J DILLA
DONUTS
(2006)
DONUTS
(2006)
The visualization above presents the album Donuts as both a record and a donut. The record is divided into 31 slices, one for each track on the album, and ordered clockwise starting at the 12:00 position. The width of each slice is based on the running time of each track.
Within each track, sampled songs are placed in a way that recalls donut sprinkles. The position of each sprinkle represents its release year, with older songs closer to the outside edge (where one side of a record would begin) and newer songs closer to the inner edge.
The color of each sprinkle represents the genre of the sampled material, based on the legend below. Unidentified samples are not shown, as their release years are unknown.
J Dilla's Donuts is an album composed entirely of samples.
What started as a beat tape shared among friends was finalized in the final year of the life of James Dewitt Yancey, who was also known as Jay Dee but best known as J Dilla.
Stones Throw Records released Donuts on J Dilla's 32nd birthday: February 7, 2006. J Dilla died from a combination of a blood disorder and lupus three days later.
J Dilla produced some of the best and most influential music of the late 1990s and early 2000s. But Donuts was different.
In Dilla's own words, Donuts is "just a compilation of the stuff I thought was a little too much for the MCs. That’s basically what it is...me flipping records that people really don’t know how to rap on but they want to rap on."
Sampling Donuts explores the use of sampled material on Donuts.
This project uses a mix of existing and generated data.
Some of the data shown here comes from WhoSampled—a user-populated database of known hip-hop samples. WhoSampled provides information on the genre of the sampled material, as well as bibliographic information for the sampled material's song name, artist, and release year.
The project also uses new data attributes for the timing, duration, and type of each instance of a sample.
Users who submit information to WhoSampled can assign one of ten genres to a sampled song. More than half of the samples used on Donuts are labeled by users as soul / funk / disco samples from the late 1960s or early 1970s. Think James Brown, Eddie Kendricks, Kool and the Gang, the Isley Brothers, and Stevie Wonder.
Dilla also liked to reference other hip-hop. Almost all of the samples since the early 1980s are hip-hop samples, both from the Golden Age of Hip-Hop and from then-contemporary hip-hop artists of the early 2000s.
WhoSampled provides information on which elements were used in a sample, but labeling a sample as a sound effect, hook, or drum may not capture how it's used in a composition.
In a dissertation published in 2013, musicologist Dr. Amanda Sewell proposed a typology for hip-hop samples to categorize them as:
In Sampling Donuts, each instance of a sample is categorized based on how Dilla used it on each track.
Almost every track on Donuts uses just one song—usually sourced from a soul / funk / disco record—as its structural sample. Dilla rarely used material from multiple sources to compose the harmonic and rythmic foundation of a track.
Despite being considered an instrumental album, almost every track includes at least one lyric sample; only two tracks have no lyric samples. Many of the lyric samples are referenced in the track names.
By categorizing the genre and type of each sample instance, we start to see the composition of each track.
The final attribute—time—places each sample instance at its location within the track. In each of the images below, sample instances are placed in three grooves representing the three types of samples in Sewell's typology. The position and length of each instance within these grooves represents its timing and duration.
These visuals are based in part on layering graphs, a notation for sample-based hip-hop developed by Adam Krims in his 2000 book Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity.
Each of the 31 tracks below are shown as circular layering graphs. Click any individual track to reveal liner notes about each track and its samples.
That's no mistake—the first track on the album is labeled as an outro.
After dropping an "I don't care" from Gary Davis, Dilla introduces himself by twisting lyric samples from Skillz and Ras Kass's Six Figures. Two phrases in Skillz's second verse, "hit up Jake?" and "you a dealer?" are turned into what we hear as "J, J, J Dilla...Dilla...Dilla..."
This introduction resembles the way Pete Rock names himself and C.L. Smooth on In the House, the intro to their album The Main Ingredient, which was among Dilla's favorites. But instead of sampling his name directly (as Pete Rock was able to, using Q-Tip's voice from A Tribe Called Quest's Verses From the Abstract), Dilla crafted his name from other words.
It's fitting that Skillz introduces Dilla, as Skillz was the first artist to officially record a Jay Dee song: his From Where??? was recorded in 1994 and included on Skillz's 1996 debut.
Workinonit, the longest and most complex track on Donuts, presents the album in minature form. Almost every sample reappears later in the album.
The Mantronix siren that kicks off the track is the most common sample on the album. That siren, from King of the Beats, hypes up various points of eight other tracks on Donuts.
Lyric samples from the Beastie Boys' The New Style reappear in The New and the moans from "Sweet" Charles Sherell's Yes It's You show up in Time: The Donut of the Heart. The holler from Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Gals and Joeski Love's "huh? what?" are also used in The Twister (Huh, What).
The source of the lyric sample that sounds like "work it out" remains unidentified.
