On the same day J Dilla’s Donuts entered the world, the visionary producer turned 32 years old; but the artist and his final creation would only overlap on earth for a few short days. After a long and painful battle against the blood disease thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) and complications from lupus, Dilla—born James Dewitt Yancey—died on February 10, 2006.

Dilla has been gone for nearly 20 years now, but his body of work, and Donuts in particular, has taken on a life of its own, casting an ever-expanding influence on 21st-century music. Though his roots were planted firmly in hip-hop, the enduring appeal of Donuts has partly to do with how it both embraces and transcends the genre. Today, J Dilla is better-known than he ever was in his lifetime, and the music he left behind continues to play an active role in the evolution of different styles.

Forged in Detroit

J Dilla was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, the birthplace of Motown, techno, and Parliament Funkadelic—not to mention hard-rocking proto-punks, Death. As a bastion of African American music, hints of Detroit ring through every corner of modern music. From an early age, the city’s hard-driving grooves and his family’s musical background made an impression on Dilla. According to the 2022 book Dilla Time, by Dan Charnas, the young Dilla was already developing DJ skills before he could read. Over time, he began to demonstrate a tendency for perfectionism, down to the way he organized his room, along with a penchant for dissecting and modifying electronics.

During the ’80s and ’90s, Detroit was dancing to the uptempo pulse of electro, house, and the city’s own burgeoning “techno” music. Teenage Dilla soaked up the city’s mix of electronic funk from the legendary radio shows of Jeff Mills and the Electrifying Mojo, but he was most interested in the slower sounds of rap coming out of New York. Forming crews with neighborhood friends and mastering the tedious process of making “pause tape” beats with a simple cassette deck, he quickly showed his dedication to the art and culture of hip-hop. While Detroit’s hip-hop didn’t have the draw of its coastal counterparts, Dilla would soon play a central role in the city’s small but vital scene.

As Dilla continued to pursue his musical ambitions, local veterans began to take notice. The late musician Amp Fiddler, who died in 2023, had his fingerprints all over the sounds of Detroit—from Parliament Funkadelic to house music to hip-hop. He was also the one who introduced Dilla to the Akai MIDI Production Center—or MPC, the sampling workstation that, in J Dilla’s hands, would become like hip-hop’s answer to Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster.

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[Above: the MPC-3000, which in time would become one of J Dilla's primary tools for music creation. Image via Perfect Circuit's archives.]

By the time he landed his first official release, Dilla had already mastered the MPC and honed a signature sound by placing notes between the beats. With his friend Phat Kat on the mic, Dilla—then called Jay Dee—paired the hard-hitting drums of their song “Front Street” with an ethereal chord loop that could have come from a Detroit techno track. Then, as a member of the group Slum Village with rappers T3 and Baatin, Dilla began to refine his and turn heads in the process.

After Amp Fiddler passed a Slum Village demo to Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest in 1994, the name Jay Dee spread quickly through the upper echelons of rap. Before long, some of the era’s biggest acts—including the Pharcyde, De La Soul, and the Tribe themselves—were rhyming over Dilla’s laid-back swing.

When Q-Tip launched a production outfit called The Ummah, he invited Dilla to join the group, and soon the young Detroiter’s tracks and remixes were backing the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B. Meanwhile on trips to New York, Dilla started spending time at Electric Lady Studios, where architects of the neo-soul sound, including D’Angelo, Questlove and Eryka Badu were crafting new material. As Dilla became a core member of the loose collective known as the Soulquarians, his unique time feel became a hallmark of the emerging sound.

However, his signature productions were still obscured by the Ummah name, and his contributions to groundbreaking records by D’Angelo, Common, and other Soulquarians also remained behind the scenes. Ready to seek recognition on his own terms, he lined up a solo record for B.B.E., an independent U.K. label. Welcome 2 Detroit not only revealed new musical directions with elements of live instrumentation and Detroit techno, it featured Dilla as an MC rapping over another producer’s beat. The 2001 record marked the next phase of Yancey’s career with a new name: J Dilla.

As a fellow Detroiter called Eminem brought more attention to the city’s rap scene, Dilla was inking a new contract with MCA. With the lucrative deal, his career seemed poised for mainstream success. However, a combination of budgetary problems, company shakeups, and creative misfires derailed the plan.

Then in early 2003, Dilla got sick. The occasional health issues he’d started noticing were mounting into something more serious, and after returning home from a tough European tour, he checked into the hospital. Doctors quickly discovered that Dilla’s illness was severe, and his kidneys were struggling badly. He was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder called TTP, and began a grueling regimen of daily dialysis treatments.

