J Dilla releases 'Donuts' — three days before his death

Why it matters

Donuts came out February 7, 2006, on Stones Throw. It is J Dilla's twentieth studio project, depending on how you count, and it was largely composed and assembled while Yancey was hospitalized in Cedars-Sinai for complications related to lupus and TTP (thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura). He had been in and out of the hospital for years. He had been making beats from his hospital bed on a small portable setup that Madlib and Peanut Butter Wolf had assembled for him. Donuts is thirty-one instrumental tracks, most of them under two minutes, almost all of them looped soul-and-funk samples with hard drums and unconventional time-signature feels. The album is structured as a kind of beat-tape art object, with songs that bleed into each other and end before they conventionally should. Dilla died three days after it came out. The album then became, almost immediately, one of the most-cited beat-tape records ever made. Every producer who came up after 2006 in the underground-soul-rap space (Madlib, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Knxwledge, KAYTRANADA, the Soulection crew, Anderson .Paak) cites Donuts as load-bearing. You should hear it. The thirty-one tracks fit together like a mosaic.