In September 2020, Rolling Stone reported that Dilla's estate was being sued by the rightsholders of 10cc's music. The plaintiffs, Music Sales Corporation, may be sample trolls; they had purchased 10cc's intellectual property in 2019.
Some sources attribute the "Let's go!" vocal that kicks off Waves to gospel singer Kirk Franklin, but it's more likely from fellow Detroit production duo and Slum Village affiliate B.R. Gunna. On Dirty District Vol. 2, B.R. Gunna's Intro leads in to Do Ya Thang, which features Dilla.
Many Donuts fans have noted the 10cc lyrics used here, which Dilla manipulated from Johnny, Don't Do It to the affirmative: Johnny, do it! This may be a message of encouragement to Dilla's younger brother John, aka Illa J, who indeed followed his brother's footsteps into hip-hop.
Faint radio-style messages are also apparent in the loop from the 10cc sample, but the source of the indecipherable female vocal snippet that first appears at the 50-second mark is unknown.
Some sources and streaming services list this track as Light It, but originally it was named for its most prominent sample, a cover of the Doors' song from the band Africa.
The song appears on Africa's only album, Music from the "Lil Brown", which in turn is a reference to the Band's Music from the Big Pink.
The female vocal whoops here are sometimes credited to Lyn Collins Think About It, which was most famously sampled in Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's It Takes Two. But no: those whoops are from an uncredited female vocalist on the Detroit Emeralds song.
The Beastie Boys song briefly sampled in Workinonit is more fully heard here.
One of the more bittersweet tracks on the album, Stop! is built around Dianne Warwick's You're Gonna Need Me, with the lyrics "you're gonna want me back / in your arms." The track starts with Jadakiss's laugh and a verbal illusion: Dilla transforms Jadakiss's "it's dat real!" to what you might hear as "is death real?"
This track contains the only fraction of silence on the album: about one minute into Stop!, after Dianne sings "you better stop," the music...stops.
Dilla uses different parts of My People...Hold On from former Temptations member Eddie Kendricks in ways that illustrate Sewell's sample typology: Dilla uses the drums in the introduction of the song as a structural component, the phased heavy breathing as a surface sample that comes in and out of the track, and the vocals of "my people! hold on!" as a straightforward lyric sample.
The song Mujhe Maar Daalo, sung by Asha Bhosle, is from the 1974 Indian film Geetaa Mera Naam, or Geetaa is My Name. Around the same time Donuts was baking, Dilla's friend and collaborator Madlib was producing his Beat Konducta in India album, which also heavily samples from Bollywood soundtracks.
The Diff'rence incorporates samples from multiple songs from the same artist. Here, Dilla uses both Fruitman and Jungle Boogie from two different Kool & the Gang albums. He does the same thing on Time: The Donut of the Heart and Lightworks.
In 2007, Stones Throw released a compilation called 2K8: B-Boy Zombie War for the 2K8 NBA video game. The Stones Throw comp included MF DOOM and Guilty Simpson rapping over Mash in a track titled Mash's Revenge.
Mash is built upon a sample from Galt MacDermot, who most famously composed the music for Hair but also produced soundtracks for films including the Blaxploitation movie Cotton Comes to Harlem.
MacDermot worked with some of the best funk/jazz drummers of the time, including Bernard Purdie, Jimmy Lewis, and Idris Muhammad, making his music popular with hip-hop producers.
Mash ends with the Lou Rawls lyric sample of "It's straaange..." from Seaon of the Witch. This sample also closes out Glazed.
The moaning heard throughout this track is an uncredited vocalist on Charles Sherrell's album. Sherrell was a bassist in James Brown's band and a member of the J.B.'s. James Brown also produced Sherrell's solo album.
At 78 seconds into this track, there's an unidentified sample of someone saying "Who?". We may never know who it is.
This track ranked #15 on WhoSampled's list of the top 20 samples of all time. Dilla productions occupied 4 of the top 20 spots on their list.
In his 33⅓ book on Donuts, Jordan Ferguson says this of Glazed: "...nowhere else on the album is anger and aggression felt more strongly than Glazed. Compared to the other beats, Glazed is downright unpleasant... Dilla takes a one-bar horn break from Gene and Jerry's You Just Can't Win 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?"
The first words on Donuts are a lyric sample: "I don't care." That seemingly flippant mantra is revisited on Airworks with L.V. Johnson's I Don't Really Care.
Madlib also used this sample material for Strong Arm Steady's Chittlins & Pepsi on 2010's In Search of Stoney Jackson album.
YouTuber Narokx posts sample breakdowns of a few tracks on Donuts, including his re-creation of Airworks. In the comments, he admits: "THIS IS IT—the most challenging breakdown I've done, by a mile!!"
The title fits with the next Donuts track, Lightworks. Both tracks contain Raymond Scott's commercial jingles as surface samples. Dilla incorporates the Raymond Scott sample at the end of this track in a way that makes the transition quick and seamless.
