My first experience with the name J Dilla was in the summer of 2006. That year, I went to both Pitchfork Music Festival and Lollapalooza. At both festivals, and particularly at Lollapalooza, I saw multitudes of people wearing the same t-shirt. In varying colors, it said in white print: "J Dilla Changed My Life."
There's an interesting story to the origins of the shirt, actually. In December of 2005, German producer DJ Deckstarr was to appear on a bill with Dilla, at Unique Club in Dusseldorf. At the time, Dilla was already in the throes of the blood disease TTP. He was playing shows from a wheelchair, after having for years downplayed the severity of his illness. There was talk that he should stay home, that he shouldn't be globetrotting to play shows.
To hear Deckstarr tell it:
"I have been a hardcore Dilla fan for years ... I can't think of any other artist that was able to touch me with music like he did. I have been waiting for years to get the chance to see this man perform and I was so happy that Dilla would come in December. I was reading all this stuff, "This man should stay at home," and so on. I was thinking to myself, "Why can't these people appreciate what Dilla is doing right now and just support him?" I wanted Dilla to see that it is more than just music and that I support him from the bottom of my heart no matter what, because he has been there for me all these years."
So Deckstarr created his own shirt, white lettering on black print. "J Dilla Changed My Life."
By the following summer, the shirts were near ubiquitous at the Chicago music festivals. And I, unaware, could only ask myself one question: "Who the hell is J Dilla?"
Then I took the time to find out.
He was a man who, back in February, released his final album.
He was a man who, three days after the release of that record, had passed away at the age of 32.
That show in Dusseldorf, where the "J Dilla Changed My Life" shirt first appeared would end up being Dilla's last.
* * *
J Dilla was born James Yancy in 1974 in Detroit, Michigan. And, as cheesy-autobiography-opening-line as that is, it's important to know that before you even listen to a note of Donuts, that final album of his released in February of 2006. Because Donuts is an record that, in a very unique way, spans the breadth-- and breath-- of J Dilla's life. It's also not an album that should be your first introduction to his work. Without digesting not only Dilla's career as a producer, but also Dilla the man, it's almost impossible to hear Donuts the way it was intended.
Progress has always defined Dilla's work. He moved forward, often away from the very things that he had just found commercial success doing. Dilla's style in the mid-to-late '90s was all at once an homage to old-school '80s hip-hop and incredibly futuristic rendition of where the genre could lead. Peep Dilla's work with A Tribe Called Quest, the Pharcyde, the Roots, even Janet Jackson, and what you'll notice across the board are those tape-deck quality drums and simple, memorable melodies that were a direct send-up to rap's roots. But look beyond the surface and you'll start to hear his unique, disruptive and woozy take on sampling, you'll notice how his drums-- sampled and spliced-- seem to lag behind the beat, then try to catch up, then fall back again, inevitably making you put your ear just a little closer to the speaker.
In the early '00s two producers jumped onto the scene, mostly due to their work on Jay-Z's seminal 2002 record The Blueprint. Kanye West and Just Blaze's styles both were hyper-modernizations of the old soul-sampling records that Dilla was doing in the '90s, which were themselves hyper-modernizations of the the hissing tape-deck splices that birthed rap music. What Dilla did when he came up, West and Blaze cannibalized, recontextualized and displayed to the world. But maybe more impressive than that pair's reappropriations of Dilla's sound was the way Dilla himself was doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.
When the new digital techniques of producers like West and Blaze entered the hip-hop producer's lexicon, he not only embraced it, but took it as a challenge. His drums stayed much the same, but his sound palette expanded, and on a record like Common's Electric Circus he had the freedom to go stratospheric and sometimes extraterrestrial with his productions. He found himself taking crazier risks with his samples, layering them upon themselves, splicing them into unrecognizable fragments, then reconstructing the core melody. If the first half-decade of Dilla's work was equal parts homage and progressive, then the last half-decade was categorized by Dilla taking massive risks with his sounds, seeming not to care when-- just like on Electric Circus-- the public didn't quite catch on.
Now take into consideration the man. His work was astounding, but it was the man himself that inspired the ones he worked with-- Erykah Badu, Busta Rhymes, Common-- to call up Maureen Yancy, Dilla's mother, on a regular basis, to check in on Dilla's two daughters. It was the man who, despite his health having been deteriorating since the first days of 2002, traversed Europe, playing shows in a wheelchair, who had his mother massage his fingers in his hospital bed so he could make the beats that would become Donuts. It was the man who wrote in his will to divide up his estate between his mother, his two daughters, and his brother Johnny.
