J Dilla's Donuts (33 1/3) Read online

  DONUTS

  Praise for the series:

  It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review

  Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone

  One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut

  These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice

  A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK)

  Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon

  Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype

  [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK)

  We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork

  For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com

  and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/musicandsoundstudies

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  For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

  Forthcoming in the series:

  Smile by Luis Sanchez

  Biophilia by Nicola Dibben

  Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

  The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

  Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Mike Foley

  Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

  Live Through This by Anwyn Crawford

  My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

  Dangerous by Susan Fast

  Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold

  Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

  Sigur Ros: ( ) by Ethan Hayden

  and many more …

  Donuts

  Jordan Ferguson

  Track Listing

  1. “Donuts (Outro)” (0:11)

  2. “Workinonit” (2:57)

  3. “Waves” (1:38)

  4. “Light My Fire” (0:35)

  5. “The New” (0:49)

  6. “Stop” (1:39)

  7. “People” (1:24)

  8. “The Diff’rence” (1:52)

  9. “Mash” (1:31)

  10. “Time: The Donut of the Heart” (1:38)

  11. “Glazed” (1:21)

  12. “Airworks” (1:44)

  13. “Lightworks” (1:55)

  14. “Stepson of the Clapper” (1:01)

  15. “The Twister (Huh, What)” (1:16)

  16. “One Eleven” (1:11)

  17. “Two Can Win” (1:47)

  18. “Don’t Cry” (1:59)

  19. “Anti-American Graffiti” (1:53)

  20. “Geek Down” (1:19)

  21. “Thunder” (0:54)

  22. “Gobstopper” (1:05)

  23. “One for Ghost” (1:18)

  24. “Dilla Says Go” (1:16)

  25. “Walkinonit” (1:15)

  26. “The Factory” (1:23)

  27. “U-Love” (1:00)

  28. “Hi.” (1:16)

  29. “Bye.” (1:27)

  30. “Last Donut of the Night” (1:39)

  31. “Welcome to the Show”(1:12)

  Contents

  Track Listing

  Acknowledgments

  Welcome to the Show

  The Diff’rence

  Hi

  Waves

  Stop!

  The Twister (Huh, What)

  Workinonit

  Two Can Win

  Geek Down

  The New

  Bye

  Endnotes

  Works Cited

  Acknowledgments

  This book owes its existence to David Barker, whose championing of the open submission process for the 33 1/3 series kept the door open long enough for me to stumble through. Special thanks as well to Ally Jane Grossan and Kaitlin Fontana for shepherding the series into a new era of continued success, and for handling my occasional panicked emails with calm and poise.

  For their patience, insight, assistance, and, above all, time, thank you to: Jeff Jank, Eothen Alapatt, Freddy Anzures, Khaiam Dar, Jay Hodgson, House Shoes, Linda Hutcheon, Chris Manak, Ronnie Reese, J. Rocc, Joseph Schloss, Les Seaforth, Waajeed, Dean van Nguyen, and R. J. Wheaton.

  For general support and sanity maintenance, thank you to Greg Atkinson, Glenn Evans, Melanie Correia, Chris Kozak, Jeff Meloche, the crews at YD 286 and HHK Toronto, the Toronto Public Library, and, my parents, Danny and Kathy Ferguson.

  Raise it up for Ma Dukes.

  Caitlin MacKinnon did the work.

  Nicole Bryant kept the faith.

  Sarah Jacobs saw it through.

  Welcome to the Show

  The Cedars-Sinai Medical Center makes for an unlikely and unassuming hip-hop landmark. Located in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, the building is nevertheless a monument on the topography of hip-hop tragedies. In 1994, NWA founder Eric ‘Eazy-E’ Wright died there from complications brought on by AIDS. Three years later, staff at Cedars-Sinai pronounced Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G., dead on arrival after suffering four gunshot wounds in a drive-by shooting as he left a party at the nearby Petersen Automotive Museum. Kanye West received reconstructive surgeries following a 2004 auto collision. A year before doctors repaired West’s jaw, Anthony Berkeley, known as the rapper Too Poetic and a founding member of the underground supergroup Gravediggaz, succumbed to colon cancer there, addressing his condition on the group’s final album. Cedars has been name-checked in lyrics from Tyler the Creator, Slaughterhouse and Kool Keith. But, despite the hospital’s role in some of the music’s most tragic endings, Cedars-Sinai was also the site of completion for some of the weirdest, most beautiful and influential music the genre has ever seen.

  In 2005, 31-year-old rapper/producer James J Dilla Yancey underwent treatment at Cedars-Sinai for complications brought on by a pair of autoimmune disorders: thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), a condition that causes microscopic clots to form in the body’s blood vessels; and a form of lupus, which leaves the body unable to distinguish between healthy and damaged tissue. The combination of the two would leave him dead within a year.