Lightworks might be the only track on the album that samples exclusively from electronic and hip-hop sources. Dilla uses two songs from Raymond Scott, a pioneer of electronic music and inventor of several electronic instruments. A compilation of Scott's work was released in 2000.
Dilla creates another verbal illusion when he transforms the lyrics "light up the skies" and other words in Raymond Scott's Lightworks to what sounds like "light up the spliffs." The voice we hear is that of Raymond's wife Dorothy Collins. In the late 1950s, Dorothy worked as a spokesperson and vocalist in TV commercials for Lucky Strike cigarettes.
Stepson of the Clapper may be the first track on Donuts to use only samples from one track. But Dilla uses it many ways: structural, surface, and lyric.
Mountain's live performance of Long Red contains one of the most-sampled drum breaks in all of hip-hop; it's been sampled by EPMD, A Tribe Called Quest, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Nas, and Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth.
Through the lyric samples of Mountain's banter with the audience, Dilla asks us to clap along, then mocks us: "Wrong tempo!"
The title may be a callback to The Clapper, a track on his debut album Welcome 2 Detroit that was also sampled by Madlib on Jaylib's Champion Sound track, The Mission.
This track contains what may be the only sample on Donuts from the 1990s: A Tribe Called Quest's His Name is Mutty Ranks, from the Tribe album The Love Movement. That album's production is attributed to The Ummah collective, which included J Dilla, so it's possible he also produced the song he sampled.
Dilla uses the introduction from the Temptation's live performance of Cloud Nine, where Detroit MC Michael Paine says, "Would you join me please in welcom-in-ing, The Tempting!" Public Enemy also used this sample on Welcome to the Terrordome. Dilla revisits this same MC's introductions on Thunder.
The "alright, y'all" sample comes from the Fatback Band's King Tim III (Personality Jock), the B-side to a disco single released in March 1979. This song could arguably be considered the first hip-hop release, as it came out a few months before the Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight.
This leads to a data question: should the song be considered disco? Or hip-hop?
Like Stepson, Two Can Win only uses material from one song. Only One Can Win comes from the Sylvers, a group of (at the time) six siblings from Los Angeles. The song sampled here is from their debut album, which was produced by Jerry Butler and Keg Johnson.
If you haven't seen them already, take the time to watch these two videos:
The video Estelle Caswell produced for Vox's Earworm series, where she visualizes what Dilla did with the Escorts' I Can't Stand (To See You Cry).
Tracklib's break down of Dilla's approach to sampling, which uses this track as an example of what they call his Eighth Note Technique.
Anti-American Graffiti contains lyric samples that may speak to Dilla wrestling with his medical condition and fate. Dilla uses samples from radio personality Wolfman Jack, who guested on David Ossman's comedy album. In Wolfman's raspy voice, we hear "a lot of sincere confusion about just what the doctor said", "who's going to take responsibility?", and "too much too soon!"
Wolfman Jack's appearance in the film American Graffiti is likely the source for this track's title.
MF DOOM rapped over this track on Sniper Elite, which was included on the special edition of Donuts.
ESG's UFO is another of the samples on Donuts whose source ranks as one of the most-sampled songs of all time. Creating one of the most-sampled pieces of music may not be that lucrative, though: in 1992 ESG released an EP titled Sample Credits Don't Pay Our Bills.
Charlie's Theme is one of two songs released by the Jimi Entley Sound, a side project from Portishead members Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley. Dilla may have been interested in this 2002 single for its A-side, a cover of the Incredible Bongo Band's Apache, a song which contains one of the most recognizable drum breaks in all of hip-hop.
But here, Dilla used the single's B-side, a cover of the main theme to a 1973 British biker zombie horror film: Psychomania. The original theme was credited to the band Frog, a pseudonym for composer John Cameron.
The lyric samples used in Thunder are something of a misattribution, as we don't hear vocals from any of the artists listed.
The lyric samples all come from a Motown Records live album called Motortown Revue, recorded in Detroit's Fox Theater. Instead of the performing artists, we hear crowd noise and the voice of the (uncredited) MC Michael Paine, who introduces each act with "Ladies and gentlemen!"
Dilla used that same three word phrase from mulitple songs.
Gobstopper and the next track, One for Ghost, should be considered a pair, as they both are built around Luther Ingram's To the Other Man. Of course, Dilla pulled samples from different parts of the song, so this connection isn't obvious. The use of the Mantronix siren also ties these tracks together.
With no lyric samples and a relatively straightforward loop, Gobstopper may be the best track on the album to rap over. Busta Rhymes and Rah Digga used the track on 2007's Dillagence tribute album. Jay Electronica and Nas have also used Gobstopper.
The track may have gotten its name for its ability to go on and on, like an Everlasting Gobstopper, as made clear in YouTuber Sunset Loops's hour-long version of this track.