The fact is, you need to know all that to even begin to understand Donuts.
* * *
In an interview for Pitchfork, Roots drummer ?uestlove said this regarding Donuts:
"In 2006, the project that affected me the most was Dilla's swan song. Though I didn't understand it at first. I was thinking it was about how Kanye's the new kid on the block and he's bringing soul samples back so Dilla was trying to say, "Nope, my dick's still bigger than yours, son." But it all seemed to make sense towards the end. I got to talk to him three weeks before he passed, and I was like, "Yo, what was on your mind with Donuts?" He said, "It's a message." I was like, "Hm, OK." Once he left, I started to clearly see all the subliminal messages. Like "Don't Cry", and him mangling the shit out of "Johnny Don't Do It" by 10cc on "Waves"-- that's a message to his brother John."
Those subliminal messages that ?uest talks about are why you need a basic understanding of the man and his music before tackling Donuts. On a first listen, the record can sound garbled, difficult, maybe even aimless or incoherent. It jumps from track to track abruptly, a strange move from such a smooth producer. Only one song on the album eclipses the two minute mark, and most of the 31 tracks pass by in under 90 seconds. It's difficult to get a read on. There are few traditional hooks. Samples, when they're used, are either so long as to border feeling uncomfortable, or so screwed up that they're unrecognizable. Even paying close attention, it's hard not to discard the thing as a discombobulated mess, until you consider just how careful and intentional a craftsman Dilla was.
It's only when you start listening to Donuts in the context of Dilla's life and past-work that the "message" of the record begins to unfold. Then you notice that the inclusion of 31 tracks on the record isn't an arbitrary choice, but rather individually represent one year that Dilla expected to live. Or how all the Motown samples on the record weren't just wonderful throwbacks, but a dedication to his Detroit hometown.
Then you notice how, if you leave the record on repeat, the ending of the last song loops back into the beginning of the first song, allowing Donuts to function literally as a musical circle, a piece with no beginning or end. Then, if you leave just a single song on repeat, you notice that the same damn thing applies. Not only did Dilla create a seamless album, but a seamless infinite loop with each track.
Dilla also used Donuts to talk to his friends and family. As ?uestlove mentioned, the absolute deconstruction of the sample in "Waves" still manages to sound vaguely like an otherworldly voice saying, "Hey, Johnny," as if Dilla could use the track as a ghostly extension of himself, reaching out to his brother after he had gone. Other messages are more direct, like how Yancy uses Dionne Warwick to accurately assert that "You're gonna want me back." Or the entirety of "Don't Cry," where the Escorts' "I Can't Stand (To See You Cry)" plays like a message to everyone listening not to let mourning over Dilla's death consume them.
Then there are the more ambiguous messages. Does the siren noise that periodically shows up throughout Donuts represent the constantly noisy medical equipment that surely surrounded Dilla when he was staying in the hospital? Is the reason for the shortness of the tracks an allegory for the cut-short nature of Dilla's own life? Are there hidden messages to friends and family, as rumors suggest?
Was Donuts "a message" to everyone? To those who could decipher it? Or was it more private, like the man himself?
* * *
I like this story about Dilla, told by Q-Tip, regarding when A Tribe Called Quest's 1996 LP Beats, Rhymes, and Life was nominated for a Grammy:
"I was like, "Yo, this is a good opportunity for you, you should just go." He was like, "Hell no, I ain't going. Fuck that!" I said, "You got nominated for a fucking Grammy. You are going to go." He said, "I ain't got nothing to wear!" But he went. He was so mad and disgruntled and angry about that. He was much happier doing it his way. That's who he was. He didn't really want to fuck with none of that. And I don't blame him."
I like it because it's an accurate representation of James Yancy. It shows the man's desire to stay out of the commercial aspect of his business in how he wanted to avoid what for many is the music industry's biggest night. And it also shows how loyal the man was to the people around him-- loyalty returned over and over again-- in how, at Q-Tip's behest, he still went to the show. But mostly, I like how it illustrates that there was something enigmatic about James Yancy. When people told him he'd been nominated for a Grammy, he was nonplussed. When people told him not to perform in Europe from a wheelchair, he ignored them. When one of his closest friends asked him about his most deeply personal album, he merely replied by calling it "a message."
While knowing the man is the only way to honestly wrap your head around Donuts, the truth is, I don't need to know all of the secrets that the record no doubt contains.
Even without them, J Dilla changed my life.
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