3 December 2008 :: stirring up anger problems you never knew existed

:: Record Review

J Dilla

Donuts
(Stones Throw; 2006)

Rating: 80%
Combined Rating: 78%

The release of Donuts and the death of its maker so closely coincide, it’s an impossible task to separate the music from the ghost. This album’s primed for posthumous press favor, and manic, conspiratorial cynicism would call it some carefully timed marketing ruse. The simple fact, though, is that we have this sterling example of instrumental hip-hop to celebrate, and now we have a dead Jay Dee to mourn, and life leaves us no room for questioning. That fact is cold, and it is hard, and at first it seems at odds with the soulful warmth of these beats. For anyone who really cares, listening to Donuts is a rather full emotional experience.

In my review of Med’s Push Comes to Shove, I called Jay Dee a “wack-ass drum connoisseur.” Now that he’s gone, well, I won’t pretend to rescind it. The promotional sticker on this album’s shrink wrap, however, has Kanye proclaiming, “Jay Dee is a drum god. His drums can only be paralleled, they can’t ever be topped.” Kanye’s been wrong before (he was wrong about his Grammy outfit, for instance), and he’s wrong again. As Newell has previously noted, Slug says that Jel can program an amazing drum sequence on his SP 1200 in about five minutes. On a bad day and, say, with only two minutes working time, Jel would still out-drum Dilla. It’s not that the texture of Jay’s hits are poor, and maybe Kanye’s just been spending too much time listening to Top 40 rap, thinking that chintzy 808/303 ticks are the top of the competition. For the most part Dilla smartly chopped his drums from samples. The problem’s that his sequencing often relies on single drum strokes or standard 4/4 kicks paired with trap taps, nary a fill or stutter or change-up to be heard. Donuts does little to rectify that M.O., but these beats average a minute and a half long, and so Dilla stumbled upon the perfect sort of album format for his particular style of production, percussive variety brought about through the actual track changes, even if it’s just a shift from one sort of click-track to another. And, in some cases (“The Twister”), a rollicking break does await.

For some reason the 31 tracks are given individual names, ones probably assigned in less time than it takes Jel to make an amazing beat, alternating between generics (“The Diff’rence”), single syllable words (“Stop”), silly donut-themed nonsense (“Time: The Donut of the Heart”) and games like naming a track after its runtime (“One Eleven”) or following a track “Hi” with a track “Bye.” Quite evidently, and in contrast with more serious instrumental hip-hop, the names mean nothing, or they at least have no intention of injecting meaning into the compositions they mark; furthermore, the containing album is less about the donut than it is about the pack of donuts. Appropriate to its record label, Donuts is a winding, Madlibian exploration of music via the strident vessel of hip-hop.

Unlike Madlib, however, Dilla stuck closer to the soul and funk roots of his career genre, shying away from bossa nova and Afro-beat and the rest of Lib’s castle vault collection. And there’s a refusal in Dilla’s work to sound underground, to allow stand-off mix-downs or layers of vinyl crackle to bury his source elements; there’s no obscurant will here. With Donuts the end result should feel eminently familiar to most heads, and not just because it twice uses samples most recently employed by Edan’s Beauty and the Beat (“The Diff’rence” – “Murder Mystery”; “Geek Down” – “The Science of the Two”). All the ingredients here are standards, most of the lifts having appeared in beats prior to this; why, “One Eleven” scratches up the “Aw yeah,” hip-hop’s Wilhelm Scream and the ubiquity of which is probably only exceeded by loops of the “Funky Drummer” break. Thus, Donuts is something a bit more specific and reflexive than a “Madlibian exploration of music.” It’s a sample-based exploration of sample-based hip-hop. While Madlib plumbed bottomless crates and Edan blazed psych-hop hybrids and Kanye flipped tokens of pop music mass consciousness over strings and keys from the guy who produces download-only Fiona Apple, Dilla was making these immediately pleasing beats, beats that are all about remaining within a head’s bubble of comfort while simultaneously reshaping and reinforcing that bubble. In context the idea almost seems revolutionary.

If all the verb tense changing of this review is a bother, understand that it’s motivated. Donuts is an intensely present listen, as much an in-this-moment reminder of hip-hop’s past as it is a reminder of the past that contains the prolific doings of J Dilla. It’s entirely too richly tragic and fitting that the man’s last release is the apotheosis of his work, the finest and most representative example of what he contributed to music and, in turn, how music inspired him. I find myself very thankful that this disc doesn’t reach for innovations, doesn’t try to prognosticate the future. It’s hip-hop pregnant with memory; for a head, that’s the most reassuring sort of elegy.

Chet Betz :: 16 February 2006 |                

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