"You're Gonna Want Me Back In Your Arms"
Written: Mar 23 '06 (Updated Mar 27 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: see review
Cons: not really, but see review anyway
The Bottom Line: get it.
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| crypticcradle's Full Review: Donuts [2/7] - Jay Dee aka J. Dilla Movies |
If there was Music, and it was a living, breathing creature, then this past February it shed two tears on its big Polaroid picture album of memories.
As it looked through this book, to the photos of the past 10-15 years, it saw a hip-hop producer in Jay Dee (aka J Dilla) who was one of the few men behind the boards that could make you move, and move you, every single time. It saw photos of a young Jay Dee building with Native Tongue collective The Ummah, and lacing up soul-core beats with drums that tickled your mind and made you bob your head till your neck was out of position for the likes of A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. It saw the young man come into his own with his Detroit post-Motown brand of hip-hop that put his crew, Slum Village, and his area on the hip-hop map for good with “Fantastic Vol. 2”, his own solo effort “Welcome 2 Detroit” and oh, by the way, he took some time out to help Common get his sh*t together and drop his first definably excellent (and to this date, easily his best) album in “Like Water For Chocolate”, producing the vast majority. From there, we see images of him jumping on the Stones Throw bus, building with post-millennial hip-hop wonderchild, Madlib, dropping forward-thinking musical mayhem on their collaborative effort, “Champion Sound”. And them’s just the big highlights. When Music saw them in its book, it first shed a tear of great joy from its right eye.
But out of its left eye, Music then shed a tear of bitter pain, mourning the loss of Jay Dee at the age of 32. Apt as ever, Music’s final photo of Jay Dee is the exact same photo – a plain picture of the man, his whole face obscured by a baseball cap, except a beautiful grin – you see on the cover of his final work, “Donuts”.
Upon the hospital bed where Jay Dee’s body was slowly succumbing to a rare blood disease with other complications, as the Detroit Free Press reported, he worked while literally begging, in his mind, for extra time to complete “Donuts”. This was the album he felt he needed to get in. And not as if that makes “Donuts” any better or worse of a record – I’d much prefer it if he was touring, enjoying a healthy life, and plotting a one-on-one collaboration with Dizzee Rascal right now, and I’d like the album just the same because it’s fantastic – but it does add a little resonance to a song like “Time: The Donut of the Heart”, when you know that that loop, with its slow moving strings, and the carefully chosen whispers, deeply affecting soul-singing and moaning, were decided upon by a man who knew his time was nearly spent, versus someone simply feeling sentimental at the time. Yet, if you forget that “Donuts” comes from any unusual, sad circumstances, it will be great, and unsurprisingly so, coming from J Dilla and Stones Throw, an artist and label known for bringing such greatness to the masses.
That being said, “Donuts” is a 31 track, 43 minute effort that could well be considered Jay Dee’s magnum opus besides being his parting shot. Each “donut”, or brief instrumental, shows-off a different aspect of Jay Dee’s range as a producer, going from his soul base outward to the less seen, prog-minded side of the legend. And each instrumental can hold up on its own as Dilla packs each with sound and ideas, using a deft ear for mashing spoken, sung, moaned vocals to slickly layered loops, and his mixing and chopping skills are fully exhibited in glorious fashion. But it’s the whole that these small instrumentals create that will blow you back and have you groovin’ and smilin’ like hip-hop can get you to do when it breaks out of our atmosphere and holds hands with the stars.
An odd but invigorating combination of car engine “vroooom”s, sinister guitar picks, and silly vocals singing “Workinonit!” bring in the opening, and easily the longest donut, ummm, “Workinonit”. This is Dilla’s tune-up, but more than that, as he must weave somewhere in the ballpark of 10-15 samples in and out of the mix, fidgeting with the sound like the world’s top chemist going into the lab sans a plan, though thinking it’d be great if the end result made us all live forever. Oh, and it works to wonderful effect; this track intrigues the mind and whets your appetite for all you’re about to hear.
