J DILLA
Produced by J Dilla
Released February 7, 2006
Two months ago, I spent several postings musing over the concept of what a "song" may or may not happen to be and what "performance pieces" may or may not happen to be. And here I am, returning to that topic again because what are "songs" and "performance pieces" to mean in the world of hip-hop? Even moreso, perhaps what I am thinking about is something even grander. What is "music" itself if there are no composers in the traditional sense? And then, what does it mean to "compose," especially when much of the material utilized in the music is pre-existing and originated by completely different artists? What does it mean to be a "musician" especially if the individual in question does not play any instruments?
I have struggled with the legitimacy of hip-hop for much of my life, and in some ways, I still do but albeit for completely different reasons at this stage and frankly, would be worthy of a completely different posting...but I digress...
On this site, and I believe somewhere in it's debut month of April 2013, I wrote about my tentative relationship with hip-hop and rap music but I will give you the shorthand version for the purposes of this new posting. I will forever treasure the sheer rapture of hearing The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" (released September 16, 1979) while riding the bus to school. It was as if the Earth shifted from its primary axis. I further remember my complete rejection of the music during my adolescence, an excessively harsh stance that I now freely admit to being needlessly vehement. Even so, and aside from wanting to fit in with my group of friends, I rejected rap music and hip-hop because, being a drummer, I could not see or understand or could even be bothered to try and find the validity in something which seemed to contain no actual "music." As far as the skill of the rapping itself, something which I also rejected, I can recall some comedian I saw on television who once joked, "If all you have to do to rap is put together words and rhyme, then Dr. Suess is the baddest rapper who ever lived!"
It all felt like some kind of bizarre cosmic joke being played on music itself, that slowly but surely, this genre filled with what sounded to be like the endless and the emptiest of boasting laid on top of synthetic beats and musical snippets from real musicians--the process of "sampling," a process which felt like nothing less than theft to me--was overtaking what I had considered to be real music. Yet, by my college years, when rap and hip-hop was just really beginning to become the dominant force in popular music, my perceptions changed dramatically with the arrival of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, the incredible and seemingly endless inventiveness of Producer Prince Paul and of course, the untouchable and iconic album "Fear Of A Black Planet" (released March 20, 1990) by Public Enemy. All of those albums and artists, plus the masterpiece "Endtroducing..." (released November 19, 1996) the instrumental and debut by DJ Shadow, seriously schooled me on understanding the skill and musicality of the lyricism, the poetic dexterity of the rapping, and even elevated the process and techniques of sampling into extraordinarily creative art. It was then that I began, as I must paraphrase from Jedi Master Yoda, to unlearn what I had learned about what music is, is not, could and could not be.
Since those days, the lines between musical genres have been supremely blurred especially within the confines of R&B and soul music. With the arrival of The Roots, Common, Yaslin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), Talib Kweli, Q-Tip, Raphael Saddiq, Lauryn Hill, Bilal and so tremendously with Kanye, West, Erykah Badu and D'Angelo, traditional musicianship and songcraft have been sublimely merged with the aesthetics of hip-hop and rap. DJ/producer/multi-instrumentalist Madlib and his plethora of imagined aliases have blurred those lines between the musical genres of hip-hop, soul, rock and most especially jazz, plus traditional and sampled instrumentation, so intricately and blindingly that it is nearly impossible to even hear where the disparate elements begin and end. And as I listened to all of those aforementioned artists and others, I kept hearing the name J Dilla spoken with such a hushed sense of awe and reverence that my curiosity was piqued to say the least, and now, at long last, I have a sense of who he is and who he was. But I am getting ahead of myself...
If you are already more than knowledgeable about the life and legacy of J Dilla, then you are more than familiar with his legend. I admit, I am extremely late coming to this party but perhaps, I was present but just never realized it. For me, and like Jon Brion and even Georgia Anne Muldrow, J Dilla is yet another of music's greatest secret weapons...again, at least he is to me. I will bet that if I scoured the album credits of quite a number of CDs in my collection, I would indeed find his name as a producer somewhere. The mighty Questlove still speaks of his seismic musical touch so often and Erykah Badu paid glorious tribute to him on the track "Telephone" from her darkly spectacular album "New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)" (released February 26, 2008), but I still had no real idea of who he was. Until now...
