J Dilla's Donuts (33 1/3)

by Jordan Ferguson

  Bootie Brown, a member of California group The Pharcyde, whose 1995 sophomore album Labcabincalifornia gave Dilla some of his first major national exposure, remembered the effect watching Dilla’s approach had on him: “Jay Dee didn’t have those rules. He sampled from anything, he’d sample something that came out yesterday, CD, cassette tape, it didn’t make a difference. And for me to see what the product was after he would do something like that, it kind of erased the boundaries of like, ‘man, it’s only me putting me in this frame of mind of holding myself back, I need to just do whatever I want to do.’ That’s what music is, experimentation.”13

  Even the most shallow look through Dilla’s extensive catalog of beats will show that during his career he seemed to make it a point to return to records and breaks that were staples of hip-hop production, as though he were working through some sort of checklist, to prove that he could take any record and make something listeners hadn’t heard before. Using songs like “Footsteps in the Dark” by The Isley Brothers, “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club, or Bob James’s “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” could be considered biting in some circles, given how frequently they’ve been used. But the work Dilla put into twisting and chopping his source material into something original could not be denied. As he wrote in the liner notes for his 2001 album Welcome 2 Detroit, “I like to ‘freak’ shit that’s been abused, just 2 see if I can do something different with it.”14 No moment typifies this philosophy more than the origins of the song “Little Brother” by Black Star, a favorite anecdote of Roots drummer Questlove, who witnessed parts of its assembly.

  It’s universally acknowledged that Dilla was always working, always making beats. Sometimes he would make beats he had no intention of ever selling to MCs, he just considered them practice (Waajeed released three volumes of these “practice beats” on his Bling47 label between 2002 and 2005). Occasionally, this practice took the form of finding alternative ways to sample deep cuts already used by other producers. While killing time at Dilla’s house waiting for a flight in 1999, Questlove heard Dilla playing around with the Roy Ayers song “Ain’t Got No Time,” which had been looped by Pete Rock and used as a brief interlude, no small feat considering Ayers sings or speaks throughout most of the song’s two and a half minutes. After concluding that there was no obvious loop he could take, Dilla did the only reasonable thing he could think of: he made one.

  According to Questlove, “Dilla goes through the entire two minutes and twenty-seven seconds of ‘Ain’t Got No Time’ and he literally takes one second, or less than one second … half-second pieces, of all the parts of the song that Roy Ayers is not talking … and what he does is, he masterfully places it together and somehow makes it sound fluid. When you play ‘Little Brother’ for anybody you’re just like, ‘Oh, okay, it’s an eight-bar loop.’ But no, he literally took half-second chops, thirty-two times, and made it sound fluid … This was like when Matt Damon saw that math problem in Good Will Hunting, this was that.”15

  Questlove pleaded with Dilla to make him a copy of the beat, but he refused, not wanting to be seen as disrespecting his idol. “[H]e was like, ‘Naw, man, this is one of Pete’s beats, I can’t do it.’”

  Lifting that Roy Ayers song, under any other circumstance, could have been considered a felonious offense of the beatmaker’s ethics, biting at its most flagrant, and Dilla knew it. It was only divine providence that saw fifteen seconds of it accidentally end up on a beat tape passed to Mos Def and Talib Kweli, who looped it straight from the cassette to make “Little Brother,” a song that resembles Pete’s interlude, but has its own melody and rhythms. Without Dilla’s willingness to abandon the conventions of hip-hop production, the song would never have been made. No one else would have had the audacity to try.

  “What’s interesting about that to me is that the producers I knew at the time still really respected him,” said Schloss. “In fact, I remember that a lot of the people I was working with considered him one of their favorite producers when he was still working with Slum Village. I haven’t gone back and asked them about it, but my guess would be that they felt that his creativity outweighed any perceived violations.”

