Hodgson again: “It’s common often to do what he’s doing, it’s uncommon to do it that well, with that much artistry.”
As the album progresses, a dichotomy of mood begins to emerge: Each beat can be plotted on a graph with “skullkicking” on one axis and “heartbreaking” on the other; each track containing both colors in varying opacities. It’s the transition he works over and over again: “The Twister” into “One-Eleven,” “The Factory” into “U-Luv,” “Thunder” into “Gobstopper.”
The siren takes a break through the middle movements of the album, returning for three consecutive songs starting with “Thunder.” But it feels different when it returns, a change that remains through repeated listens. It seems to stop being frightening and begins feeling powerful, not a wail of despair as much as a screaming defiance in the face of an abyss. That siren is an avatar, a primal “I am,” from a man sapped of energy in his real life. Who is he? Who he’s always been. It’s right there in the title of the Mantronix song the siren originated from.
“King of the Beats.”
All hail.
Geek Down
Death is the great universal, the thread that connects me, you, Dilla, every living thing on this planet. We are all going to die. This is not something most individuals care to consider. Existence, consciousness itself, is an industry designed to distract us from that fact, the “screen,” Tolstoy wrote of in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” The story’s titular character, slowly succumbing to injuries sustained in a fall, tries to distract himself from that truth, but can never outrun it fully: “Suddenly it would flash from behind the screen, he would see it. It flashes, he still hopes it will disappear, but he involuntarily senses his side—there sits the same thing, gnawing in the same way, and he can no longer forget it.”1 For many listeners, especially those with at least a passing familiarity with the album’s origins, Donuts rips down that screen, its music and messages a stark representation of one man confronting the truth of his mortality, which, while true, is a bit of a facile interpretation. Yes, the record is concerned with such matters, but it expresses that concern in a more nuanced and complicated manner, part of a conversation humanity has been having with itself for centuries.
From the moment humans learned how to think critically, they’ve been thinking critically about death, and most of that thinking centers on whether death is essentially good or bad. The idea is that if one can prove philosophically that death is not harmful, it doesn’t merit the fear and panic so often associated with it. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus worked this lane first, arguing that death is not a thing to be feared because it removes all sensation, all pleasure or pain, from life. Why fear something that cannot “harm” us in any traditional sense? Epicurus’s dismissal of death was so absolute it spawned an epitaph used on the graves of many of his followers: “I was not, I was; I am not, I do not care.”
The Roman poet Lucretius furthered that idea of death’s irrelevance in his “Symmetry Argument,” which posited that one’s “absence” in death is analogous to the “absence” experienced before birth. You weren’t “here” before you were born, and you didn’t notice one way or the other, so, not being “here” after you die shouldn’t matter either: Waiting to walk onto the stage is no different than stepping off if it. Which makes death, if not necessarily a good thing, not inherently bad, either.
It seems sound on the surface, if one can ignore the fact that conscious existence brings with it experience, challenges, victories, heartbreaks, love, pain, and joy. Death, as we currently understand it (read: secularly), obliterates the memory of all past experience and the promise of the future; you’ll never get to learn Swedish, visit Morocco, or take breakdance lessons once you’re dead. To Epicureans and humanists, this doesn’t matter: Death removes all experience, bad and good, and sometimes you just have to take the bitter with the sweet. What we get is all we have, make the most of it and make room for the generation after you. Rational, but not exactly comforting. Or is it?
No modern school of philosophy examined the nature of death and its relationship to life quite like the Existentialists. First explicated by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and revitalized by twentieth-century thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, this philosophy (painting here with an admittedly broad brush) argued that only the individual could bring meaning to life in the face of an absurd world and faceless God: “After two world wars, everyone was ready for a philosophy that could nod to the irrational elements in life; hence, perhaps the immense popularity of both psychoanalysis and existentialism after the abattoir of the twentieth century.”2 What better guide for tackling the question of finding meaning in life when death is certain?
Camus looked at that paradox in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The myth in question concerns a Greek king, condemned by the gods to push an immense boulder to the top of a hill, only for it to roll back down again upon reaching the summit, forcing him to repeat the act for eternity. Camus used the myth as a starting point to address what he considered “the one true philosophical question, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”3 For Camus, the puzzle to solve was not whether death was good or bad, but whether its reality negated the purpose of living; he wanted to understand why we bother. Sisyphus’s sentence is absurdity in action, as, some might argue, is life. But, for Camus, redemption is found in the moment the condemned king makes his descent back to his rock to start again; that moment surges with possibility, and the hope that maybe this time … “Where would the torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?”4 To Camus, the toil of Sisyphus is no less absurd than that of anyone who sweeps floors, sells stocks, makes music, or writes books, but there is meaning in the struggle, purpose in the toil, a thought echoed by the modern philosopher Todd May: “Imagine trying to live without projects, without a career trajectory, or relationships or hobbies. These are central elements of a human life … we cannot abandon our projects to live in the present. We must integrate them somehow … One can live engaged in the present and yet also be engaged by one’s projects that extend into the future.”5 Given what we know of him, continuing to make his music between rounds of dialysis, it’s a sentiment Dilla would appear to have shared.
