By the third stage, Kübler-Ross noticed that patients would start to accept the reality of their situation, but viewed it more as a problem to be solved, with an answer they could discover. As such, they start to bargain, try to cut deals, convinced there’s something they can do to extend their lives: “The bargaining is really an attempt to postpone … and it includes an implicit promise that the patient will not ask for more if this one postponement is granted.”16
Postponement. An attempt to squeeze more time out of a finite amount, to arrange for an event to take place at a later time. Postponement is at work in the greatest trick Dilla pulls on the entire album, checked by name on what might be its most moving track.
“Time: The Donut of the Heart” is a beautiful, wistful song, speeding up the intro to The Jacksons’ “All I Do Is Think of You,” and giving it the patented Dilla bounce; as strings wash over the background and the sound of a woman sighing in pleasure becomes a labored exhale of release. The song features the first appearance of Dilla’s Dadaist vocal chopping, taking slices of Michael and his brothers so short they lose their meaning, and using them as tonal accents throughout the track. At the one-minute mark, Dilla slows the whole thing down (on the third beat no less), switching the hi-hat to eighth notes, halving the tempo of the guitar, and then speeds it up again on the one without missing a step. It’s a prodigious display of drum programming for a producer who tapped out his drums by hand, but it’s also his attempt to control time, to stretch it and pull it, to slow its progression through his music in ways he could not in his life.
Kübler-Ross also notes that much of the bargaining done during this stage is done via prayer. While Ma Dukes told the Detroit Free Press that Dilla became more spiritual in the last year of his life (often returning to the Book of Job), God isn’t felt much throughout Donuts, with one exception: On “One Eleven,” Smokey Robinson’s sweet falsetto sings Lord, have mercy. It’s not the centerpiece of the beat, that’s the string melody from “A Legend in its Own Time” (another “King of the Beats” moment, perhaps), but it’s there, and it’s unobscured. It also doesn’t appear to be taken from the record that serves as the basis for the rest of the beat, suggesting Dilla went out of his way to include it. For what it’s worth, while the title most likely refers to nothing more than the length of the song, Chapter 1, Verse 11 of the Book of Job is the moment Satan dares God to test Job’s faith by taking everything he has.
Bargaining is felt most concretely, though, on “Stop!” The song is one of the album’s early high points, a return to a more solid song structure with a spacious introduction that gives listeners a chance to catch their breath after the whirlwind of music that starts the album. Dilla takes Dionne Warwick’s warning to a trifling lover, chops it, rearranges it, and directs it back at the universe: You better stop, and think about what you’re doing, give a little back my way … Dilla also makes good on the warning, pausing the music for one beat in the only outright moment of silence on the entire album, as if to say, “This is what happens if you go through with this.”
“Stop!” actually went through the most changes during the album’s many iterations. The version on the release is what was on the original beat tape, but sometime during the editing process, Dilla handed in a second version, a more straightforward loop with the silence removed. Jank asked for the older version back.
Individuals who enter the fourth stage, having begun to understand the reality of their situation and how little control they have over it, grow depressed and emotionally dark, grieving for their departure from the world. Many songs on Donuts “feel” sad (“Thunder,” “The Factory,” “Last Donut of the Night”) but it’s on “Walkinonit” that the emotions bubble to the surface. Over trilling strings, a refrain lifted from The Undisputed Truth’s performance of the classic heartbreak song “Walk on By” repeats again and again with little variation: Broken and blue, walking down the street, broken and blue. The two lyrics come from entirely separate verses on the sample; they were put together deliberately. It’s the rawest, least obfuscated moment on the album, almost confessional by comparison to everything else, making it all the more startling and powerful.
Finally, Kübler-Ross notes that if a patient has enough time to process their situation and make their way through the preceding stages, “He will have mourned the impending loss of so many meaningful people and places and he will contemplate his coming end with a certain degree of quiet expectation.”17
Surprisingly, it’s this stage of acceptance that becomes more noticeable after repeated listens, and is most present throughout. Many of the songs have a sense of closure, of settling affairs, and making peace: “Waves,” another 10cc flip, takes the band’s biker death ballad “Johnny Don’t Do It,” and morphs the title into a loop of John—do—it, likely a dedication to his younger brother John, now known as the MC Illa J; “People,” “Don’t Cry,” and “U-Luv” seem explicit messages of comfort to the people he cares about. “Hi” is about reunion, of seeing someone again after a long time apart. In the original song, “Maybe” by Philadelphia soul trio The Three Degrees, the entire story started in that sample is told: The narrator speaks of leaving her man and regretting it, until she encounters him again at a bus stop and joins him for a drink, where she declares her love and begs for a second chance. Giving “Hi” an added air of mystery, Dilla offers no such resolution, he starts the narrative at the bus stop and ends it at the moment the speaker turns around; the listener has no idea what it is she sees when she does. It’s a moment pregnant with unfulfilled expectation, and has a sense of hope; it’s clear from the tone of the woman’s voice she’s pleased by what she finds behind her.
