Of Donuts and Drums

          James Yancey, widely known as J Dilla, recorded his final album, Donuts, in a hospital bed. Almost as if the force of artistic endeavor was the only thing keeping his soul attached to his body, he died of complications arising from Systemic Lupus Erythematosus three days after it was released. It seemed like an anti-climactic end for Dilla; he was, after all, your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper’s favorite producer, a man whose endless capacity for sonic innovation and how-the-hell-did-he-do-that creativity placed him in rarified air with such luminaries as Hendrix and Coltrane, and whose immaculate sense of rhythm and timing put him in the company of Max Roach and Ginger Baker. He was a man whose vast contributions to music seemed to demand a grand final statement.

            Instead, he named the album after a piece of frosted fried dough with a hole in the center. Donuts doesn’t seem, well… significant enough, at least not at first. Perhaps it’s because there’s no gravelly voice speaking directly to the listener from beyond the grave, like in Johnny Cash’s posthumously-issued American recordings, or because there are no cathartic solos seeming to break free from the constraints of gravity like in Coltrane’s last records. Perhaps it’s because there are no lyrical insights about mortality and life; in fact, there are no lyrics at all except for a few ad-libs, just instrumentals that Dilla made by chopping up samples from his record collection on his Boss SP-303 sampler. Some reviewers and even more internet trolls have argued that Donuts seems like nothing more than one of the many beat tapes Dilla made throughout his career—just a collection of beats and nothing more.

            But it’s more likely that the title throws people. After Dilla’s death, his record company, Stone’s Throw, issued a statement that read: “Easy explanation: Dilla likes donuts,” presumably in a preemptive strike against anyone searching for deeper meaning in the title. But the glibness of this statement hardly seems fair. The word “donut” does not seen like a fitting capstone to an artist’s life; in fact, breakfast foods, more so than most things, seem impossibly, terribly insignificant in the face of death. The void swallows donuts the way a baleen whale swallows krill, the idea that someone would use their final earthly work to express their love for a snack that is so temporary and so high in trans fat is, to say the least, a disquieting notion. Who makes an album on their deathbed and names it after a breakfast pastry? And, more importantly, why? Aren’t there more important things than donuts?

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As with most questions regarding music, the answer begins with the drums. Every vinyl copy of Donuts comes bearing a sticker on the shrink wrap bearing the following endorsement from Kanye West: “Jay Dee is a drum god. His drums can’t be topped.” Coming from someone as talented (and egotistical) as Mr. West, a compliment of such a religious nature carries a great deal of weight. It is also entirely accurate. Dilla’s drums are completely, utterly, irrevocably bangin.’

Dilla sampled the drums on Donuts, meaning that he used a sampler machine hooked up to a record player to grab sonic snapshots of each drum hit from the record on the turntable. Sampling is a science in and of itself. Once captured, the drum hits (think of them as a photographer’s negatives), are processed and EQ’d (much in the same way as a photographer performs color correction in his darkroom), and assigned to different pads on the sampler. Then, they are pasted together into a brand-new drumbeat by playing the different pads, creating a kind of percussive collage.

In order to understand the collage, you have to examine the individual pictures, the way Dilla’s individual drums sound by themselves, completely divorced from the context of rhythm and time. It’s as if Dilla tuned his drums to some ancient frequency sympathetic to bone marrow. They have the power to get under skin, to reverberate and ring through the rib cage all the way through the skeleton until they become a part of the body’s natural rhythm in all its polyrhythmic complexity—a second heartbeat thumping along, joining the first.

The visceral, body-moving power of Dilla’s drums is surprising, because they’re not actually that loud. Whereas some hip-hop producers EQ their snares and their kicks cartoonishly loud (all the better to make windows rattle and asses shake), Dilla keeps things subtle, and it is through this subtlety that his drums gain power. There are many threads on internet forums full of dudes arguing about how Dilla got his drum sound, and (like most people who argue on the internet) their efforts are futile because the way he found new timbres within his samples goes beyond machinery. They sound less like drums and more like brief smears of color in the sand, here one second and gone the next.

This may seem like an obvious thing to say, but sounds have the power to evoke images and feelings. Often, drum sounds evoke images of, well, drums. Not on Donuts. Let’s just foucs on the kick drum for a second. On “Workinonit,” it sounds like a four-hundred pound dude in a velour track jacket taking an uppercut to the gut from an MMA fighter. On “Geek Down” it sounds like a seven-foot tall man in a trench coat knocking at your door well after midnight. On “Hi,” it sounds like a giant blowing a kiss, and on “Bye,” it sounds like a hundred-foot wide bubble just as it breaks the surface of the ocean. On “Last Donut of the Night,” it sounds like a young man’s heart trying not to break. But more often than not, though, the sound of Dilla’s drums evokes something nameless, one of those in-between emotions that we really don’t have a name for. Dilla didn’t have to rap on Donuts, because his drums sometimes take you places words can’t.

