How J Dilla's "Donuts" Permanently Reshaped Hip-Hop Production

July 10, 2022 by Luke Modugno in Classic Reviews, Read

Art is fluid, everchanging. Altered by powerful voices and minds, potent creatives seem to always carve out new paths and directions within the artistic bounds of their medium. However, you seldom see a singular composition definitively erase the once unnavigable borders of art and delineate new ones. Circumstance, unmitigated creative fearlessness and a willingness to adapt are required in order to shift the tectonic plates that lie beneath the surface of an art as ancient as music. All of those requirements were met when fabled rap producer J Dilla left the world of art with his groundbreaking beat tape Donuts.

Donuts was born out of circumstance. J Dilla emerged in the late 90’s as a prominent underground producer for local rappers, until breaking through with the notable rap collective Slum Village. Working with acts such as A Tribe Called Quest, Common, The Pharcyde and more, Dilla quickly made a name for himself with the complexity in which he chopped and looped his beats. Dilla’s production wasn’t just unique and ear-catching. There was distinct warmth, vibrance and vivaciousness erridating from the way Dilla’s kicks, drums and loops sat.

Whenever Dilla decided to hop behind the boards, his beats exemplified personification of the human experience. The intimate guitar on “Didn’t Cha Know'' projects the image of a dawn sunrise peeking through a window with the curtains flapping in the wind, especially paired with the silky-smooth vocals of Erykah Badu. The kicks draped over the melancholic vocals of The Pharcyde on “Runnin’' sounds like a comfortingly warm summer night. Uptempo, drawn-back, soulful or bouncy. Dilla was a chameleon that could shape-shift his production style to fit the artist he was working with flawlessly. Dilla didn’t just produce, it was more than that. His dense hip-hop orchestras reverberated with listeners at a deeper level.

It was this boundless talent, along with tragedy, that allowed for the creation of Donuts. In 2005, Dilla was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder known as Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP). Unfortunately, TTP is extremely deadly, with a fatality rate of 70-80%. Despite at first continuing to tour and work, Dilla was eventually confined to a hospital bed as his symptoms continued to worsen. Understanding his mortality, Dilla brought his MPC3000 and a record player to accompany him in the solidarity of his hospital bed. The goal? Use his ingenious, renaissance-level production skills to create a project that acted as a love-letter to his family, friends, fans and his time spent on Earth.

As friends and family came to visit Dilla, they would contribute to the creation of Donuts, by gifting him new records to chop, loop, manipulate and organize into his cacophonously intricate production style. Being the chronic sampler that Dilla was, his ear became immensely picky.

In a documentary made about the album's creation, Dilla’s mother illustrated just that, “When I took the crate up, and he looked through it, I think out of a whole milk crate full of 45s, I think he might have taken a dozen out of there and set them aside. He said 'you can take that back to the house'. He said 'none of that's good'." Using inspiration and direction from the people he loved most is a wholly tangible and immediate feature of the record, as Dilla cycles between a diverse set of genres and sounds for his samples, demonstrating the crate digging done on his behalf. From 70s soul records to traditional African drums, Donuts sounds what it would feel like if the complete contents of a dusty, out-of-date record store smelted the entirety of its stock into a singular vinyl disc. Borrowing literal milliseconds of various records for miniscule portions of songs off of Donuts, Dilla’s patchwork style blends and pairs endearingly well with the tools his family provided him with.

Throughout the final year of his life, Dilla’s condition worsened considerably. His legs and arms would periodically swell, hindering his ability to work on Donuts. If the pain of using his fingers to operate his MPC became too much to handle, his mother would massage his fingertips, he was simply bent on finishing the record. His sheer determination radiates from each track. From the roaring, vigorous guitar that defines the blood-curdling opener “Workinonit,” spry dance tracks such as “Dilla Says Go” and “Light It,” somber love songs like “Stop”, to signature soul loops on “One for Ghost” and “U-Love,” “Donuts” is a 31-song exhibition in sampling mastery and pushing the boundary of what it means to produce into uncharted territory. This isn’t hyperbole either. Think John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Wolfgang Mozart, this is the company J Dilla stands in with just how innovative projects like Donuts are. Let me explain.

Dilla wasn’t just chopping samples in a way that made your head bop, he was tinkering with and altering our conception of music time. Thanks to the compositional study done by author Dan Charnas in his novel “Dilla Time: The Life and After-Life of J Dilla,” we have a genuine understanding of just how indelible Dilla’s mark on music is. Let’s take a deep-dive into some music theory.

The vast majority of European music counts its rhythm evenly, meaning every beat is of equal length. This is otherwise known as straight time.

