If the six years since Donuts was released has taught us anything, it's that a great album can be a sort of open-ended puzzle that can be solved from multiple angles. It's become James Yancey's signature production opus, even though the path that led him to it was laid down by a lifetime of collaboration, workshopping, and constant production in the service of other people's voices. It's the last work he created in his lifetime, released the week of his death, and yet it still feels like his music hasn't run out of time yet, whether that's down to periodic dives back into his vaults, or via the artists that've picked up inspiration and run with it to new places. It's a widely praised favorite for so many people, and yet there's something about Donuts that feels like such an intensely personal statement. Even attempting to engage with it objectively, setting aside the direct experience of the man who made it, doesn't entirely break through its mystique.
But as music, the role Donuts occupies is something more than the weight of its rep or impact-- or even the circumstances in which it was created, as hard as it is to separate the idea of the album's sound from the motivation of a prolific creator knowingly constructing his final work. As an album, it just gets deeper the longer you live with it, front-to-back listens revealing emotions and moods that get pulled in every direction: mournful nostalgia, absurd comedy, raucous joy, sinister intensity. There's all kinds of neat little tics and idiosyncrasies, pushing Dilla's early 00s beat-tape experiments and exchanges into compositions that tinker with Thelonious Monk's off-kilter timing and Lee Perry's warped fidelity. The songs on Donuts are like miniature lessons in how to take sample-based music and use it to build elaborate suites out of all those nagging little pieces of songs that stick with you long after you've last listened to them. There's little else in Dilla's catalog quite like it; at points, it sounds like he was busy quickly unlearning everything he'd taught himself just so he could have the experience of relearning it all again one last time.
While Donuts is best experienced as a self-contained album, Stones Throw has gone to the unusual step of reissuing it as a box set of 7" singles, a format that initially comes across like a boutique novelty at the expense of practicality. If anybody owns a scuffed-up old jukebox and wants to stock it with records that recreate the feeling of recalling jumbled-up memories and mulling over them for a while, then sure, this would work great. And it's hard not to appreciate the symbolism of issuing this album on 7" records, considering that the hospital bedside setup Yancey used to create a significant portion of Donuts consisted of a SP-303 hooked up to a portable 45 turntable. But is there a reason to chop one of the last 10 years' purest can't-listen-to-just-one-track experiences into pieces, especially when the target audience for this reissue likely already has a version they don't have to keep flipping over?
Well, think of it this way: What's your favorite song on Donuts? Breaking an album like this into its component tracks puts a new viewpoint on a record that's always been easy to see as a whole, and the limitations of three minutes or so per side gives individual moments more weight on their own. The rhythms of the isolated tracks can feel truncated and abrupt in this new context-- without anything to segue into, side-enders like "Workinonit" and "One Eleven" flip off like a light switch-- but it still fits the suddenness and in medias res editing of the album's handmade, conversational feel. And it only serves to elucidate how much Dilla could do in such a limited amount of space. He could fit a lot of off-beat meter-shifting, loop-upending false starts and jump cuts, subtle slow-build dynamics, and double-back surprises into the little 50-to-80-second vignettes. That's plenty of time to set up expectations, only to twist them around a thousand degrees.
There's also some clever sequencing to the sides that lets new thematic possibilities appear. Of course "Airworks" and "Lightworks" share a side to themselves, and as consecutive tracks they felt like weird companion pieces in the middle of the original album. On record, that odd pairing-- a hiccupy series of tics drawn from L.V. Johnson's classic Chicago soul, transitioning into a cheerfully odd rework of Raymond Scott's late 50s musique concrete corporate jingles-- forces those two cuts into closer quarters and highlights their shared tendency to loop vocal phrases and backbeats into knots you can't untie. Same goes for "Two Can Win" and "Don't Cry", which consecutively showcase Yancey's knack for building classic hip-hop beats out of solitary 70s R&B nuggets. The choppy yet lush elegance of "Dilla Says Go"/"Walkinonit" and the heartbroken please-stay pleas of "Hi."/"Bye." stand out in isolation, too.
But even without that benefit of new juxtapositions, it's still eye-opening to take each little set of songs as it comes and not sweat getting to the next one, pinpointing the inimitable technique and sample-sourcing scope of Donuts through certain distinct moments. Just pull out "Geek Down" and note how Dilla took one of the most recognizable samples in hip-hop, ESG's "UFO", and found something surprising and obscure to lay it over: a 2002 7" retro-funk b-side called "Charlie's Theme" released in limited numbers by an incognito Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley from Portishead. That's in keeping with the other moments where he's clearly working with some well-used building block that every sample-based producer should know their way around-- Mountain's "Long Red" ("Stepson of the Clapper"); Malcolm McLaren's "Buffalo Gals" ("Workinonit" and "The Twister"); the Beastie Boys' "The New Style" ("The New")-- and still finds a way to fit that piece into something uniquely his by drawing from an encyclopedic catalog of under-utilized funk and soul deep cuts. Even the ubiquitous siren he lifted from Mantronix feels like Dilla's sole property now-- maybe because Kurtis never thought to lay it over a mobius-strip revamp of Kool and the Gang album track "Fruitman" ("The Diff'rence") or a tense, staggered piano loop cut from Martha Reeves' mid 70s post-Motown solo debut ("Thunder").
If you need any extra incentive, the box set packs in some bonus material. There's a medley of tracks that share sources with Donuts instrumentals "Anti-American Graffiti" and "Geek Down", which were originally slated for MF DOOM and Ghostface showcase "Sniper Elite & Murder Goons". The track shows both MCs still in post-Madvillainy/Pretty Toney form, DOOM twisting internal rhymes at a ridiculous clip, Ghost still verbally sprinting like he's coming off "Run". And "Signs", originally a Fan Club release, tacks on a stand-alone postscript that hints at some of Donuts' brilliance, but mostly just provides a pretty straightforward (if appealing) instrumental break based off a needly organ riff and that old Syl Johnson "Different Strokes" grunt. The rarities are enticing, the packaging is immaculate, and the format is intriguing. But above all else, this reissue provides a good excuse to revisit an old favorite in a new light, and in the end it's still a classic no matter how you hear it-- on 45, CD, MP3, or just running through your head.