One for Ghost was written for Wu-Tang Clan member Ghostface Killah, whose acclaimed 2006 album Fishscale included Whip You With A Strap, which is built upon this Donuts track.
Gobstopper and One for Ghost are among the nine relatively late additions to the earlier beat tape version that Dilla shared with friends around the fall of 2005. The other seven: Stepson of the Clapper, Geek Down, U-Love, Hi., Bye., Last Donut of the Night, and Welcome to the Show.
Jaylib's No Games is sampled here, a track from Champion Sound, the beat tape that evolved into a long-distance collaboration between Dilla and Madlib. It started in 2000 when J Rocc gave a CD of unused Dilla beats to Madlib, who rapped over them, but with no intention of releasing the tracks commercially.
Without telling Dilla, Stones Throw put one of these tracks on Madlib single and credited the track to Jaylib. Eventually, Dilla returned the honor, rapping over unreleased Madlib beats. Champion Sound mostly alternates in that pattern: a Madlib-produced track with J Dilla raps and Dilla-produced track with Madlib raps.
Unfortunately, the album was a commercial flop for Stones Throw and was soon overshadowed by Madlib's heralded collaboration with MF DOOM as Madvilliain.
Here, at 8 seconds in, Dilla briefly samples his own voice: "let the trunk rattle."
The Undisputed Truth's Walk On By is a cover of a Dionne Warwick song of the same name. Warwick's music was sampled earlier in the album, on Stop!
After the Mantronix siren, Six Figures is the next most-used sample on Donuts. As an example of the tangled family tree that hip-hop sampling chains can generate, Six Figures includes a surface sample from Malcolm McClaren's Buffalo Gals. Dilla samples both Six Figures and Buffalo Girls on Workinonit.
The Factory starts out with a three-second sample whose source has not been identified.
Otherwise, the sample sources here are among the weirdest music included on Donuts. Both Fred Weinberg and Bruce Haack produced left-field, experimental psychadelic electronic music. Dilla had previously used a Bruce Weinberg sample in his work on Busta Rhymes' Enjoy the Ride and Common's New Wave.
The Factory contains the last use of the siren from Mantronix's King of the Beats, by far the most frequently used sample on the album. Mantronix likely sampled the siren from a track called Pulsar City Alarm. This sound effect appeared on the 1984 album Digital Space Effects: Fix Your Own Mix, from Adam & Fleisner.
YouTuber djprinceNorway made a quick video to compare the samples.Dilla had also used the Mantronix siren on his 2003 EP Ruff Draft.
This is Jerry Butler's second appearance on the album; his song with Gene Chandler was used in Glazed.
The use of samples from B.R. Gunna, the Detroit group that included Black Milk, Young RJ, and Fat Ray, throughout Donuts speaks to the close connection between that group and Slum Village, the group that included J Dilla, Baatin, and T3.
Slum Village released a compilation in 2002 called Dirty District, which included Black Milk's production. B.R. Gunna then produced 2004's Dirty District, Volume 2, which features Dilla on Do Ya Thang (a sample source for at least three Donuts tracks) and Stupid.
After Dilla's death in 2006 and Baatin's death in 2009, Slum Village now exists as T3 and B.R. Gunna producer Young RJ.
Like One for Ghost, this track reappeared on Ghostface Killah's Fishscale album as the foundation for Beauty Jackson.
Dilla had an unusual arrangement with Stones Throw Records in that the music on Donuts wouldn't necessarily be exclusive to the album; Dilla was free to use the beats in his production work with other artists.
Bye. clearly pairs with the preceeding track, Hi.—note the similarities in their structure.
A slightly different version of this track appeared on The Shining as So Far to Go, with contributions from Common and D'Angelo.
Why are the tracks on the album called donuts?
At the end of Dilla's New York Times obituary, they cite a Stones Throw press release that answered this question: "Easy explanation. Dilla likes donuts."
There's slightly more to it. According to Dilla Time author Dan Charnas, in late 2005, Dilla was with Madlib and Stones Throw records owner Peanut Butter Wolf. After a record shopping trip in Los Angeles's Silver Lake neighborhood, "[J Dilla] played them a new CD of beats... He'd given it one of his playful titles that derived from the name of some unhealthy food that he shouldn't be eating in his condition, like Burger King, Pizza Man, or in this case, Donuts."
Just as the album starts with an outro, the album ends with an introduction. On some releases of Donuts, this track is listed as Donuts (Intro).
Dilla closes out the album with Motherlode's When I Die, which contains the lyric "when I die, I hope I'll be / the kind of man that you thought I could be."
The final seconds are identical to the first seconds of the album, a trick that might have been one of Jeff Jank's contributions when editing and compiling the album. When played on repeat, it's a seamless transition right back to the beginning. Full circle!