Things changed with the introduction of jazz, particularly African-American jazz. Early jazz goliaths such as Louis Armstrong started introducing the concept of beats coming long-short, long-short, which then became known as swing time.

None of that meant anything to J Dilla. With the technological revelation of the MPC, rules like that were nothing more than a musical custom. Thus brought the creation of Dilla Time, fusing both swing and straight time simultaneously. Effectively shredding the shackles of hip-hop producers for eternity, Donuts quite literally reimagined how we view music.

Donuts was officially released on February 7, 2006 to immediate critical acclaim. Sadly, Dilla passed away just three days following the release of the record, unable to revel in the musical feat he had just accomplished. Although Dilla was relatively underground at the time of his passing, the hip-hop world has never glossed over the significance of his work.

“We have to make music and think ‘if Dilla was alive, would he like this?’” said Kanye West in an interview with HYPEBEAST. “It was like he was making Quincy Jones production sessions out of his MPC. His music just felt like drugs.” Frequent collaborator, friend and fellow member of the Mt. Everest of legendary hip-hop producers Madlib has been outspoken in his praise of Dilla. “ “[His production was] like that human feel, and the selections that he chose to sample. Every producer bows down to Dilla whether they like it or not, because everybody took something from him like Coltrane.”

Madlib isn’t wrong. Dilla’s influence reaches well beyond the borders of hip-hop. From modern jazz to R&B, to funk, to lo-fi, Dilla’s bold defiance of musical rules continues to inspire waves upon waves of producers who think outside-the-box. Every off kilter drum, kick or vocal sample that sounds uniquely out-of-place can be traced back to this record and the mind of Dilla. In that way, much like the shape that a donut embodies, Dilla’s impact on hip-hop will be never ending. Rest in Peace Jay Dee.

Luke Modugno is the editor-in-chief of StereoVision.

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How Outkast's "Aquemini" Fulfilled the Prophecy & Changed Hip-Hop Forever

July 04, 2022 by Spencer Lobdell in Read, Classic Reviews

by Spencer Lobdell

On August 3rd, 1995, hip-hop history was forever altered.

While many hip-hop purists like to refer to the second annual Source awards as the night that hip-hop died, they are overlooking the most important moment of the show that I believe to be the moment when the hip-hop we know and love today was born. While most remember the show for Suge Knight’s not-so-subliminal shots at Diddy during his “Soundtrack of the Year” award speech or Snoop Dogg’s infamous “Y’all don’t love us?!” rant, the most important moment of the night followed the announcement for best new artist. When a little-known hip-hop duo called Outkast was announced as the winner they were met with a chorus of boos as the New York audience lost their mind because hometown hero Method Man didn’t win the award. Amidst the boos, a young Andre 3000 grabbed the mic and silenced the crowd with one of the most iconic acceptance speeches TV has ever witnessed, an acceptance speech that was only six words long: The south has something to say.

This moment is referred to as “Andre’s prophecy” as it came one year before Outkast started what very well might be the best three-album-run in the genre’s history. While ATLiens and Stankonia are classics in their own right, they represent Outkast on both ends of the experimental spectrum and when examining influence it’s important to start at the moment when everything changed. That moment for Outkast (and the entirety of hip-hop) was their 1998 release Aquemini.

The cultural importance of the album goes far beyond the quality of the writing and recording on the project. Aquemini is the most influential album in hip-hop history because it’s the project that liberated the genre and enabled rappers to break free from the restrictive constraints that had previously said what you could and couldn’t do in hip-hop. Aquemini is the moment when successful artists were allowed to transcend the title of “rapper” and step into their full potential as boundless creatives. Aquemini is the album that freed hip-hop.

Although it’s impossible to boil Aquemini’s impact down to one groundbreaking trait, the first that must be mentioned is the group’s willingness to blend a variety of genres without fear of alienating traditional hip-hop fans. While Aquemini is certainly a hip-hop project at its core, Big Boi and Andre effortlessly fuse funk, jazz, gospel, world music, and spoken word into the record introducing a level of genre-bending that had yet to be seen in hip-hop. The album’s second song “Rosa Park” establishes this theme early on by being anchored by a country hoe-down inspired instrumental that’s so southern it even houses a harmonica solo played by a real pastor. The deviations from hip-hop go much further on Aquemini though. From the iconic ska-inspired horns in “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” to Erykah Badu and CeeLo Green versing soulful spoken word over the jazzy “Liberation” instrumental, the duo managed to seamlessly mix sounds throughout the project, somehow making a record for both old-school players AND new-school fools.