  Even with his refusal to adhere to the “rules” of his craft, Dilla’s transgressions never injured his credibility in the production community because they always passed the dual litmus tests of laziness and creativity. One could accuse “Little Brother” of biting Pete Rock, but no one could say that it cut corners, or that the resulting music didn’t advance and inspire the artform. He always refused to limit himself, he valued his ears over what the accepted rules of production might dictate he do. He would program his drums ahead of or behind the beat, or lift a sample from any source in any genre from funk and soul to lounge and folk, and still make something wholly his own, a fearlessness that cemented his position among the all time greats of the art form.

  As Pete Rock himself said shortly after Dilla’s passing, “In the beginning of my career, I did a lot of new things. And this guy took it at least two or three levels higher than me. It was a chain reaction. It was like from Larry Smith to Marley Marl, Marley Marl to Pete Rock, from Pete Rock to Jay Dee.”16

  Stop!

  J Dilla would hate this book.

  I’ll never know this for a fact, and he’ll never be able to tell me himself, but everything I’ve read, everything I know about the man suggests he would not be a fan. This sort of intense examination of his older work seemed to make him extremely uncomfortable. His focus was always on forward movement.

  Frank Nitt, half of Detroit rap duo Frank-n-Dank and one of Dilla’s oldest friends, told a documentary crew in 2010, “I know that for him, he was always on to the next. He kind of let it all go at some point. I think what bothered him the most [was] people would call him about something he did three months ago. And he’d be like Aw, man, they want this old-ass beat, I don’t even want to fuck with this beat right now, it’s old to me.”1

  House Shoes concurred: “[He’d] get on one page, he would conquer that and be satisfied and then he would move on … and he wouldn’t look back, there was always no looking back with Jay. Like, ‘I did that, I’m done with it, let’s go five years ahead.’”2 If Dilla’s career is any indication, the music he might have made after Donuts would certainly have sounded markedly different from anything he did before. In a musical landscape filled with trap beats, electro and dubstep, I could try to predict what sounds might have caught his attention and inspired him. But he’s not here, so I’ll never know.

  This leads to a common rebuttal to those who would claim the album’s greatness: Would Donuts be considered a classic had Dilla survived? Would we still be talking about it? Would it still possess the haunted power that it does? Would I be writing this book? Or would it just be some anomalous blip in his discography, an artifact left over from a bout of bad health? Maybe it would. But I’ll never know.

  There are a lot of things I won’t know. Regardless of what myths and rumors swirl around the album’s creation, despite how personally many fans might cherish it, Donuts is the singular vision of James Yancey, with very little collaboration from anyone else. No matter what evidence can be pulled from the album, no matter how sound my arguments or anyone else’s might seem, the purest truth is that no one knows what Dilla was thinking when he selected those samples and manipulated them in the ways that he did. A non-lexical chant sampled on the song “People” is taken from “Mujhe Maar Daalo,” a track from the 1974 Hindi movie Geeta Mera Naam. The actual lyrics of the song, when translated to English, tell the story of a woman facing her demise, seeking to prove that life does not end with death. Is it even in the realm of possibility that Dilla knew that when he decided to sample that song? Only he knew. Whether the point was to make a grand statement on the nature of mortality, or assert how dominant his beatmaking skills were, no one can say definitively what he intended. Any inference I make regarding those intentions is, in a way, speaking for Dilla, and that’s a proposition I find mo
re than a little discomfiting.

  But isn’t that, to some extent, the entire purpose of criticism? To pull meaning and appreciation from a work of art through the prism of one’s experience, as well as an understanding of its historical and biographical context and one’s familiarity with the conventions of the genre?

