J Dilla’s 2006 masterpiece, Donuts, finally gets the 33 1/3 treatment from Bloomsbury’s series of books on what it deems to be important albums. Published today, J Dilla’s Donuts is written by Canadian author Jordan Ferguson, who analyzes the methods the Detroit hiphop producer used to create this influential, innovative work, interviews Dilla associates, peers, and Stones Throw Records employees, and recounts how Donuts, whose tracks were constructed as their creator was hospitalized while fighting lupus and the incurable blood disease TTP, is ultimately about his death. Ferguson also places Detroit in the context of hiphop history and discusses how it impacted Dilla’s aesthetics.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but here are a few passages that give you an idea of Ferguson’s approach.

Donuts was never meant for you. It was never meant for me. It’s a private and personal record, a conversation between an artist and his instrument, which just happens to be the history of recorded music. It’s the final testament of a man coming to terms with his mortality; a last love letter to his family and the people he cared about.

Despite sounding jarring and scattershot, Donuts is a deceptively unified album, a work that challenges and confronts expectations, designed to be listened to in its entirety: a rarity in a genre not known for being album-oriented.

[Dilla] always refused to limit himself, he valued his ears over what the accepted rules of production might dictate he do. He would program his drums ahead of or behind the beat, or lift a sample from any source in any genre from funk and soul to lounge and folk, and still make something wholly his own, a fearlessness that cemented his position among the all time greats of the art form.

Ferguson further elaborates on his book in the clip below.