J DILLA AKA JAY DEE - Donuts

Hip-hop has two problems: one unfortunately incurable, and one that will become a driving force. The first, and by far the more tragic, is that J Dilla aka Jay Dee, brilliant beatmaker, producer, arranger and one of the pillars of the Stones Throw roster, passed away on February 10 of this year, shortly before the release of "Donuts". And it's precisely "Donuts" that is hip-hop's second problem from now on, because this record is visionary and definitively opens, or perhaps closes, a stylistic path born a few years earlier.

Jay flies sky-high, loading up on medication not to chase some rocker à-la Pete “sniff” Doherty bullshit, but because he's struck by a serious immune system disease that confines him to hospital, and it's there that "Donuts" is born, a record that is anything but sad or resigned.

Thirty-one unfinished songs, thirty-one songs that could all become hits, more or less cult ones, and instead they remain caught in the throat, never completing themselves, yet burrowing deep into the brain, carving out space through that driving force so often mentioned and never pinned down: expressive urgency, an urgency to let every single hummable hook flow out and dress it up, embellish it, make it perfect and then leave it standing still, an end in itself, yet at the service of everyone and of the work itself.

J Dilla provocatively starts from the end, opening with the "Outro", as if he wanted to say goodbye to everyone right from the start because perhaps he'll already be gone by the time the "Intro" arrives, and in between it's a solitary journey into black fantasy, black like Gil Scott-Heron, like Marvin Gaye, like Public Enemy or his friend Madlib; hooks are fired off one after another, first funk, then soul, then hip-hop pure and hard, always unbeatable and meticulously crafted, in a whirlwind of sketches that are unfinished yet utterly complete in their spontaneity.

You have to stop worrying about finding a common thread running through all the tracks on the record; the only guiding vision is the one Jay Dee carries in his imagination, which he opens up to us, showing how it's possible to bring Madlib's nervous energy into pop form while at the same time sharpening its frenzy.

Scrolling through the tracks on “Donuts” is like walking through the Hall Of Fame of black music: nothing is spared, everything is reworked in a patchwork key — though it's not really a patchwork, it's closer to a creative storm, a series of flashes stringing together just the right moves to strike straight at heart and mind, amid broken or barely-sketched beats and female voices chasing one another.

Recounting individual tracks would honestly make little sense — it might be the usual overused line that the work has to be taken as a whole, but I don't care, for one simple reason: “Donuts” is gorgeous just like this, with no single episode truly standing out and every song managing to lodge itself in memory, the kind you find yourself humming on the street.

Its only flaw is that it won't have a follow-up.

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12/09/2006