J Dilla: Donuts : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Detroit native Jay Dee is a top-ranked architect of soulful hip-hop, having produced purebred material for Common, the Pharcyde and Slum Village. Donuts -- created from a hospital bed and home studio while Dee recuperated from a mystery ailment -- is a box-fresh assortment of thirty-one instrumentals, most barely more than a minute long, built from a basic palette of sweet soul loops, rudimentary scratches and glazed electronics. "Stop" sports a moment's silence where a kick drum might go; its absence creates a dubby propulsion. In "People," the pitch-shifted loop of Eddie Kendricks singing "My People . . . Hold On" becomes even more powerful over the track's crazy carousel of conga drums. This beatmaker has done good -- as a sampled voice instructs on "Stepson of the Clapper": "Clap your hands to what he's doin'!"