The Review is Over. (A Donuts 20th Anniversary Retrospective)
James Dewitt Yancey was a Detroit producer and rapper who came up in the mid-1990s under the name Jay Dee making beats for A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and The Pharcyde. He would gain further notoriety near the turn of the millennium as a major contributor to the Soulquarians collective. He was either involved heavily with production, like with Mama’s Gun or Like Water for Chocolate, or inspired the rhythms and aesthetics of albums like Voodoo. He even got to show off his rapping as apart of the group Slum Village, and around this time, they released Fantastic Vol. 2. He was becoming known as a soulful hip-hop wunderkind. He took from a wide variety of genres and infused it with his own unique brand of off-kilter drums; a Jay Dee beat was unmistakable. Everyone jumping at the opportunity to work with him. Although, he had higher aspirations.
He left Slum Village to start a solo career and released his debut album Welcome 2 Detroit in 2001. He would also start referring to himself as J Dilla. The album mixes dirty Detroit underground hip-hop with tributes to several genres like Soul, Progressive Electronic, and even Bossa Nova. He also got in touch with another underground producer Madlib and created Champion Sound, where they would trade beats and bars with each other. None of these albums lit the world on fire. They got pretty good reviews, but failed to establish a large audience. Dilla would toil away at a follow-up, but that would soon come to a halt.
In 2003, J Dilla was diagnosed with TTP and contracted lupus shortly after. While he did initially downplay his illnesses to the public, by 2005, he would be bedridden at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center bleeding hundreds of thousands a month just to stay alive. It’s at this point where the story of Donuts gets cloudy, as there are two stories that tell two completely different scenarios. To summarize, the first one is that Dilla worked on Donuts on his deathbed with nothing but an AKAI MPC, a Boss SP-303, and a turntable. The other one told in Dilla Time is that Stones Throw art director Jeff Jank was given permission by Dilla to edit and extend some beat tapes. Dilla was busy on that follow-up to W2D, so he probably didn’t have time to make two albums at once. However, if you know this album, you know the aftermath.
On February 7, Donuts was released on Dilla’s 32nd birthday. On February 10, Dilla passed away. While that other album was unfinished by the time he passed, Karriem Riggins was brought in to finish Dilla’s vision. That follow-up would be known as The Shining, and while it charted higher and was made for wider appeal, the album isn’t talked about that much these days. It’s pretty good, but it’s ironic that the true album Dilla was toiling away with has been overshadowed by an album handed off to a label seeking new music. A lot of that has to do with how sudden his passing was. Similar to how Swimming was quickly recontextualized after Mac Miller’s death, Donuts was reinvented even quicker. Pitchfork reviewed the album on February 8 and mostly talked about the production, while PopMatters reviewed Donuts on February 13 opening their review with “This is how a brilliant mind says goodbye.” It was perceived as this wordless final statement with lyrics being interpreted as Dilla coming to terms with his illness. The only reason the first story about Dilla making Donuts on his deathbed became popular was that Stones Throw didn’t want to deny it: the story became the album.
All that context is to say that Donuts is often mythologized in hip-hop spheres, and while the story of J Dilla is tragic, I don’t want to paint this album as only being about his death. If Donuts was only hailed as classic purely because Dilla died suddenly after its release, then we should be praising XXXTentacion and Juice WRLD way more than we do. Regardless of its circumstances, good music survives. And Donuts is nothing short of excellent.
Donuts has 31 tracks averaging below two minutes per track. You may think that it contributes to this idea that this album is nothing but a glorified beat tape, but rest assured, the album is at its perfect length. I don’t think I would want any song to go on longer than it needs to, and the main concern is to show you as many ideas as possible before going onto the next one. It’s enough to leave you satisfied, even if you want more. And this album always has more to give you.
Dilla has always been known for a groove that only he could create. He would disable quantization on his samplers to give the percussion a more human feel. This rhythmic disorientation is genuinely fascinating in music theory, but I’m not well versed in music theory, so all I’ll say is that Donuts doesn’t disappoint. The same production work that you’d come to expect from Dilla shows up on here, whether it be “Stepson of the Clapper” and the stomps and claps backed by this guitar warm-up, or the soft snares on “Mash” that accentuate the piano. While that’s all well and good, I should also acknowledge that Donuts is weird.
Dilla hated giving out multitracks, so in order to not bother him about it, Jeff Jank chose to work off of the tape itself to edit. On top of making the album sound distinctly worn and compressed, it contributes to why people argue whether Donuts can be classified as plunderphonics. I don’t know how much of this is Jeff’s work, as Dilla was also known for focusing on one part of a mix (i.e. drums) when sampling, but it leaves the album with this strange feeling, as voices will frequently cut off between chops. “People” has these bongo loops that are soundtracked with folk singing and someone exhaling into the aether. Frequently, the beat will start with this extended intro from the sample before kicking in, like with “The Twister (Huh, What)” or “Hi.” It’s like already being drunk and then someone smacks you in the back of the head.
I think the crown jewel of this approach is “Don’t Cry,” that initially does minimal to change the Escorts song, but when it kicks into high gear and starts chopping on the eighth, it creates this surreally depressing atmosphere. I often give credence to bafflingly good sampling, but Donuts has it all over this album. I’ve seen attempts to recreate “Don’t Cry”, and none of them come close to the power the song gives. Easily a Top 10 Hip-Hop beat ever.
This album surprisingly has great structuring, and while the first half is more in your face with songs like “Workinonit” that serves as a great introduction piece or the big brass found on “The Diff’rence”, the second half is melancholic. That fact contributes to this album being interpreted as a final statement. “Don’t Cry” has been categorized as a song comforting Dilla’s mother, while “U-Love” could also be a goodbye to his loved ones. Again, I don’t want to contribute to the myth that this album is explicitly about his death, but there is this foreboding energy that starts to come up when the album starts to wrap things up. It’s almost as if the album is disappointed in itself that it’s about to end because it has so much more to give you. Thankfully, we are given closure with the last three tracks: “Bye.” served as a demo for So Far To Go off The Shining, but while the latter conveyed intimacy in glorious excess, the former takes pleasure in its sparseness. ”Last Donut of the Night” is soundtracked by this swelling string section with the overdub scratching the vocals “ladies and gentlemen”. And then there’s the last track “Donuts (Intro)/Welcome To The Show,” where Dilla emphasize these choir vocals singing about “the man that you’d thought I’d be.” It even ends with a callback to “Donuts (Outro)”, showing that the album loops in on itself.
Regardless of its initial intentions, Donuts has proven to be one of the most influential albums in the last 20 years. Whether it be his own friends like D’Angelo and Black Thought, up-comers like Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, future stars like Drake and Big Sean, beat smiths like Knxwledge and Kenneth Blume, the entire lo-fi hip-hop genre that was birthed in this album’s wake, and even places outside of hip-hop like the emerging Wonky genre or the sampling found on Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, they can all be traced back to Dilla’s influence. He truly gained a reputation as your favorite musician’s favorite musician. Even outside of music, his stuff is often soundtrack by Dave Chappelle and [adult swim], basically establishing their own identity through his music. Even the city of Detroit loves bringing him up every chance they can get, it feels like there are murals or tributes anywhere in the area.
With all that said, I hope that I convey to you my love for this album. It is one of my favorite albums of all time, and came to me at a perfect time in my life, where I started to realize that music could be much more than something that you put on in the background. I probably wouldn’t be on this site without it, and for that I think this album.
Thank you for your time. Let’s begin.
