So why is J Dilla’s Donuts on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
Donuts is a sample-based, mostly instrumental record that puts soul, jazz, rock, and funk into a blender and serves it up as a tasty hip hop concoction all its own. It’s an album that perhaps at first feels like a bunch of separate pieces, but I’m convinced that the more you sit with it, the more it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
J Dilla’s death at the young age of 32 was a gut punch for the music world. He combined rare musical chops with a unique creative vision, and his influence can be heard in the work of countless music producers and creators who came after him.
“Workinonit” is the track that gave me my first indication of J Dilla’s genius. You can hear things like car revving noises, Beastie Boys samples dating back to License to Ill, pinging electronic notes, and even a single guitar chord playing once in a while all while female vocals joyfully sing, “Workin’ on it!” And that only describes some of what’s going on, really. It’s a wild sound collage that’s not quite like anything I’ve ever heard before.
I’m always a sucker for a good cover of The Doors, and in fact, Donuts represents at least the third album on the best 1,000 albums ever list that has covered “Light My Fire” specifically*.
* Also see: Ultra-Lounge: On the Rocks (#955) and The Mike Flowers Pops’ A Groovy Place (#839).
“Light It” layers a hippie hippie love version of the “Light My Fire” chorus underneath shimmery samples, making for a strange yet surprisingly pleasing thirty-five second loop.
For yet another cover of The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” Type O Negative delivers a version that is insanely different than the others I mention above, and in fact it’s a really incredible hard metal-meets-goth take on the classic.
The Beastie Boys also make a cameo appearance of sorts on “The New,” which plays off the B-Boys’ “The New Style.” “The New” adds horn samples and other fun vocal effects.
Some stats & info about J Dilla – Donuts
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Hip Hop, Instrumental
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #386
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was Donuts released? 2006
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #537 out of 1,000
J Dilla’s Donuts on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.