It’s easy to see the tremendous impact that Outkast breaking genre rules had on modern hip-hop. This impact is palpable across Kanye West’s entire discography from soulful samples featured on The College Dropout and Late Registration to truly boundless hip-hop housed on 808s and Heartbreaks and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Moving into even more recent examples, without the bold experimentation Outkast employed on Aquemini we would’ve never been lucky enough to see XXXTENTACION push the limits of what a rap album could be on ?, his sophomore album. Finally, the artist where Aquemini’s influence is the most noticeable is none other than Kendrick Lamar who won a Pulitzer Prize for To Pimp a Butterfly, an album with a heavy psychedelic jazz influence that can be clearly traced back to the Southern duo.

One of the most obvious impacts that Outkast had on modern rap was welcoming artists from areas other than California and New York to the party. While there certainly were groups and artists making music outside of the two states, none had reached the mass appeal that Outkast did, a feat that signaled to the average consumer that good music could come from anywhere. Outkast broke the geography of hip-hop allowing new scenes to emerge and have lives of their own. The south became a hotbed for hip-hop after Aquemini resulting in generational talents like Lil Wayne, Killer Mike, and T.I. Years later, a similar renaissance was seen in Chicago with artists like Common, Lupe Fiasco, and Kanye West. While there were certainly great artists from regions outside California/New York before Outkast and the growth of different scenes across the country was inevitable, what the duo did for the south and all other developing regions after must be acknowledged.

Thus far we’ve looked at the impact of Outkast’s instrumentation and regional prowess, but we have yet to discuss potentially the most ground-breaking power the group yielded: The context of their writing. Outkast was the first hip-hop act to leverage their authentic duality as a strength rather than a weakness that needed to be covered up. In 1998, there were specific archetypes that rappers had to fit into to be successful. You could either be A Tribe Called Quest or NWA, De La Soul or Wu-Tang Clan, Talib Kweli or Jay-Z. Andre and Big Boi completely destroyed this idea of a single identity and Aquemini was the album where they truly became the player and poet. Outkast would be the first to tell you that hip-hop was so much more than drugs and guns but then turn around to tell you the importance that both had on the culture.

This duality and authenticity that Outkast pioneered is the reason that hip-hop was able to expand and become the biggest genre in the world. While we love gangsta rap and conscious rap alike, it’s hard for the average person to relate and identify with either sub-genre completely, and if the lines were never blurred both camps would’ve simply gone deeper into their respective niches. Not only was Outkast the first to walk this line, but they were undoubtedly the best at it.

Finally, this examination of influence would be incomplete without mentioning the way Andre’s flow taught the best rappers ever how to spit. Although Biggie had already shown the world how mesmerizing a flow could be by the time Aquemini was released, nobody pushed it further than three stacks. Andre broke every rule of rap resulting in some of the most mind-bending flows hip-hop has ever heard. He seemed to write against the beat instead of with it allowing him to fall into absurd pockets that would pave the way for emcees like MF DOOM, Earl Sweatshirt, and Boldy James.

When speaking about extremely influential works, it’s not rare for an album’s greatest strengths to be the projects that came from it. The most beautiful thing about Aquemini is that well it birthed some of the greatest records in hip-hop history, to this day its greatest strength is not what it became but rather what it is. The record is nearly 25 years old and somehow doesn’t sound dated at all. You can play Aquemini next to any of the great albums to come out in the past decade and it sounds right at home. Outkast is without question one of the most legendary hip-hop acts to ever grace a mic and Aquemini is the project that pushed them to this level. “Even though we got two albums,” Big Boi raps on that album’s “Y’all Scared,” “This one feel like the beginning.”

Spencer Lodbell is the co-founder of StereoVision.

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How “Pieces of a Man” Became the Socially-Conscious Voice of a Generation

June 30, 2022 by Asher Ali in Classic Reviews, Read

by Asher Ali

When George Floyd was murdered, Americans dusted off their shoes and marched to fight for justice in a system that was ever-more glaringly built on discrimination and racism. Many different phrases and taglines were prominently featured at the forefront of 2020’s push for change, namely among them a particular truism first uttered from the mouth of poet and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is one of the most used and also distorted lines in times of tumult, and it originates from Scott-Heron’s prominent song of the same title. First used as part of his introduction to his inaugural album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, the song made greater waves on the Chicago native’s second project, Pieces of a Man in 1971.

The album became an underground success with its jazz poetry breaking down the perspective of a beleaguered man desperate to break free from the chains of oppression. In particular, “The Revolution will Not Be Televised” has been at the vanguard of fights for social justice from London in 1983 to Mumbai in 2009.

