hospital stays. He was in my car with Madlib and I and we were going record shopping and he just gave it to me to play in the car. I had released the Beat Konducta volume 1 & 2 album a few months before (which is Madlib’s instrumental hip-hop alias) and I later felt like maybe he gave me that as his own version of Beat Konducta.
So the story goes the album was named as such because Jay loved donuts. But what was the true meaning behind the title?
Wolf: The “donuts” thing was just another tongue-in-cheek thing that Dilla did. I don’t think he really thought too hard about calling his album Donuts. I don’t even to this day know if it was supposed to be an instrumental album or a beat tape for rappers, but I damn near begged him to let me release it as an instrumental album and he agreed. But the “donut” thing could be his ode to unhealhty food (he called another one of his beat tapes “Pizza man”) or it could be because he knew that J Rocc and I loved spinning 45s when we went on the road with him and Madlib, and Dilla sampled from 45s for most of that album. “Donuts” is a nickname for 45s cuz of the hole in the middle. We’d all go to Rockaway Records in Silverlake/Glendale and get our fix of 45s and I believe that’s the record store where the majority of the samples from Donuts came from.
How does Donuts look on your ends a decade later?
Dorn: It’s amazing to witness because now it’s long enough ago that guys don’t even know why they’re playing behind the beat the way they are. Like they don’t even know the records that inspired this in the first place. That freaks me out the most. Combine that with churches churning out players and you have a rebirth of musicianship.
Jeff Parker: We were all giant fans of that record in Tortoise, man. I mean, we all loved Dilla in general. But that record blew everybody’s minds. We had all been following Dilla’s music, and whenever he dropped anything we were curious to know what it was going to sound like and one of us would go out and get it. It was a very exciting time.
For me personally, it wasn’t anything I expected it to sound like. It was totally different from the stuff that he had been doing. When I first put it on, I was actually kind of put off by it. I was like, “Yo, man, where’s the smooth beats? Where’s the space?” (laughs) Especially comparing it to all of his other stuff, I was like, “Man, what is this?” But the more and more I listened to it, and like the most intriguing music, hearing it over and over again eventually it became like one of my favorite things I had ever heard, still to this day. I was actually just listening to it very recently and I always hear new things every time I listen to it”.
I shall leave things there, as I would point people in the direction of the album – either on vinyl or streamed – and its myriad sounds. Ahead of its fifteenth anniversary, I was eager to spotlight an album that has a huge legacy and has been celebrated by critics far and wide. I hope, on 7th February, people around the world spin Donuts and raise a glass to remember…
THE remarkable J Dilla.