One of the truly lasting sentiments one can gather from this album is that Jay Dee didn’t just make music, dig through music to find his music, but that he truly cherished music. He strings together and blends his sounds, not with respect, but with adoration for them. The way he mixes together chorus after chorus of a vintage soul crooning of, “C’mon baby, light my fire!”, over various chopped, enthusiastically spoken samples on “Light My Fire”, lets you not just understand, but feel this love for music until it sets your soul out of whack. Same can be said for the disparate elements of a Jadakiss vocal sample scratched-in to a bombastic female soul chorus and a dreamy woodwinds on “Stop”, showing you the depth of Dilla as a listener as well as a musician.
As Jay Dee possesses multi-dimensional talent behind the boards, “Donuts” shows the spectrum that he could work within, making for an undoubtedly lasting experience. Not only do you have those tracks built upon Dilla’s best natural soul and hip-hop loops, but you have transitions into an outer realm that might hint at the influence Madlib had on his music in the latter stages of his career. “Lightworks” has bubbling synths, sirens, mixed-in vocal samples of Dilla himself, and a quirky female singer sounding straight-off a broadway musical comedy, yet as any great hip-hop producer can do, Dilla makes it all fit his scheme and interact within his album beautifully. Thematically, “Anti-American Graffiti” also reaches outside the tried and true, with singing of ”My family tree”, faded in, then out, leaving room for an edgy guitar riff, rugged drums ‘n’ claps, and a disgruntled voice screaming, “Too much, too soon!”, all coming together as a reminder of that bad feelings from whites to blacks still lingers. Indeed, this man could get deep.
Outside his apparent love for music and his stylistic versatility, Jay Dee was also clearly in appreciation of all the different things he could make music do with his equipment. You could literally sit and sift through “Donuts”, drooling over all the little elements that make his work so astounding. His knack for transforming and recreating chorus with slick chops is wow-worthy; check “Waves”, where he takes several different male vocal tones, stretches them and places them strategically to make a tense, affecting hook that he rides on and on and on, switching it up and screwing with it along the way. His ability to milk a climax from multiple sources is paralleled by few; “The Diff’rence” finds our man taking pianos, trumpets, and multiple soul brothas, and leading the track into a bombastic, triumphant sax reel with an exhilarating but sparsely-used vocal sample strongly pumping out simply, effectively, wonderfully, “The diffffff’rrrrreeeeeence!”. And lest we forget, Jay Dee can work some drums and breaks like nothing; his snares kick up all sorts of sh*t on the John Blazing ”Geek Down”, while his low-key, tambourine driven percussion keeps the sinister vibe on ”Workinonit”, and point blanc, the cymbal crashes and manic breaks ensure that ”The Twister (Huh, What)” bangs with the best of them.
With all Jay Dee could do with his musical equipment, he always made sure what he did had a genuine emotional core, and that’s in full force on “Donuts”, back story or no back story. With its bells riding the soulful orchestration and sublime hip-hop vocal tidbits, “Dilla Says Go” refreshes the spirit like a glass of ice water in the scorching Summer heat. “Two Can Win”, with its up-tempo, sped-up soul vocals and classic funk and orchestral instrumentation will bring your inner-child out to play. And on the flipside, “Last Donut of the Night” shows a darker side, a soul resided to its fate as guitar and strings underlie vocal samples that tell of a man who had triumphed.
There’s no doubt that Jay Dee did that; big time with his truly grand finale, “Donuts”.
Those triumphs plus the hands of time will dry that bitter tear that mourns Jay Dee from Music’s book of Polaroid memories, while preserving that tear of joy forever.
Less heavy, Jay Dee wrecked the boards like few others, and though he’ll be missed by those of us who love music in general, hip-hop in specific, he’ll always live on through his music. “Donuts”, in all of its utter greatness, and made under the most melancholy – yet inspiring – circumstances is among the most essential creations in an intimidating body of work.
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"Donuts". J Dilla. 2006: Stones Throw.
James Yancey aka Jay Dee passed away on February 10th, 2006 due to complications from a rare blood disease. To read the wonderful, touching article from the Detroit Free Press, follow this url: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060223/ENT04/602230496/1039/ENT.
Recommended:
Yes
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crypticcradle
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Member: Eric
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