The album as a whole has also remained consistently relevant to this day through the instrumental impact it had in establishing the sound of hip-hop and jazz rap. Scott-Heron never agreed that he was the forefather of rap, calling his association with the genre “a mistake,” but the state of hip-hop today would be unfathomable because of who the poet and the famous Pieces of a Man inspired.

The groundwork of the album’s sound is laid out by jazz composer, keyboardist and producer Brian Jackson who was a decade-long collaborator with Scott-Heron. His wavy drums, flute and keyboard sounds served as simply a backdrop to Scott-Heron’s whimsical dictation, which was a more novel concept of the time as it gave the lyrics space to stand out on their own instead of forcing them to meld together.

The juxtaposition of gentle rhythm against fluid, yet hard-hitting lyrics inspired Ali Shaheed Muhammad of a Tribe Called Quest to seek out jazz samples to put up against the bars of his fellow group members. Muhammad got together with Jackson in 2021 for a collaborative jazz project, but as a fan of Jackson’s in the early 90s, Muhammad emulated the sonic ideas from Pieces of a Man in a range of Tribe tracks, from “Excursions” to “Keep it Rollin’”.

Free expression of difficult themes was also championed on the album by Scott-Heron and also became a distinguishing factor for A Tribe Called Quest as the group ascended. Even in their younger years, the young emcees of Q-Tip, Jarobi White and Phife Dawg were politically and socially outspoken, talking about xenophobia, veganism and religion in their rhymes. Scott-Heron’s grand influence on hip hop has helped some deem him as the progenitor of the genre; a hard nomination to argue against when you pay attention to how much he’s influenced perhaps the greatest zeitgeist in the genre’s history. Kanye West was maybe one of the most outspoken musicians in the early 2000s, both inside and outside the studio, as the mutual Chicagoan saw his genius as a reincarnation of what Scott-Heron had preached before him.

West has always been proficient at analogizing tropes in the commercial world to dig at something deeper within the human condition, something Scott-Heron was masterful at doing in his poetry as well. Kanye gave clear credit to this on Late Registration’s “My Way Home” which sampled “Home is Where the Hatred Is” from Pieces of a Man, but in a way that was unique for West’s production style at the time.

Instead of chopping it to pieces and reverbing the song to make it beautifully unrecognizable, West loops the hard-hitting piano chords from the song leaving it nearly untouched, while then featuring Scott-Heron’s powerful vocals at points to break through the bars that both West and fellow Scott-Heron studier Common are laying down.

West’s track concludes with 44 seconds of unbroken phrase from Scott-Heron’s classic, where his powerful voice echoes a sentiment about how returning home after suffering can cause more pain. The world knows Kanye West to be someone who rarely lets others tell his own story, yet here Ye was clearly proud to let someone of Scott-Heron’s pedigree describe how he felt.

On Late Registration’s very next song “Crack Music”, Kanye put down an introspective and socially conscious line right out of the Scott-Heron handbook where he said, “You hear that? What Gil Scott was Heron / When our heroes or heroines got hooked on heroin.” Conveying a period of time so vividly is incredibly emblematic of what Scott-Heron was known for, and not only Ye, but Kendrick Lamar out of Los Angeles was able to articulate deep personal narratives in rap, much like the spoken word of the renowned jazz poet.

Much like how Pieces of a Man tells the story of Scott-Heron and his father trying to escape cultural discrimination and injustice, good kid, m.A.A.d city was Kendrick’s tale of how he tried to overcome poverty and extreme dysfunction as a kid living in Compton. Kendrick’s prose would only become more poetic in To Pimp A Butterfly as he ornately paints a tableau of how this country tries to break Black Americans in hopes of conformity. It’s an expansion of the themes expressed in the interpersonal story of Pieces of a Man.

From “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” to “Peace”, the sounds, rhythms and themes of Pieces of a Man are the ideals that have underpinned hip-hop since DJ Kool Herc. And as recently as 2020 when the ugly head of racial inequality was front and center in this country, the message of Scott-Heron’s art resurfaced in full bloom. Perhaps nobody in modern rap has embodied how the duality of Scott-Heron’s message still resonates with the world today quite like Freddie Gibbs. The gangster poet first used the line, “The revolution is the genocide / my execution might be televised,” in Alfredo’s “Scottie Beam” and later on released his own rendition of the soulful and sorrowful “Winter in America” which Scott-Heron and Jackson wrote as they saw first-hand how democracy can fail this country.

The best art is that which transcends time with the message it brings, and Pieces of a Man has not just reached multiple generations but inspired them too socially and artistically.

Asher Ali is a staff writer.

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