Sound Lesson 4: Dilla's Donuts

I've been noticing more and more Hiphop artists playing with the concept of art taking on its own life independent from the life of the artist. While Vaughn Bode constructed a self-sustaining world of mystical wizards, lizards, and bodacious women that enchanted bombers worldwide, J Dilla (born James Yancey) produced a resonant universe crafted out of disparate musical histories that aggressively calls the listener to fall deep into his own sonic world.

While struggling to survive in a hospital bed in '05 and '06 with the debilitating immune condition, lupus, J Dilla gathered the courage to leave behind his best album, Donuts. Dilla worked bedside with musical equipment brought by his mother. Each of the 31 tracks he completed do not last much longer than a minute reflecting Dilla's failing endurance yet resilient devotion to tie together his final aesthetic vision.

While listening more carefully to Donuts and unraveling some of its layered mysteries, I realized that Dilla was trying to come to terms with his own death on the approaching horizon. Some of the cryptic code offers itself to us listeners.

As if peacefully saying goodbye to the terrestrial and firmly implanting himself into the everlasting through his art, Donuts begins with the 'outro' and ends with the "Donuts (Intro.)" Adding to the spiritual quality of the album, the finale 'intro' aims towards Dilla's own apotheosis by employing a sample of one-hit wonder Motherlode's 1969 pop hit, "When I die."

The heartfelt soul jam addressed to a distant lover is propelled by serene percussion that drives Motherlode to chant in harmony during the chorus, "When I die / I hope I'll be / The kind of man that you thought I'd be." In the concluding 'intro' Dilla strategically chops up Motherlode's chorus to elevate the self-proclaiming "be," intertwined only twice with the parallel concept "die," which is manipulated into near incomprehension, as Dilla deconstructs the notions of being and death into their pure sonic elements of feeling.

Facing death head on, Dilla elongates Motherlode's vocals into a celestial proclamation, emphasizing not only the beauty of life but even his own oncoming second life, as he dissipates into becoming, and finally being, the music itself. As a last memory, Dilla aligns himself with a long lasting history of musicians who have passed but continue to live on in the hearts of all who remember.

Intro J Dilla.