These may be fun puzzles to muse over, but thinking about death in these ways seems to strip away its dignity; how “good” or “bad” death is, embracing life’s absurdity and the subtleties of conscious existence likely offers little comfort to a person facing his or her definite end. They also approach death as an abstract concept instead of a physical process: Ask even the most stoic man if he’s prepared to die and he may say yes; tell him he’ll die in an hour and his response may be different. What does death really mean to the dying? What does it mean to sit there, as Dilla did, performing from a wheelchair on the other side of the world and face the thing we’re all trying to avoid, to have Ivan Ilyich’s screen torn down in front of you? What then? How do you process it, in life and in art?
***
In 1969 Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross formulated one of, if not the most popular perspectives on facing the end of life in her book On Death and Dying. Intended as a guide for medical professionals, the book sought to examine how human beings process the knowledge of impending death, so attending physicians and other medical staff could better relate to their patients.
When she was a girl growing up in Switzerland, Kübler-Ross’s neighbor fell from a tree, and was not expected to survive his injuries. The neighbor wished to stay in his home, to forgo any treatments or trips to the hospital. No one denied his request. The man talked with his wife and children, left instructions, put his affairs in order. Kübler-Ross and her parents stayed with the man’s family until he died, mourning with them. When he passed, there wasn’t a viewing, no cosmetic deception to make him look as if he were sleeping; they simply removed the corpse and
buried him.
Decades later Kübler-Ross, now a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago Medical Center, witnessed vastly different attitudes toward terminal patients: Clinical, reticent, treating the individual as a series of problems to be solved in the name of extending life. She wasn’t entirely sure the methodology was superior: “[A patient] may want one single person to stop for one single minute so he can ask one single question—but he will get a dozen people around the clock, all busily preoccupied with his heart rate, pulse … his secretions or excretions but not with him as a human being.”6 Kübler-Ross found her colleagues’ devotion to clinical distance unsettling, and couldn’t shake the idea that it neglected a patient’s basic humanity. In 1965 a group of theology students approached her for assistance on a research project they were working on. They wanted to examine death as the biggest crisis in human life, but were unsure how to collect any data. Her suggestion was simple: If you want to know about death, talk to the dying.
Kübler-Ross and the students began interviewing terminal patients, asking them how they felt about their experiences with doctors, family members, and their own mortality. The more they talked, the more she began to notice patterns emerging, a similarity of experience among them. Her findings entered the popular consciousness as the five-stage “Kübler-Ross Model,” which is still used as an aid in understanding the process of confronting death. It’s also useful in understanding and interpreting the chaotic mood switches of Donuts.
Like most details about Donuts, accounts vary on how accurate the “deathbed creation” legend actually is. A 2006 article in The Source reported Dilla completed 29 of the album’s 31 tracks in the hospital, though “completed” has often been erroneously interpreted as “created.”
“[T]here was always like a little box of 45s, stuff like that, but most of the record, almost all of it was made before he got to the hospital,” said Egon. “But it was edited in the hospital … [he’d have] his computer out and his headphones on and he’d be editing … He would be in there making the final mix of the record.” Adjusting the levels, mixing the sounds and adding effects could have taken as long or longer than chopping and looping the samples, and would have been no less labor intensive, especially when the joints in Dilla’s fingers would so often stiffen and swell.
“The one thing his mom will tell you is that he would go over the same track over and over again, making minute changes. I think [that’s] why Chris was so pissed that Jeff was just going to get, like thrown out of the room if he brought an idea to edit the album over to him. Because Dilla was so meticulous about that,” said Egon.
Whenever he selected the samples or where he was when he did so doesn’t really matter; he still gravitated to songs with titles like, “You Just Can’t Win,” “I Can’t Stand to See You Cry,” “Sweet Misery,” and the almost too on-the-nose, “When I Die.” Much of his work from the 2005 batches, which turned up on Spacek’s “Dollar,” and posthumous releases like Mos Def’s “History,” or “Love” and “Won’t Do” from The Shining, among others, strike a similarly restrained and thoughtful, if less chaotic, mood than what’s heard on Donuts.
“I think a lot of the kind of, melancholy stuff, when I started hearing it was more or less when I knew that he was sick. So I think, in some ways, all of that kind of ties in together,” said Waajeed.7
By the time he was making those beats, Dilla had been sick long enough, gone through enough treatments and hospital stays to have a sense of how his story might conclude, whether anyone else did or not. Kübler-Ross notes that, oftentimes, patients are the first to understand the severity of their conditions.
“[T]he outstanding fact, to my mind, is that [terminal patients] are all aware of the seriousness of their illness whether they are told or not. They do not always share this knowledge with their doctor or next of kin.”8
Said B+, “Listen to Donuts. Do you really think the dude didn’t know what was gonna happen to him? He fully knew what was gonna happen.”9
“Like, his mom was in there like literally massaging his fingers, she tells that story and it’s true. Like you know, and not only that, but she was taking like, not heaps of abuse, because it’s her son, and he loved her and it was obvious, but you know the dude was going through some serious shit when he was making that final version of the record,” said Egon.10
Any man who continues to make music until days before his death (Questlove once claimed the last beat Dilla ever made, a flip of Funkadelic’s “America Eats Its Young,” was made hours before he died),11 who flies to Europe and performs from a wheelchair two months before his death, is Camus’s ideal. Dilla’s life was absurd in the extreme, but how he lived it despite that absurdity was heroic. If his illness was Sisyphus’s rock, the descent was his music, the thing that made it bearable, even if it stared mortality in the face.