But the thing is, drums don’t last. They’re ruthless. They hit you one moment and make your whole body vibrate, and then they’re gone, leaving you waiting in limbo like a desperate lover in the space between boom and bap, biting your nails and looking at the clock until the next swatch of color washes over you.

Dilla’s drums are not drums but brief moments of utter, ephemeral perfection. They are here and then they are gone, but in that brief window of time where the drumhead is vibrating and sending wiggling air molecules into your ear drum, everything feels right with the world. Played loud enough, they knock everything out of your head, shutting down every part of your brain except for the part of the brainstem responsible for head-nodding and the part of the cerebral cortex responsible for making you say damn, this sounds good.

In that sense, the act of hearing the individual drum sounds on Donuts is not unlike the act of, well, eating a donut. It is nearly impossible to feel anything but joy or to think about anything but donuts during the donut-consumption process. For about a minute (or, for this music critic, around twenty seconds), all is well in the world. You have to really, really, work hard at it if you want to feel hate, anger, or sadness when you have chocolate frosting on your lips.

And Dilla arranged his donuts in an artful manner, too. Unlike most hip-hop producers, Dilla did not quantize his drums on Donuts. Quantization is essentially a process that takes human error out of making music. Basically, the artist sets a tempo using a machine or software, and this tempo becomes a grid of subdivisions: eighth notes, sixteenth-notes, dotted quarters, etc. The artist plays the track, and then the quantization program takes all of the notes and lines them up perfectly against the grid of subdivisions. Everything is therefore perfect—not a note early or late. This is why most drum tracks on hip-hop songs sound so relentlessly squeaky-clean. 

By comparison, Dilla’s beats are dirty. They’re off-kilter, lilting, and highly imperfect, all on purpose. Dilla programs drums like Theolonius Monk trapped in a break-beat drummer’s body. Just like the way Monk had a habit of playing melodies where every note seemed like it was in the wrong spot until the end, where he tied it all together and made all the wrong notes seem right in retrospect, Dilla turned his quantizer off and constructed drum beats that are completely wrong but oh-so right. 

For example, peep the stuttering sixteenth note hi-hat pattern on “Last Donut of the Night,” the way it freezes for a second on the “e” of the second beat, then comes in just a hair late on the “and.” It sounds incorrect, like a fourteen year-old drummer with a really nice kit getting nervous and falling apart at a recital. Given that the bass drum sounds like a beating heart (and cops the heart’s four-four, thump-thump, thump-thump rhythm), the end effect is that the whole track sounds a little bit like a heart murmur.

But the murmur keeps going, on a loop. Unlike Monk, who (usually) tied his splay-fingered chords together somehow, Dilla just lets the wrongness ride. He never succumbs to the desire for neatness, preferring to allow the drums to keep landing in the exact same wrong spot every measure. After awhile, the brain adapts and adopts Dilla’s skewed sense of time. Wrong becomes normal and normal becomes right, and though all the imperfections, all the hiccupping hi-hats and late snares (and possibly even phone calls from doctors bearing bad news) still seem wrong, they somehow still make sense when considered as an overall groove. Eventually, once the groove takes hold, it quickly becomes apparent that Dilla isn’t even wrong at all— he just has a more intimate understanding of the no-man’s-land between sixteenth notes than we’re used to.

To hear a Dilla beat is to hear fleeting moments of perfection arranged imperfectly; thus, to hear a Dilla beat is to hear life in all of its glorious, irregular, temporary beauty.

And, sadly, Donuts is temporary, too: it has thirty-one bite-sized tracks, one for each year of Dilla’s life, and all of them are over too soon. Dilla’s beats are the kind you could listen to for hours, but none of the tracks on Donuts last longer than three minutes, and most are done in fewer than two. They’re here and gone, and before you can blink an eye all four sides of the double-LP are done and it’s over, but it’s beautiful while it lasts.

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So, to return to the original question: “Why would anyone name their last album after a breakfast pastry?” I think the answer is that Dilla loved donuts, just like the record company said. But that’s not actually a simple answer. Life is filled with all sorts of unpleasant things: (lupus, taxes, cancer, light beer, car accidents, etc), but it’s also filled with donuts and drum breaks, those brief moments where everything is all right. So, to love donuts is not just to enjoy the taste of jelly-filled pastries but to acknowledge that however brutish and short life might seem, it will always—even in the face of death—be worthwhile. Even during rough times when pastries and snare rolls are few and far between, the few good moments still redeem all of the rough patches. They might be temporary, but hey, life is temporary. The bass drum is still gonna hit on the downbeat, even if it’s a little bit late, and things are gonna be all right—well, maybe they won’t be all right, but they’ll at least make sense—again by the next measure. Just wait for the beat to drop.