DONUTS (33 ⅓ ) - Jordan Ferguson

Knocking out some shorter books right here at the end of the year, figured that since I read that long DILLA TIME biography it made sense to read what I believe to be the only other treatment of Dilla in book form, this 33 ⅓ addition about his magnum opus, Donuts. Obviously, this book suffers from having read the longer Dilla piece first. I don’t think Ferguson anticipated that someone would be writing a 400 page biography of Dila that really digs into every aspect of his sadly short life, so when he includes a 50 page version I’m sure it seemed like it would go down as the final word and he spends too much time on it. I would have preferred the book be just about Donuts, the album and music itself. Ferguson tries to place the album within the larger context of Dilla’s life, which is a good idea but is done much more exhaustively by DILLA TIME. Which is not to say that there wasn’t a few bits of info that were new to me. I didn’t know that Dilla’s very last recording was a flip of “America Eats its Own” by Funkadelic, or that Pete Rock was the first producer to use a producer tag. There is a much more in-depth discussion here of exactly where the samples in each record on Donuts are from and what techniques he’s using to bring them all together. This was the stuff I was really here for, and for the second part of the book, Ferguson delivers. He is also big on the “this record is about dying” theory which I hadn’t really considered before DILLA TIME. The case is pretty strong, given the circumstances of its creation. However, as a listener who went over a decade before hearing this theory, I find the album melancholy and laid back, more than morbid. If it’s about death it’s more in a “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream” sort of way, a melding with an afterlife where his perfectly selected and flipped samples live alongside one another forever. A musical Elysian fields, if you will. I think Ferguson oversells how much the album shifts moods, I find the vibe very consistent. Ferguson writes, “Each beat can be plotted with a graph with “skullkicking” on one axis and “heartbreaking” on the other; with each track containing both colors in varying opacities,” which seems strong to me. I don’t think of any of the beats as fully “skullkicking” or “heartbreaking” at all, they all seem blunted, ethereal and untouchably cool. Even the tracks he thinks of as harsh and challenging, like “Glazed,” I still get lost in and spaced out on. But that’s just me. Ferguson has a ton of interesting stuff to say about this album, which truly is the greatest beat tape of all time and is a top 10 hip-hop record. There deserves to be as much writing on this as there is on Dylan or Springsteen or Lou Reed. Obviously, DILLA TIME is the book to read if you wanna understand Dilla but if you’re not read for the 400 page commitment that that entails, this is more than an acceptable place to start. 31 perfect tunes