Nearly three weeks ago, I purchased J Dilla's album "Donuts" and I have been listening to it repeatedly, compulsively and nearly to the point of obsessively. It is an album that I have picked up and placed down more times than I am able to recall and it is also something that I have perused many times on I-Tunes as well, yet did not make a purchase, perhaps due to the scant length of the songs, if that is indeed what the tracks can be called. You see, "Donuts" is a 31 track instrumental album packed to the gills and beyond with layers upon layers of samples and beats that do not even exist as actual "songs" but ultimately becomes an album that works as a sound collage that could essentially play as an endless loop since the album's first track, entitled "Donuts (Outro)," and the final seconds of the album's final track, entitled "Welcome To The Show," are exactly the same.
What has struck me so powerfully about this album is not necessarily the sheer volume of samples included, which is indeed massive and a bit reminiscent of The Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" (released July 25, 1989), but how J Dilla strung those samples and beats together to create a work that is nostalgic yet ahead of its time, intricate in structure yet allows itself to maintain a certain rawness, soulfully warm yet possesses a streetwise swagger, artfully esoteric and entirely accessible, and mostly and surprisingly, it is a poignant, deeply personal work filled with purpose and power that sums up not only the artistic intent and life of this idiosyncratic musician but is also a meditation upon his then impending mortality.
When I listened to "Donuts" for the very first time, I did already know that J Dilla had passed away in 2006 from cardiac arrest after enduring a lengthy battle with lupus, as well as the rare blood disease Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP). What I did not know was that 29 of the album's 31 tracks were created and completed while Dilla was in the hospital for an extended period and armed with a sampler and record player given to him by friends. The finished album was released to the world on Dilla's birthday and he passed away only three days later. J Dilla was only 32 years old.
That level of information as to the album's impetus and creation has only served to inform the entire listening experience which has grown exponentially each time the CD loops itself back to the beginning. While Dilla certainly is no longer with us to elucidate upon the inspirations and meanings of his selections, everything is entirely left to the listener's interpretation. What has amazed me is how intimate and personal of an album it actually is, especially one that contains no real lyrics and the sounds have been collected from existing sources.
"Donuts" speeds along with a dizzying and entirely intoxicating ebb and flow of styles, genres and compulsively head nodding beats that zig-zag from the supremely soulful, playful (the childlike "Lightworks" sounds like an old television jingle, for instance) and ferociously clever (the track "One Eleven" runs for the duration of exactly one minute and eleven seconds) to the challenging and even disturbing. How Dilla created "Donuts" by manipulating all of this pre-existing music into such a dynamically new format that even the repeated lyrics, choice words and even sounds all feel like subliminal messages from Dilla to the listener, fully expressing his inner state during his illness, is mesmerizing to me. J Dilla's "Donuts" is a headphone album that often feels like an audio movie for the mind.
As the listener is invited to be entertained and enraptured throughout "Donuts," we are also invited and allowed to make any connections that we wish and to embark upon Dilla's harrowing journey with him. Are tracks like "The New" and "The Diff'rence" designed to be selections of self-affirmation proclaiming how he is set miles apart from his contemporaries? Are tracks like "People" and "Glazed," which uses the repeated sound of a horn blast almost like an alarm clock, designed to serve as political warnings to us to "Give peace a chance" because "time is running..." and then the track changes before hearing the word "...out." And you know, as I write and ruminate, maybe those political statements are more directed towards himself. Perhaps to make peace with himself before his time inevitably runs out.
Let's take the album's second track "Workinonit." At first, I smiled from ear to ear because I had recognized Dilla's usage of 10cc's "The Worst Band In The World" as one of that track's many samples. Dilla cuts and restructures the song so that we only hear the words "Play Me" and "Buy Me," obviously an encouragement for listeners to hear Dilla's music. But then, he repeats the phrase "Fade Me" (or was it manipulated to say "Save Me"?) and the song instantly becomes something much darker and more pleading. At the beginning of the track "Stop," Dilla has also restructured and re-edited the words of Jadakiss to ask the question "Is death real?" just as a sampled Dionne Warwick sings, "You're gonna want me back..."
In tracks that become more cacophonous, like "Anti-American Graffiti," which features the voice of an agitated Wolfman Jack exploding with end-of-the-world rantings and "The Twister (Huh, What)," we hear the words "Huh, What?" being asked again and again, thus expressing the state of confusion Dilla must have been experiencing once receiving new diagnoses and enduring more medical procedures. Subsequent listenings have shown me that those words are uttered several times during the album but are not instantly noticeable as they are buried in the mix but when they do suddenly leap out to greet your ears, the effect is sobering, as felt in the aforementioned "One Eleven," which contains a musical sample of "A Legend In Its Own Time" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles that evokes the emotion contained in the piercing sound of crying. Throughout "Donuts," we also hear the sound of what seems to be a siren. During the first sections of the album, we hear the sound occasionally but the siren increases its presence the further the album plays, eventually arriving several songs in a row, perhaps suggesting the state of Dilla's increasingly fading health.
