More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Donuts was never meant for you. It was never meant for me. It’s a private and personal record, a conversation between an artist and his instrument, which just happens to be the history of recorded music. It’s the final testament of a man coming to terms with his mortality; a last love letter to his family and the people he cared about. It’s clearly a record about death; the evidence found in its rebus of samples, sequencing and song titles leaves little doubt of that.
When you play ‘Little Brother’ for anybody you’re just like, ‘Oh, okay, it’s an eight-bar loop.’ But no, he literally took half-second chops, thirty-two times, and made it sound fluid … This was like when Matt Damon saw that math problem in Good Will Hunting, this was that.”
“One of the hardest things is that, if you have training, at some point you sound trained. You do what you’re supposed to do
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.
death, if not necessarily a good thing, not inherently bad, either.
“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.
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.