  The predominant tension among critics of the last 80 years revolves around these ideas of authorial intention: Essentially, whose opinion matters more, the person who produces the work or the person who consumes it? For most of the twentieth century, multiple schools of thought, including the so-called “New Criticism,” post-structuralism, and deconstructivism argued that meaning should be derived only from what can be extracted from the work itself through close reading; that is what matters, the artist is little more than what the poet T. S. Eliot considered a “medium,” free of personality. Or, as the critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley posit in their essay “The Intentional Fallacy”: “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.” Wimsatt and Beardsley might have been discussing poetry, but the idea is equally applicable to any work of art, including Donuts. By this reasoning, the inability to know or verify what Dilla meant makes no difference to what I might take away from repeated listens, because what he might have been thinking or feeling when he made it is irrelevant to my interpretation.

  But.

  The formalist sensibility only works if I can commit to it fully, and, if I do, I end up thinking my way into a paradox: What Dilla might have thought or felt as he made the album is irrelevant to the meaning I pull out of it, but what if the meaning I pull out has everything to do with what I think Dilla might have thought or felt? This line of thought also demands not only that all evidence be contained in the object, but that the object exists free of any other historical or cultural influence, and that’s something I can’t do. One man created Donuts, but it didn’t spring forth from a vacuum. It’s the product of a cultural tradition, and the end point of decade-long career; I can’t ignore these factors. What I’m trying to do probably ends up falling more in line with the historicist, reader-response schools, where interpretation is a collaborative process between the artist and the listener: I extract meaning from the album based on what I know, while acknowledging what was going on at the time, both in his life and the larger musical landscape.

  Ultimately, my mind is too feeble to deem one path “correct”; I’m just trying to establish the precedent at work here. The truth is, there are many people who don’t think Donuts has anything to do with dying; they just let the album breathe as it is. I happen to think it’s very much about mortality, in more ways than Dilla might have even realized. And my opinion isn’t any “more right” than theirs; “rightness” isn’t the point here. The point is that when any album enters the public space, the creators of the work relinquish their right to dictate what the listener takes away from it.

  “Donuts has proven itself as a great work of art [because it’s] open to theories like that—this is great,” said Jeff Jank, longtime Art Director at Stones Throw Records, who worked closely with Dilla on the album as it moved to completion.

  “Dilla went from being his own person with a lot of privacy, to being the public’s person. The public discussion about the work has become a part of it.”3

  There might be many things I’ll never know about this record, but that doesn’t mean the questions shouldn’t be asked.

  The Twister (Huh, What)

  By 2003 J Dilla had established himself as one of the best producers in the industry, and had built a catalog impressive by any standard. He’d provided classic tracks for The Pharcyde, De La Soul, and Busta Rhymes. He’d co-produced the last two A Tribe Called Quest albums, Beats, Rhymes and Life in 1996, followed by The Love Movement in 1998. The year 2000 was particularly good to him: As part of a loose collection of likeminded artists called “The Soulquarians,” he manned the boards for most of Common’s critical and commercial breakthrough Like Water for Chocolate, inspired the musical aesthetic of D’Angelo’s album Voodoo, and released Slum Village’s sophomore album, Fantastic Volume 2.

  Originally recorded in 1998, Volume 2 delivered on the promise of its predecessor, offering a mix of re­recorded tracks from the initial demos as well as new material. For many fans of his work, that album was their first uncut glimpse into what Dilla was capable of when he made music for himself, and proof that he’d perfected the sloppy drums, soupy bass, and chopped-up keyboards that typified his sound during that period in his career.

  “Eighty to ninety percent of all these joints that people have heard? Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes tops. The first beat I ever saw him make was ‘Get a Hold,’ off of Beats, Rhymes and Life … and it probably took him about twelve minutes to make. And he was getting frustrated. He was getting frustrated on the drums. Finally he got them, and then just to chop the loop up and put it on top took him like two, three minutes,” said House Shoes.1

  Dilla’s increasing success, combined with a ravenous fan base constantly hungering for new material, meant that, by the time Volume 2 was released, it had already leaked and been heavily bootlegged, though that never seemed to bother Dilla very much.

