The myth surrounding Donuts is precisely that: a myth. As the popular legend goes, J Dilla was undergoing treatment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for lupus-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), and, to bide his time, produced the entirety of what would be the final album he released in his lifetime. When the producer born James Dewitt Yancey died at 32, three days after the album’s release and three days after his birthday, publications circulated a rumor that Dilla’s mother had been bringing crates of vinyl to Cedars-Sinai so he could create what is now widely, and rightfully, regarded as his masterpiece. This is the story that went around the press after reporters caught wind that music equipment had been spotted in his hospital room. Stones Throw, under financial duress and aware that a narrative this compelling would lead to increased album sales, never refuted its veracity. But it was erroneous nonetheless.
Hip-hop journalist Dan Charnas, author of the excellent 2022 biography Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, discovered the true story behind the record, thanks to his thorough reporting. In the definitive Dilla book, Charnas reveals that Donuts was largely made on a desktop in Pro Tools; Dilla’s Akai MPC3000, his signature instrument, doesn’t possess the time-stretching features that are heard all over the album. The Detroit native began Donuts as a humble beat tape, at first comprising just 27 tracks with a sub-30-minute runtime. When Stones Throw founder Peanut Butter Wolf expressed reluctance over asking a hospitalized Dilla for new material, the label’s art director, Jeff Jank, proposed a different idea: What if they asked Dilla to expand Donuts, which would give him a solid foundation to start with? It seemed a far less taxing endeavor than making an entirely new album from scratch.
Except Dilla didn’t want to do it himself. “Why don’t y’all do that?” he asked Jank. At the time, Dilla’s central focus was The Shining, what he considered to be the true successor to his 2001 debut, Welcome 2 Detroit, and what would later become a posthumous, feature-heavy album. Jank, under Dilla’s supervision, got to work on what we now know as Donuts. Initially, Jank simply wanted to lengthen the tape, but his work grew more extensive the longer he toiled away at it. “Workinonit,” for instance, began as two discrete tracks that he melded into one. Granted Dilla’s approval and license to treat the beats however he deemed fit, Jank continued down this path. Even after padding the album out, it was still far too short, so Dilla rounded out the tape by giving Jank access to nine additional beats, which arrive near the album’s end. Jank even took the liberty to name the tracks himself, giving them clever labels like “U-Love,” “Two Can Win,” and “The Twister (Huh, What).” Dilla was amused with the titles he came up with, and, one last time, he gave his assent.
Even though Jank helped assemble it, Donuts is a J Dilla production through and through, bearing all the quintessential marks of its maker. There’s the plunderphonic sampledelia, the limping pace unburdened by rigid quantization, and the siren lifted from Mantronix’s “King of the Beats”—a sound he refashioned into something virtually his own, a cheeky nod that he was the king of the beats himself. Ego be damned, Dilla was absolutely right. The man was operating at his creative, collagist apogee. Dionne Warwick and ESG sit comfortably with Frank Zappa and the Sylvers; 10cc and Stevie Wonder coexist among Run-DMC and Kool & the Gang; and even a jingle for a 1959 cosmetics commercial gets refurbished into an entire track named “Lightworks.” He may have begun as an emcee, performing in Slum Village—the trio he started with his high school pals—but it was clear from the outset that Dilla’s greatest gifts lay in beat-making, a talent that future collaborator and fellow Ummah member Q-Tip urged him to pursue.
Within the span of a decade, Dilla crafted beats for the Pharcyde, Erykah Badu, the Roots, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, D’Angelo, De La Soul, and many, many other influential artists. He would become a core part of two artistic collectives, the Soulquarians and the Ummah, the latter of which being a production-centric group named after the Arabic word for “brotherhood.” It’s an impressive portfolio, one that displays Dilla’s penchant for jazzy R&B and hip-hop that he helped to define in his wake. This was in large part thanks to his loose approach to programming drums, which sit within the pocket but just a fraction of a second either behind or ahead of the beat. The result is a stumbling cadence that never feels completely out of control, flowy and tight all at once. He followed the beat of his own (synthesized) drum, going so far as to even disable the quantization feature on his MPC. All of this is to say that Donuts plays like the culmination of all that Dilla had come to pioneer in the time leading up to its completion. It’s a victory lap for one of the most important producers of the 21st century, an auteur whose imprint on hip-hop is still deeply felt to this day in cutting-edge, contemporary rappers like MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, and Navy Blue.
Listening to Donuts today only reaffirms its timelessness: in Dilla’s experiments with tempo, in its decade-spanning samples, in its aural hall of mirrors, in its enduring impact on music writ large. The woozy Jackson 5 guitars coursing through “Time: the Donut of the Heart,” chopped and sped up, lend a romantic yearning to spoken vocals from Sweet Charles Sherrell, which come and go like a speckle of dust, a fragment of a memory now lost forever. On “Glazed,” a brassy funk beat loops like a needle hitting a bump in a vinyl groove, its performers locked in perpetual motion. Jadakiss’ opening inquiry on “Stop,” manipulated and erratic, falters over itself until Dionne Warwick’s velvety voice guides the track toward a reprieve with a mantra that’s simultaneously soothing and melancholy: “You’re gonna want me back in your arms, you’re gonna need me one day.” In one of the album’s most affecting moments, Dilla samples a 1974 track from the Escorts for “Don’t Cry,” its chiming glockenspiel and choral tapestry a stirring tribute to his mother, as his close friend and fellow Soulquarian Questlove stated years after its release.
For Dilla himself, Donuts was likely something of an afterthought, a secondary concern that came after his main focus, The Shining. But little did he know what this tape would come to accrue: a level of import so significant that it has become shrouded in myth and ignited debates over its origins. He’d handed off his magnum opus, a non-priority, to be edited and sequenced by an employee from his label. Dilla knew he didn’t have much time left in this world, but, just like the way he eschewed the typical rhythms of the 4/4 grid, he has left behind a body of work that defies time itself. Donuts may be an album mistakenly tied to a false legend, yet that fiction underlines something deeper at work here: Dilla, and this album, are legends in and of themselves.
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.