While it’s likely unrelated to “Hi” but not insignificant, Ma Dukes told Ronnie Reese in Wax Poetics that during one stay in the ICU, Dilla wasn’t fully coherent for two days and would ramble to himself, but she heard him talking to someone named “OD,” murmuring “Okay, I’ll wait on the bus, the white bus … okay, I won’t get the red bus. Don’t get the red bus.” When she asked him about it later, Dilla told her he’d seen Wu-Tang MC Ol’Dirty Bastard, who died in 2004: “He explained that ODB told him not to catch the red bus—everyone that catches the red bus goes to hell. He was to wait for ODB and the white bus. Everyone that is true to the game, and true to their music, could have any ride that they wanted.”
“Bye.” reprises the tempo trick from “Time” but when it returns near the album’s end, it has a different effect, faltering and regaining its balance like someone stumbling and regrouping his or her strength near the end of a long journey. It’s a subdued track, as are most of the songs in the album’s later moments, before exploding into one final burst of energy in “Welcome to the Show.”
The last song on Donuts is typically the first “A-ha!” moment for listeners who begin to investigate the parts used to make the album. The song takes its sample from “When I Die” by 60s Canadian pop-rockers Motherlode and turns it into a hymn, looped outbursts of ecstatic joy. This isn’t the muted optimism of a funeral, this is the raucous celebration of a New Orleans-style wake; Dilla’s taking us to church. Amid the rapturous cries, a lyric begins to rise to the surface, out of context, but taken from a beautifully simple summation of what anyone might hope for when facing their end: When I die, I hope to be the kind of man that you thought I would be. The song then ends with the unexpected reprise of the Gary Davis-sampling “Donuts (Outro)” before cutting out and ending the album.
None of this is to say that Kübler-Ross’s model is a checklist to be ticked off (“Done denying? Better get angry!”). It’s not a linear or prescriptive model; she allowed that stages could overlap, and patients have also shown they can skip steps or double back and repeat. It’s also not true to say that death pervades every song on the album; how dour an affair would that be? Donuts has humor (Frank Zappa’s assurance that “you are going to dance, like you’ve never danced before!”; a tweak of the vocal that makes it seem as though “Lightwor
ks” is encouraging everyone to “light up the spliffs”), and swagger (“The New”). Songs like “The Diff’rence” and “Two Can Win” are downright happy. Everyone ultimately faces their end alone, there’s no prescription or rulebook for processing it, everyone faces it in their own way. Dilla faced it through music. As Donuts ends, one gets the sense he was coming to terms.
That is, if Donuts even really ends. Play the CD on “repeat all,” and the end of “Welcome to the Show” feeds directly into the start of “Donuts (Outro).” The end is the beginning, the first is the last, and some things go on forever, like a circle. Like good music. Maybe like the human soul.
Dilla being Dilla, though, he couldn’t let the ends of the album sync up perfectly: the transition between the two jerks and stutters just slightly as the album restarts. He always did love mistakes.
The New
As Dilla’s final work, Donuts will always carry extra significance in the minds of many listeners. There’s something about an artist’s last work that seems to bring added resonance. According to the novelist John Updike, “[W]orks written late in a writer’s life retain a fascination. They exist, as do last words, where life edges into death, and perhaps have something uncanny to tell us.”1
If the presence of death and dying can be felt and heard throughout Donuts, if hidden messages are scattered throughout it, they don’t explain why they’re delivered in the ways in which they are. As the end point of a career that spanned over a decade and went through at least a quartet of distinct styles, it’s hard to deny that Donuts is, at its most basic, really weird. To try and glean a sense of why that is, one must consider what it means for artists when they’re faced with their expected or untimely end, and what that means for their art.
In 2006, the same year Donuts was released, the literary theorist Edward Said published On Late Style, a book that sought to explore why great artists and composers late in their lives (meaning near the end, not necessarily elderly) frequently produce work in one of two styles: A sort of creative final summation, the period at the end of the sentence as found in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or works that suggest not, “harmony and resolution but … intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”2 With those moods at either end of the continuum, Donuts clearly falls along the latter.
Said draws heavily on the work of German philosopher Theodor Adorno, specifically what he had to say in a 1937 essay on the late works of Beethoven:
For Adorno … those compositions that belong to [Beethoven’s] third period … constitute … a moment when an artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.3
Like Adorno’s Beethoven, J Dilla was also an artist at the height of his powers, struck down by forces he could not control just as he ventured out into what would be the last phase of his career. The move to L.A., collaborations with Madlib, and an easy working relationship with Stones Throw seem to have given Dilla the freedom to move his art wherever he wanted. As a musician he had nothing left to lose, no limits or rules to concern himself with. And, if what Kübler-Ross suggests is true, he was acutely aware his window to do so was rapidly closing.