  “They say we went multiplatinum in the streets because it was bootlegged, I mean everybody at different companies bootlegged to the point that when it finally came out, everybody already had it,” he told the BBC in 2001, “But it’s all good. I thank the bootleggers because you actually helped me. That gave me a little, I guess you would say power in this industry … It took all of that bootlegging for the labels to look at it and say, okay, people want this, so let’s get on it. So I appreciate everything. It’s cool with me.”2

  Due to the heavy delays and piracy, Volume 2 inadvertently acted as a capstone to the first phase of Dilla’s career. “We made that when everything else coming out was real harsh and hardcore. We always tried to do what everybody wasn’t doing, so that album was directed towards the females, really,” Dilla said in 2003. “We had a couple of songs on there for the DJs and production heads, but the majority of the album was real soft. Then when we came out, finally, that’s when everybody else was doing soft shit.”3 With his sound becoming the standard and no longer the outlier, he started getting restless, eager to change his style.

  He didn’t have to wait long for the chance. The English label Barely Breaking Even offered him the opportunity to kick off their “Beat Generation” series of compilations, designed to give solo opportunities to noteworthy beatmakers and DJs, in the tradition of Marley Marl’s In Control.4 The resulting album, 2001’s Welcome 2 Detroit, the first to feature the “J Dilla” moniker (changed to avoid confusion with Atlanta-based producer Jermaine Dupri, who also went by “JD”), was a watershed moment in his career, and a notice to listeners that he was preparing to broaden his sonic range. As he wrote in the album’s liner notes, “Originally I went into this project 2 produce a breakbeat LP. What happened? BBE basically told me to do whatever I wanted to do. UH OH!” Welcome 2 Detroit offered listeners the first glimpses into where Dilla was headed, a mix of live instrumentation, world music, and the sort of Kraftwerkian electronic sounds that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on The Electrifying Mojo’s radio show 20 years earlier. All the buzz paid off when he signed a production deal with MCA Records later that year.

  But for all his momentum, Dilla had also witnessed more than his share of industry controversy by 2003. He’d watched The Pharcyde implode in front of his eyes, frequently telling the story of two members getting into an actual fistfight over the merits of competing drum filters. He’d watched Tribe fall apart as well, and left Slum Village as a full-time member not only to focus on his solo career, but also to avoid the same outcome between himself and the people he came up with.

  “Sometimes that friction is a lil too much to handle and I was glad that I was a
ble to walk away before ill shit went down like fighting with niggas on some crazy shit. Like I seen from Pharcyde to Tribe to all that shit, you being able to see that shit behind the scenes … I saw that shit about to happen and that’s exactly the path that we were on.”5

  T3 recalled, “[W]e were doing a photo shoot. He pulled me aside and he was like, ‘Yo, 3, man, I think y’all got this. Y’all can handle this, y’all don’t need me for this, man. I’ve got some other stuff I want to do,’ or whatever … I wasn’t mad—even though I was kind of mad—but I gotta respect the man who was up front and honest with me.”6

  There was also the matter of the mysterious circumstances surrounding the creation of Janet Jackson’s 1997 single “Got Til It’s Gone.” While production is credited to Jackson and her frequent songwriting partners Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the song features all the hallmarks of Ummah-era J Dilla, from the gurgly bass and keys to the crack of the snare and the Q-Tip rap break, leaving some questions regarding who actually produced the track.

  Dilla, for his part, tried to remain diplomatic: “That doesn’t sound like a Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis beat, not to say any names, but it just doesn’t sound like it. I know they couldn’t have done it. Why is Q-Tip rapping on it, it sounds like a Tribe beat. We all had an input into that, me, Tip and Ali. In this game there’s cats coming up producing and have had joints come out and [their] name is not on it. It’s all good, it’s all good. In the end you just gotta stay focused.”7 Still, when it came time to do the remix, he couldn’t help himself. He turned up the low frequencies, filtered the organ, packed on the kick drum notes and made the snare extra dry, all of his trademark maneuvers. He called it the “Ummah Jay Dee’s Revenge Mix.”