  Lupus is a monstrous disease, causing the body to essentially become allergic to itself: “Immunologically speaking, it is the opposite of what happens in cancer or AIDS. In lupus, the body overreacts to an unknown stimulus and makes too many antibodies, or proteins directed against body tissue.”1 Coupled with TTP, the pair formed a brutal tag-team of ailments that damaged Dilla’s kidneys and left the joints in his hands swollen and stiff, particularly cruel punishments for a man who spent his life flipping through stacks of records and tapping out beats on the pads of a sampler. Intensely private, he played down his condition in the hip-hop press, referring to it as “this lil illness,” and that he was in “A-1 health and everything.” He chalked it up to malnutrition from eating poorly overseas.2 Even friends who came to see him in Cedars-Sinai didn’t ask too many questions: “I poker faced it,” said Michael “House Shoes” Buchanan, who was a longtime friend of Dilla’s back in Detroit, where they both grew
up. “It was hard as hell.”3 But while the illness debilitated his body, his mind remained sharp, still dreaming up sounds that demanded to be shared with the world.

  Fans and followers know the story well: despite his own body holding him hostage, J Dilla refused to go quietly; if he had to go, he was going to make sure he left heads bobbing. With a makeshift recording setup in his hospital room, a stack of records and a laptop, he marshaled every last bit of strength in his weakened frame, forcing his stiffened fingers to create the sounds he heard in his mind. The result: a collection of 31 tracks that would forever change the way beatmakers view their art form, named after a favorite food he could no longer eat.

  J Dilla’s Donuts is not hip-hop music. Not as “hip-hop music,” is typically defined and understood. There are no raps, no hooks, no skits, no songs longer than 3 minutes; most clock in at a minute and a half. There are beats, yes; there are scratches and samples too, some of which will be very familiar to hip-hop enthusiasts. But none of the music on the album ever resolves itself; resolution seems to be the last thing desired. Songs careen and crash into each other, starting and stopping without warning, never giving a listener the opportunity to fully enter them; just when you’re getting comfortable, as you familiarize yourself with the elements in front of you and align your perspective to the workings of Dilla’s mind, he flips it on you. For a man who loved to frequently master and switch musical styles, Donuts acts as a document of his career in miniature. The original press release for the album likened it to scanning radio stations in an unfamiliar city, a perfect description if the station’s program director were playing half-broken 45s found buried out back of the building. The soulful vocal melodies of The Jacksons, Dionne Warwick and The Isley Brothers are scratched, chopped, pulled and mutated into stunning, indecipherable aural pastiches. Tempos shift gears without warning; time stretches and morphs, leaving the listener disoriented. The atmosphere can shift from sexy and lush string arrangements to aggressive, obnoxious horn loops and sinister, futurist synths, all within a five-minute span, the only constants the crackly static of a needle in the groove, and the alarm blast of a siren.

  James Yancey had been many things by 2005: John Doe, DJ Silk, Jay Dee, Dilla Dawg; a member of 1st Down, Slum Village, The Ummah, The Soulquarians, and Jaylib; the Motor City’s neglected son and Los Angeles’s conquering hero. His productions for A Tribe Called Quest, The Pharcyde, Common, Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson had made him legendary among those in the industry and fans paying attention. But major label frustrations and a refusal to take large paydays for work he wasn’t passionate about had driven him back underground, working with a trusted crew of MCs and other collaborators, many of whom he came up with in Detroit. His sound was equally mutable: setting aside the syrupy basslines and crispy snares he innovated and perfected throughout the 1990s in favor of the live instrumentation, electro-influence and world sounds of his solo debut Welcome 2 Detroit, and the lo-fi grime found on the Ruff Draft EP and Champion Sound, his collaboration with L.A.-based producer Madlib.

  “He was always constantly reinventing himself, on a monthly basis,” recalled House Shoes, a DJ who met Dilla at Detroit’s Street Corner Music in the mid-90s and became one of his most ardent local supporters. “You know, the batch [of beats] you get this month didn’t sound nothing like the batch you got last month, didn’t sound nothing like the batch you got the month before that.”4

  As the beats that would eventually form Donuts began to circulate, listeners discovered Dilla had opted to go in yet another direction, a synthesis of everything he had done to that point, taking the electro weirdness he’d favored earlier in the decade, combining it with the rare groove sensibilities of his 90s work, blending it with the soul revivalism found in the music of chart-topping producers like Kanye West or Just Blaze, and slicing, chopping and reworking it into a sound singularly his own.

  “When I heard all that together in the way he actually wanted it to come out, I was like, Fuck me, man. These last couple years has completely flipped music on its head once again,” said Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, former General Manager for Stones Throw Records, the Los Angeles-based label that would eventually release Donuts. “There’s no way anybody’s gonna know what to do with this. It was so astronomically different from everything that everybody had tried to do with that source material.”5

  All as Dilla’s health continued to decline.

  Despite sounding jarring and scattershot, Donuts is a deceptively unified album, a work that challenges and confronts expectations, designed to be listened to in its entirety: a rarity in a genre not known for being album-oriented. As Dilla told an interviewer in 2005, in maybe the only public comment he made on the album before his death, “It’s just a compilation of the stuff I thought was a little too much for the MCs. That’s basically what it is, ya know? Me flipping records that people really don’t know how to rap on but they want to rap on.”6

  Donuts was never meant for you. It was never meant for me. It’s a private and personal record, a conversation between an artist and his instrument, which just happens to be the history of recorded music. It’s the final testament of a man coming to terms with his mortality; a last love letter to his family and the people he cared about. It’s clearly a record about death; the evidence found in its rebus of samples, sequencing and song titles leaves little doubt of that.

