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Other highlights on the album include “Don’t Cry,” which employs an old, powerful soul record and deepens its power through his producing ability. The beat is entrancing, harkening back to Aphex Twin but giving it a punchier hip-hop feel. Dilla pulls from a wide range of source material - everything from Stevie Wonder’s “For Once in my Life” on “The Twister (Huh, What),” a rendition of “Light My Fire,” to obscure ambient pieces like Raymond Scott’s “Lightworks.” The latter is repurposed in spectacular fashion on the album, with the track of the same name. Following the tradition of DJ Shadow but resisting comparison to other artists in sample-based music, “Donuts” is not only a template of fantastic hip-hop beats, but a compulsively listenable and incredibly diverse album. “Donuts” was the last gift he gave to world, and boy did it deliver. It’s easy to romanticize the “vision” of artists and the creative process, especially when the artist isn’t around anymore to explain it. The album was composed during an extended hospital stay - J Dilla had been in poor health in the years leading up to his death. I love the “plunderphonics” term: we imagine a pirate digging through buried treasure, only it’s Dilla sifting through some hundreds of albums, some rare, some popular, some we might not even consider “music.” The beauty of sample-based music - often ridiculously called “plunderphonics” - is the ability to unearth old classics and obscure references and infuse them into a larger musical narrative. I’ve personally never heard of them, but hearing them on J Dilla’s masterful album “Donuts”, released the week before his death, it feels like Dilla did them justice. Now, if you haven’t heard of 10cc, I don’t blame you. Nearly 14 years after his death, legendary hip-hop producer J Dilla is being sued for illegally sampling 10cc’s 1974 album “The Worst Band in the World”.