“When he passed, the shit just took on a whole new meaning … Like, was he really that nuts, to basically make a goodbye letter? That shit is like saying goodbye,” said House Shoes.12
It’s therefore not unreasonable to look at the album, to step into the sources used to make it and conclude that death and dying are present there: “[H]e really wasn’t able to communicate. Which really makes Donuts that much creepier for me to hear because all of those [samples], I’m now certain beyond a shadow of a doubt, were actual messages from him,” said Questlove.13 It’s only after repeated listens, when one gets “under the hood” of the tonal moods on the sampled records, that Donuts reveals it is not just sending messages about dying but about living as well.
The first stage of Kübler-Ross’s model is denial; when faced with the news of oncoming death, patients initially cannot believe it, refuse to acknowledge that their time might be running short. That sense of denial doesn’t appear often on the album, but that’s not to say it’s completely absent.
It’s there in the album’s proper opener, “Workinonit.” The longest song on the album, and most traditionally structured, it offers listeners a false sense of security before the controlled chaos that erupts throughout the record’s remaining 40 minutes. The beat’s built around “The Worst Band in the World,” a satirical take on stardom by British art-rock band 10cc. Dilla takes the loose jam of the original recording and turns it into the tightest rhythm section this side of the JB’s, liberally inserting stabs of distorted guitar and choked sirens. There are vocal samples, mostly unintelligible save for the repeated mantra of “play me, buy me, workin’ on it.” The beat’s a statement of intent, a declaration to people who might have forgotten about him in the years following Slum Village, Tribe, and Common that he was still here, still relevant, still working.
Yet, despite that confidence, there’s a moment in the song’s second movement where Dilla loops one last sample from the original’s vocal. Coming at the end of the 10cc song, and playing on a motif of the band-as-product (in this case a vinyl record), the lyric on the original is fade me. When Dilla gets through with it, the sample seems to slur into something else entirely: Save me.
Denial is felt explicitly on “Dilla Says Go,” where a sample of The Trammps assures the listener, “I’ll get over it, baby.” It’s also there on beats that use well-worn samples, like the thundering drums from Mountain’s “Long Red” on “Stepson of the Clapper” or the metallic grind of ESG’s “UFO” on “Geek Down.” These are not rare sources; most hip-hop fans would recognize them instantly even if they couldn’t name them. But their use has a sense of finality, as though Dilla knew this would be his last pass, so he’s going to prove just how dope he can make them. “Stepson” takes Mountain’s live intro and turns it into a gospel breakdown, all clubbing drums, call and response vocals, and the audience applause looped into a soul clap. “Geek Down” takes ESG’s guitars and plays with the gain, turning them nauseous, making them lurch and roll on top of a crushing drum break lifted from The Jimi Entley Sound, a one-off side project of Portishead members Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley.14
These so
ngs, and any time Dilla uses a staple of the genre, that abused shit he mentioned in the Welcome 2 Detroit liner notes, are challenges, the sort of nut-grabbing bravado that’s been hip-hop’s bread and butter from day one, the same challenge heard in every Huh? What? from Joeski Love. It’s Dilla saying, “Could a dying man do this?!”
The second of the five stages manifests itself less overtly on Donuts, in that it permeates through some of the tracks, but it simmers beneath the surface most of the time. According to Kübler-Ross, “When the first stage of denial cannot be maintained any longer, it is replaced by feelings of anger, rage, envy, and resentment. The logical next question becomes, ‘Why me?’”15 This feeling of anger and resentment can be felt on the “skullkicker” side of Donuts’ twin moods. “The Twister (Huh, What)”, “The Factory” and “Geek Down” all contain a sort of aggression in the way the drums are placed at the front of the mix; the kicks bludgeon, the snares crack like a slap to the face, and the hi-hats sizzle with treble. Anger also runs underneath the otherwise lovely song “Anti-American Graffiti” as Wolfman Jack barks about “a lot of sincere confusion about just what the doctor said,” feeling overwhelmed (“too much to do!”) and demanding to know, “who’s going to take responsibility?”
But nowhere else on the album is anger and aggression felt more strongly than “Glazed.” Compared to the other beats, “Glazed” is downright unpleasant, appearing as it does between the twin standouts “Time: The Donut of the Heart” and “Airworks.” Dilla takes a one-bar horn break from Gene and Jerry’s “You Just Can’t Win,” pushes up the high end and loops it ad infinitum. It’s noisy, punishing, grueling, impossible to be anything besides what it is: What MC would ever try to rhyme over that? It’s the only moment on the album where it feels as though Dilla is overtly getting in listeners’ faces, challenging their endurance to see how much they can take, before rewarding them with the sublime “Airworks.”
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