  More puzzling, though, is why a producer continually heralded for his ability to find the best part of a record, to pinpoint the prime cut of a song and loop it into a slice of headknocking perfection, when faced with the end of his life, would produce a final work as beautiful yet intimidating and confrontational as Donuts. Dilla never made mistakes; friends and colleagues say he would have a beat assembled in his head before he even turned the sampler on. Nothing was stumbled upon in the studio; frankly, his health didn’t allow him the time for, or luxury of, discovery. As a prolific producer and dedicated fan with a voracious appetite for the history and mechanics of the music he loved, he knew the records that went into constructing Donuts inside and out. If it’s accepted that Dilla made his final work a record about death, the question becomes, why did he make this record about death?

  The Diff’rence

  Despite being historically one of the major centers of black culture in America, hip-hop came late to Detroit. In the mid 70s and early 80s, the sound of Motown wasn’t the party grooves of The Sugarhill Gang or Kurtis Blow, but the pulsing synths and thudding 808s of Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock, brought to the airwaves by freeform radio legends such as Jeff “The Wizard” Mills and Charles Johnson, professionally known as The Electrifying Mojo.

  Mojo’s five-hour program on WJLB, “The Mothership Connection,” refused to be constrained by what was traditionally considered “black radio.” In a typical night, listeners could hear New Order, Prince, The J. Geils Band and Parliament-Funkadelic, often in the same block of songs. His eclectic tastes and bold programming decisions had a lasting influence on listeners, including three teenagers from the suburbs named Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, who would come together to eventually create the genre of techno.

  “Mojo really had a lot of impact on music in Detroit. He used to play a lot of German and British imports. The first place I heard Kraftwerk was on his show, in 78 or 79. He’d play anything from the B-52s to Jimi Hendrix to Kraftwerk, Peter Frampton … all kinds of stuff,” said Atkins. “He played all the Parliament and Funkadelic that anybody ever wanted to hear. Those two groups were really big in Detroit at the time. In fact, they were one of the main reasons why disco didn’t really grab hold in Detroit in 79. Mojo used to play a lot of funk just to be different from all the other stations that had gone over to disco. When [Funkadelic’s ‘Not Just] Knee Deep’ came out, that just put the last nail in the coffin of disco music.”1

  Across the dial on WDRQ (and eventually snagging Mojo’s spot on WJLB after he left the station) The Wizard took Mojo’s encyclopedic musical knowledge and t
urbo-boosted it, his nightly mixes blending records at whirlwind speed across three turntables, usually only for seconds at a time. Mills attributed his innovative style as a reaction to the realities of radio broadcasting.

  “Some people might say I mix very fast, from one record to another. That basically came from radio. I had to keep the people’s attention for a very short time, because otherwise they’d flip the channel to another station. I would have to keep the pace moving.”2

  Even after the realities of radio consolidation and mandated playlists drove Mills and Mojo from the airwaves by the late 1980s, their influence would be felt for years afterward, creating a culture of dance music in Detroit centered on minimalism, where the DJ, not the MC, was the featured attraction.

  This isn’t to say rap music was completely absent from Detroit’s airwaves during the 1980s. The Scene, a popular local dance show that aired at 6:00 p.m. daily on WGPR-TV, America’s first wholly black-owned television station, made a hit of its theme song, “Flamethrower Rap” by Felix and Jarvis, and featured battles between area crews in its “Rap-A-Dance” segments. By the end of the decade, aspiring MCs who grew up watching The Scene and listening to “Billy T’s Basement Tapes” on WGPR’s radio affiliate, brought the tempos down and spoke to their experiences. Artists like Awesome Dre, Kaos & Mystro, Smiley, and Detroit’s Most Wanted began to carve out the city’s hip-hop identity, reaching an early peak with the success of MC Breed’s “Ain’t No Future in Your Frontin’.” A hybrid of Midwest swagger and traditionally West Coast sample sources (“Funky Worm,” by The Ohio Players, and Zapp and Roger’s “More Bounce to the Ounce”) the success of the single kept his debut album on the Billboard R&B charts for an impressive 52 weeks.3 Despite the magnitude of his success, though, Detroit still couldn’t claim a national breakthrough for itself: Breed was from neighboring Flint, Michigan.

  To the eyes of the world, the story coming out of Detroit wasn’t hip-hop, it was techno, and within the city limits divisions of taste and class were being drawn. The success of techno overseas and the acclaim for its founding fathers (the “Belleville Three” of Atkins, Saunderson, and May) ensured most club spots were dedicated to the new dance sound of the city, to the exclusion of everything else: “Some flyers from early techno dance events had explicitly banned ‘jits,’ a derogatory term for undesirable elements from Detroit’s black working class youth. Of course, these same supposed undesirables were some of the same youth that turned to hip hop. But at local dance clubs like the famous Music Institute in downtown Detroit … this classist stance against hip hop culture spilled on to the dance floor: no rap was tolerated.”4