“I think mentally [moving] just kind of freed his mind, you know? It’s a better way of life out here compared to where we were. I think it just freed him up to kind of think like, ‘man, I can do whatever I want to do,’” said Frank Nitt.4
Since the publication of Said’s book (written during his own late period as he battled leukemia and published posthumously), critics and scholars have been engaged in a sort of tug-of-war regarding the validity of his ideas. The most common criticism is that, considering each individual encounters death in his or her own way, one cannot shoehorn a universal theory of late style onto all circumstances, there are too many variables at play: Some artists have no idea death is imminent, some are aware of its possibility for years; some endure physical disabilities or diseases, some do not; some are elderly, some are taken tragically young. It’s unreasonable to think that any theory of late style is applicable in all scenarios. Even the term itself falls under criticism: “[It] can’t be a direct result of aging or death, because style is not a mortal creature, and works of art have no organic life to lose,”5 writes Michael Wood in his introduction to Said.
But just because critics can’t agree on a unified aesthetic for late style doesn’t mean that late style, as a phenomenon, does not exist. One doesn’t need to be a classical music scholar to notice the sweeping sonic and structural changes between Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and the Ninth Symphony, first performed three years before his death and long after he started losing his hearing. Late style has been applied to Stravinsky, Strauss, and Schumann, and is equally applicable to J Dilla. Look at the adjectives frequently incorporated to describe what is considered “late style”: Fragmentary, difficult, irascible, nostalgic, and introspective. Donuts can be legitimately described with an identical vocabulary. So where does Dilla’s late style come from?
According to the scholar Joseph N. Straus, the one unifying characteristic among authors working in a late style is disability, not impending death, as death cannot typically be predicted accurately, but nonnormative bodily functions are something the artist endures every day: “[I]n the end there may be nothing late about late style in the sense of chronological age, the approach of life’s end, or authorial or historical belatedness … late style may be less about anticipating death than living with disability, less about the future hypothetical than the present reality” (emphasis in the original).6 Certainly, Dilla’s present reality during the mixing of Donuts could be considered nonnormative, and was bound to have a psychological and physical impact on the music he made.
Ronnie Reese echoed Peanut Butter Wolf’s comment to Egon before Donuts entered production, that a project of its sort was maybe the only thing Dilla could produce. “I think that it was the album that it was most feasible for him to make. You know, it’s not like he can go to studios and master things or had access to a tremendous amount of equipment or gear when he was working on Donuts. So what he gave is the most he was able to give us at that time.”
Like the Kübler-Ross model, late style theory is not intended to be a catch-all for all works by dying artists, and not every dying artist’s work conforms to every aspect of late style: “It would be unlikely for any single work to exhibit all of these characteristics, but a late-style work would necessarily have most of them.”7 This is certainly true of Donuts.
Contrary to Said’s argument regarding the late artist’s contradictory relationship to the present, though, Donuts doesn’t abandon the present social order as much as tilts its head at it in “What’s up?” moment of acknowledgment, not just in its use of classic breaks and sounds but in specific response to the larger hip-hop landscape. “Dilla Says Go” takes the same sample source as “Hate It or Love It,” a chart-topping single by L.A. rapper The Game released in early 2005, and makes something that sounds entirely different. More interestingly, “Stop!” uses the same Dionne Warwick sample as “Throwback,” a 2004 song by the R&B singer Usher produced by Just Blaze. The song, like many contemporary R&B songs, features a rap break on the bridge, in this case provided by Jadakiss. In the opening moments of “Stop!” it’s Jadakiss’s voice that’s manipulated to ask, “Is (death) real?” Is it a coincidence that Dilla took the same sample used on a song that came out the year before Donuts and even sampled the voice of that song’s featured rapper? It’s a question that can’t be answered but it certainly seems too coincidental to be an accident. The choice may have been more intentional than anyone thought.
An online message board post attributed to Questlove, dated 2007 (its authorship is unverified, though it has a voice extremely similar to Questlove’s writing from that time), alleges that the 2005 beats, including Donuts, were Dilla’s “Kanye Batches” just as the process that l
ed to the “Little Brother” beat came from the “Pete Rock Batches.” They were the result of Dilla taking inspiration from what he was impressed by in hip-hop, and trying to put his own stamp on it.
“He told me that ‘Spaceship’ [from West’s debut The College Dropout] fucked him up cause for the first time he never heard that interpretation of [Marvin Gaye’s] ‘distant lover’ in his head when he heard ‘distant lover’. kinda fucked him up a lil [sic].”8 If the post is to be believed, for the first time in years, Dilla was actually taken aback by something he heard in hip-hop, a flip he never would have considered. So he tried not only to approximate the style popularized primarily by West and Just Blaze, he looked to master it, taking their soul-sampling approach, annihilating it, and reconstructing it into something wholly his own.
For all of these reasons, Donuts continues to exist as a late work in all its irascible, confrontational glory, continuing to challenge and irritate new listeners looking for insight into mortality with its occasionally impenetrable contradictions.
As the cultural critic Terry Teachout writes, “[M]ost of us want to know what to expect at the end of our own lives, and look to art to shed light on that dark encounter. But true artists, unlike the Hollywood kind, don’t always tell us what we want to hear.”9
Bye
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