This song’s about sex, right? Imagine being perpetually sick, pretty aware you’re dying, in and out of the hospital, losing weight, wheel-chair bound, all the stuff we read about Dilla’s final years, months…I think fucking was on his mind a lot.Not on some “I need a nut” shit but like as intense, real, sensory experience–the sensory experience really—that being sick not only doesn’t allow but really, doesn’t put you in the mood for either. The track’s romantic, slinking and sliding around but confident and then slowing down to a porno track chug just as Dilla overlays those sex moans. And then, he speeds the track up again, moving the moans in and around your speakers, like a chick whispering them in your ear.
The sex sounds of The Beasties’ “High Plains Drifter” or Pharcyde’s “Soul Flower (Remix)” but used sincerely; no bratty irreverence here. Not that bratty irreverence is bad–Dilla employs it at points on Donuts–but on “Time: The Donut of the Heart” shit is about getting real, emotionally real.
Standing under the streetlight and talking on the phone with Rome for an hour about the magnitude of Jay Dee’s contributions.
“Do people realize we just lost one of the greatest of our time?”
Waiting over a month before finally calling my friend in Detroit who knew Jay Dee well.
My friend telling me stories about hearing Jay’s early work how they would hang at The Shop.
He ends the conversation by saying, “I’ll call you back, Proof is on the other line.”
-Thaddeus Clark
Like Japanese emo-metal progressives Envy, Korean punk band Bullssazo ground their sound on speed, anger, and heaviness but bounce off of that into all kinds of directions, worming through the not so apparent but very there borders of genre. Outside of –which also features a shoegaze cover of Common/Dilla’s “The Light”!–there’s not too much English language info on Bullssazo, so we’re mainly left with this beautiful, brilliant cover of “Time”.What’s especially great about this cover is how they never speed it up or rock out and the winding Jackson Five melody that dominates “Time” could easily be picked up and played at a punk pace. They just let the loop wander tossing in a thump of drums, a cymbal crash, or light bells (these instrumental flourishes ooze in and back out like those half-a-second samples pervading Donuts) when they feel like it and let it build and build organically into something more and more transcendent. What is that synth wheeze towards the end? It basically just becomes this intense post-rock song, less a cover of anything…
But that’s the perfect tribute to Dilla. More than however many rappers rap whatever over Donuts beats, doing a experimental art-metal cover of a Dilla beat makes complete, indirect sense.
Posting this song on February 10th, Dilla’s death day seems weirdly, unfortunately serendipitous. Even though it’s not smack-dab in the middle of the album, “Time” is the center-piece of Donuts and even though it’s less explicit than songs like “Bye” or “Last Donut of the Night” in referring to death, it does mention time, a thing we’re all always considering but something that becomes more pressing when you know you’re running out of it…”How long do I got, Doc?”.“Let’s talk about time travelin, rhyme javelin, something mind unravelin”…
In one of Noz’s more prescient XXL blogs (see Footnote #3), he mocks the Cult of Dilla, especially in reference to the incredibly played-out rant about the way Dilla flips the speeds and timing on some of his beats. That time-flipping, time-traveling shit is really clear on “Time: The Donut of the Heart”, when the beat slows down without really sounding like it’s slowed-down and then speeds back-up but it’s really never been slowed down (or something?). And Noz is right to josh Dilla stan rants like that because while it’s technically impressive and kinda insane to think about Dilla doing all this crazy stuff to this Jackson 5 joint, it’s producer, beat-flipper mumbo jumbo really. It’s what that flipping and time-fucking does (and means) that matters.
And on “Time”, Dilla’s working with musical timing not only for some more props from a group of people that love each and every beat he made, but working with musical timing as a way to control something, anything in this life. As he–and all of us–inch closer to the end, we’d love to slow down moments and speed others up but we can’t. At least in Dilla’s musical world of the forms he could move back and move forward…in his own way, time travel.
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