By the final third of “Donuts,” I have increasingly found myself overcome with a heartbreaking heaviness as I think what we are hearing, while not exactly acceptance, is more of a painful acknowledgement of the inevitable. Like Writer/Director Charlie Kaufman's wondrously labyrinthine and emotionally wrenching "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), "Donuts" quickly becomes an album that forces Dilla and all of us to face that final life transition through his own final transition and the effect is voluminous.
"Don't Cry," in which Dilla brilliantly re-arranged the tracks vocals and bass lines, utilizes its repeated refrains of "I can't stand to see you cry," as possible statements from Dilla to his family and friends or vice-versa or both or just to himself. "One For Ghost," with it's sampled lyrics of "She used to take me across the lap and hit me with a strap...when I was bad," seems to wallow not only in Maternal based memories but as Dilla keeps playing "when I was bad" over and over again, it also is consumed with what I think may be regrets of a man who just may be ruminating over past mistakes made. The Maternal presence continues in "Dilla Says Go," perhaps the point in the album in which body and spirit wrestle with becoming detached from each other as the Mother comforts with the words "Baby...it's alright."
Dilla takes us even further to Death's door with "Walkinonit," and with the deeply disturbing track entitled “The Factory,” the siren sound returns but is more distorted and the song's robotic tension merged with the words "It's a factory/it can hurt" makes me think of Dilla strapped to a hospital bed being raced from one procedure to another and attached to all manner of machines. I am forced to think about the final failures of the flesh in the aching and simply titled “Bye” and “Last Donut Of The Night,” in which a stage announcer proclaims "Ladies and gentlemen, for the last time at the Regal...a young man went out and made a name for himself...," Dilla serves us a self-eulogy. And the aforementioned final track, "Welcome To The Show" sends Dilla into the hereafter and then, all the way back to the beginning of the album for one more revolution, perhaps suggesting something deeply philosophical concerning the life cycle itself.
J Dilla's "Donuts" has been hailed by critics and artists as J Dilla's masterpiece, his magnum opus, the finest representation of his art and on repeated listenings, I am compelled to passionately agree. As Questlove writes in his outstanding memoir Mo Meta Blues: The World According To Questlove, the album...
"made people rethink some of their basic assumptions about music, and not just hip hop, but all recorded music-made them go back to the beginning, to the drum, to a unit of measurement, and wonder what constitutes a full work, what's a partial work, what's original, what's borrowed, whether you could take the Jackson 5's "All I Do Is Think Of You," rearrange it so that the intro is located closer to the chorus, and call it a new song. There's a chef's aesthetic at work...There's a daredevil's aesthetic...There's a postmodern critic in there, too...There's a love for the past but also an awareness that the past is destroyed every second by the present, and that the future's laying it wait to wreak more havoc."
Precisely. Absolutely. Definitely.
What is a song or performance piece? What is music and what is composition? J Dilla's "Donuts" forced me to fully re-examine everything I ever really thought about what a composed piece of musical work could actually be as Dilla took everything that came before him and re-contextualized it all so the selections actually do feel like compositions, as the album is so lovingly re-arranged and placed into an order, sequence and presentation that represents a completely singular vision. "Donuts" is an album that feels like we are listening to an imaginary radio station, or even several stations at once, with J Dilla as our DJ and guide, and those classic David Bowie lyrics, in which he sings "I am a DJ/I am what I play," never sounded more prevalent. All of the tools of his fierce creativity were at the fullest of his disposal, from the actual sampled selections, to playing with pitch control, tempo and re-configuring song structure as well. Many tracks consist of just repetitious phrases enlightening us to the fact that Dilla has taken the perceived annoyance of vinyl skipping in its grooves and has found the musical moments that created a sense of mystical magic to him...and now to us!
What are "donuts" but a euphemism of the very records that filled J Dilla's life? Think of all of the "donuts" collected and combined to create this larger "donut" and again, with the album itself being arranged to be played in a continuous loop from beginning to end to beginning again, we are hearing a philosophical musing of the life cycle itself, most specifically one man's experience with the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), all of which are represented and certainly must have weighed more than heavily upon Dilla's spirit while he was creating this work while dying and from the confines of a hospital bed.
"Donuts" is a work of undeniable passion and complete devotion to his craft and art that is fully representative of yet fully transcends the genre of hip hop. It is music the man simply had to make and is essentially a self-portrait, an intimate diary of the final year of his life.
If that does not represent what music and musicianship is, can be and should always aspire towards, then I do not know what else could represent it.
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