J Dilla's Donuts (33 1/3 Book 93)

by Jordan Ferguson

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.

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:

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.

“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.”

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.

If you want to know about death, talk to the dying.

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?’”

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.”

When I die, I hope to be the kind of man that you thought I would be.

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.

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.