Detroit may have shaped Dilla’s musical identity, but success always came more easily elsewhere. And as he struggled to navigate the industry, independent labels in England, Germany, and especially Los Angeles were eager to embrace him. For the album 2003 Champion Sound, Dilla collaborated with Madlib, an LA producer and MC with a shared appreciation for Brazilian funk and Turkish psych-rock. While the slick, synthesized sounds of the Neptunes dominated the airwaves, the Jaylib project took cues from the gritty samples of crate-digging producers like DJ Premier and Pete Rock.

When Dilla decided it was time to leave Detroit, his creative connections made Los Angeles an obvious choice. And while working with major labels had been a rollercoaster, Stones Throw, the LA imprint behind Champion Sound, fully appreciated his value. Founded by producer and DJ Chris Manak—better known as Peanut Butter Wolf—Stones Throw would go on to publish Dilla’s best-known work.

In Los Angeles, Dilla took a room in Common’s house, who had also encouraged the move. Soon after arriving, he was introduced to the city’s underground hip-hop community and its endless shelves of used records. However, as his illness progressed, working and traveling got increasingly painful. On a European tour with J.Rocc of the Beat Junkies DJ crew, he performed in a wheelchair, and on a subsequent trip to Brazil, he was forced to take an emergency flight home. Although he tried to downplay his symptoms, his difficulty with everyday tasks and extended hospital stays made it apparent that his time was limited.

Donuts: the Legend

The last album Dilla released was a solo record called Donuts. As legend has it, he made it on his deathbed with nothing but an SP-303 sampler and a box of 45s, racing to complete his final statement. According to Charnas, that narrative isn’t entirely true. Dilla is so closely associated with his gear that his MPC-3000 sits in the Smithsonian—but as Charnas points out, Donuts' sound is really the result of J Dilla’s relationship with Pro Tools software. And although the record’s release came just three days before J Dilla died, the bulk of the material was composed well before.

Though he already had a formidable discography, Dilla’s rigid work ethic produced a constant flow of “beat tapes,” filled with short demos and ideas. When Peanut Butter Wolf first heard a new beat tape composed mainly from 7” singles from Rockaway Records in Silverlake, he was tempted to release it on the spot. But with input from the rest of the Stones Throw team, the concept developed for a full-length album that didn’t ask too much of the ailing producer. Supplementing the tape’s rapid-fire flow with a few more tracks and edits to extend the runtime, Donuts took on its final form. After the long process of artwork, layout, and manufacturing, Donuts finally arrived on February 7, 2006, J Dilla’s 32nd birthday. On February 10th, he was gone.

The circumstances around Donuts garnered attention from the mainstream press, and for the dedicated music media, the album’s arrival coinciding with the loss of its creator was a major story. For all the rap fans who’d unknowingly nodded to his beats, Donuts put J Dilla in the spotlight. And like a hip-hop Dark Side of the Moon, speculation on Donuts has generated its own lore surrounding everything from the gear Dilla used, to hidden messages he placed within. The popular image of Dilla programming his sampler in a hospital bed has even been compared to Mozart furiously composing while on the verge of death.

Donuts was already well-received when it debuted in 2006, but its stature has only grown since. The 2013 reissue of Donuts earned a perfect 10 from Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone even named it one of the 500 Greatest of All Time. Akin to Biggie and Tupac, the combination of tragic history and pop mythology has elevated J Dilla and Donuts to a legendary status. But the cult of Dilla couldn’t exist without music compelling enough to back it up.

Donuts: Style, Aesthetic, & Influence

Donuts isn't the first record of its kind. On paper, ambitious works of sample-based music, like DJ Shadow’s 1996 landmark, ENDtroducing explore similar territory. Yet Donuts doesn’t quite sound like anything else. Instead of Shadow’s sweeping instrumental movements, Dilla's tracks flow from one to the next with the free-associative logic of thumbing through a record collection.

The individual tracks on Donuts capture the creativity and craftsmanship Dilla put into his music, but it’s the album’s structure that makes it an experience. Over its runtime of 43 minutes and 24 seconds, Donuts blazes through 31 tracks, each representing a distinctive idea. But as the record spins, they merge seamlessly into suites of shifting moods and themes.

From well-worn breakbeats and interjections from rap classics to the oddball British band 10cc and antique advertising jingles, the samples on Donuts cover a lot of musical ground. The interplay and juxtapositions between them give the record its singular atmosphere. But Dilla also has a way of highlighting the sonic details that make each sample special, like the fuzzed-out leads of “Stop,” the reverberating snare on “Bye,” and the stereo tricks of “Two Can Win.” Then, every so often, an air raid siren rings through the mix to remind you whose world you’re in.

