Hello again, textual deviants!
This week on Texting, Tomek and I give J Dilla’s Donuts a spin. The two of us bring very different perspectives to this text, as the record is one of Tomek’s all-time favorites but I had never listened to it before I began to prepare for our broadcast. Whatever your own level of familiarity with Donuts may be, we hope you will find our chat as tasty as a box of Original Glazed from Krispy Kreme.
Much of our discussion centers around the question of definition. How can we adequately describe or categorize Dilla’s most celebrated album? Like David Bowie’s Blackstar, it is a kind of “swan song” (I wish I had used that phrase in the pod!) in that it was produced as the artist struggled against his own mortality and was his final artistic statement. But what was it exactly that the famous Detroit hip hop producer and beatmaker created while on his deathbed? Is Donuts a kind of sonic “collage,” a “pastiche,” a “tone poem,” a “punk soul symphony” (give Tomek credit for that one) , an orchestral “suite,” an anthology of “miniatures”? Is it “party music” for the masses or a “headphone album” made exclusively for the connoisseur? I eventually decided that Dilla’s samples of samples should be called “audio dim sum.” Does it make sense?
Also relevant to the discussion of Donuts is the concept of the “ring composition,” whereby a text ends as it begins and thus seems structurally to be a never-ending loop—rather like a record spinning on a turntable . . . which, when you think about it, looks a bit like a donut, doesn’t it?
The theme of curation is explored as well. I like how Dilla preserves and memorializes snippets of some of his favorite records and makes those snippets his own. I correctly identified a few samples on my first listen: Beastie Boys, Frank Zappa, Stevie Wonder, Wolfman Jack. I thought I heard echoes of others: Dionne Warwick, Jackson 5. But it took some digging online to discover that Dilla was also using a sample of Lou Rawls’ cover of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch.” What a wonderful surprise it was to learn about this track:
Donuts also introduced me to this gem by Godley and Creme’s 10cc:
I furthermore learned, thanks to Tomek, that the most sampled drum break in hip hop history—it features prominently on Donuts as well—is from Mountain’s live Woodstock performance of “Long Red.” Who knew?
How many samples can you identify? What are your favorites?
Next week, our topic will be graffiti, which was requested by friend of the pod Maria S. Do you have any texts you would like us to consider? Let us know!
MW
"Audio Dim Sum"