Digging for samples is often about hunting for things like percussion solos, piano intros, or drumless string passages—anything that can be layered on top of other sounds. Dilla, however, takes a more horizontal approach, with plenty of chops featuring a full band. At certain points, he even lets the original tunes play out a few bars before flipping them upside down.

Contrary to most of Dilla’s work—and the conventions of rap beats in general—Donuts doesn’t bother to leave room for an MC. Instead, he lets the samples do the singing. Often sitting front and center, some voices ring out while others are dissected by the syllable and stitched back into new words. Donuts may not have lyrics in a traditional sense, but in forum posts and YouTube comments, there are paragraphs analyzing what each phrase could be alluding to.

Emotionally ambiguous and filled with ear candy, Donuts rewards repeat listens. Of course, its enduring appeal has also led it to become a broad influence on the music that followed. Award-winning pianist Robert Glasper defied pushback from seasoned vets to popularize Dilla’s time feel in the world of jazz, while crossover artists such as Terrace Martin, Thundercat, and Kamasi Washington helped reinforce the connections through their work with Kenrick Lamar.

Before ascending to superstardom, Kayne West was taking cues from another Midwestern soul-sampling producer just a few years older called Jay Dee. However, the Dilla influence that bubbled up to the surface is nothing compared to its impact on the underground. In Los Angeles, a weekly club night called Low End Theory inspired an entirely new sound built on J Dilla’s elastic rhythms. Combining sub-busting bass with an anything-goes attitude toward sampling, Low End Theory regulars such as Flying Lotus, Tokimonsta, and Ras G grew from hometown heroes into global ambassadors of “LA beats.” While Dilla’s productions had pushed the boundaries of hip-hop from within, the next generation made instrumental rap beats into a vital subgenre of electronic music.

In other corners of electronic music, Donuts is revered for reasons that have more to do with Dilla’s sampling methods than his sense of rhythm.

In the 1980s, hip-hop groups quickly seized the arrival sampling technology to mimic the way a DJ could manually loop part of a song. By the end of the decade, hip hop records like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys were splicing fragments of sound into “sampladelic” collages. At the same time, punk, avant-garde, and industrial musicians inspired by cut-and-paste techniques in visual art and literature used sampling in more abrasive ways.

In the mid-80s, musician and writer John Oswald coined the term “plunderphonics” to describe the way some of these acts, such as Negativland, appropriated advertising and pop music to poke fun at mass media and the logic of copyright laws. Since then, plunderphonics has grown into a wide category of works constructed entirely from pre-existing material, from atonal soundscapes to the dancefloor “mashups” of Girl Talk and the experimental pop of the Avalanches’ 2000 release, Since I Left You.

As a fully completed piece rather than an instrumental soundbed for an MC, Donuts bridges the gap between plunderphonics and hip-hop, shortening the distance between some of most commercially successful and unconventional music ever made. And as a record that remains both readily available and musically approachable, Donuts is recommended on lists and forums across the internet as a gateway into plunderphonics and other paths of musical discovery. But in the same way listeners have appreciated Donuts in the context of experimental music, artists in certain spheres of indie have been inspired by it. Animal Collective member Noah Lennox cited the record as a major influence on his work as Panda Bear, and reviewers have also invoked Dilla to describe solo tracks by Eric Copeland of the electronic noise rock band Black Dice.

In recent years, J Dilla’s name has started to appear in hashtags under streams and playlists of “lofi beats” intended as a light soundtrack while you concentrate on something else. Ironically, J Dilla, and Donuts in particular, are anything but background music. According to Questlove, the first time he heard Dilla’s muffled drums while outside a club, it stopped him in his tracks. Or as Madlib rapped over a Dilla beat on Champion Sound, you “must be out of your head if your system ain’t up to the red.”

As musical discovery becomes increasingly governed by algorithms, Donuts is a testament to how relationships, geography, and happenstance shape our relationships with music. When it came to Dilla’s samples, he didn’t rely on the nostalgic aura of bygone hits, nor was he pulling from a stash of closely guarded rarities. Instead, the songs that Donuts is sculpted from represent the idiosyncrasies of individual taste. As Dilla guides you through the music he loves, he’s cropping, looping, and zooming in on the reasons why. Behind the perfectionism was a lifelong fan, enchanted by music. Donuts is about the experience of listening to it all.