The Obscure J Dilla Beat Tape That Changed Music Forever

Long before Donuts, a passed-around cassette made the Detroit producer a key influence on the sound of hip-hop and soul. The author of the celebrated Dilla Time takes us inside the making of this legendary tape.



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When fans and critics attempt to induct the uninitiated into the wonders of J Dilla, the beat producer who died 17 years ago this week, the commonly recommended collection is 2006’s Donuts. It is, by far, his most famous album, in part because it’s his epitaph, finished while he languished in a Los Angeles hospital bed and released three days before his death. The 31 clipped instrumentals carry no vocals save for the ones Dilla extracted and manipulated from his copious sample sources; this lent a posthumous air of prophecy to the project and led listeners to extract messages from the sonic mayhem. Donuts was influential in its jagged approach to sampling, bringing fracture to the fore of hip-hop and spurring the careers of beatmakers like Flying Lotus and Knxwledge.






But as great as Donuts is, there is a more obscure piece of collected work that best illuminates the ongoing influence of James Dewitt Yancey: a humble beat tape created eight years prior, when he was still going by the name Jay Dee. Unlike Donuts, which also began as a beat CD, this collection was never officially released—and likely never will be. A number of the tracks were sold as beats for other artists’ songs years ago, and most contain samples that have not been cleared. You can find parts of it here and there on streaming services, but your best bet is this on YouTube. The cassette was circulated by Jay himself in different iterations in the late ’90s, with different sequences and some different beats, and subsequently passed around the music industry via second- and third-generation dubs. It did not even have a name. Dilla-heads assigned it a title after the fact, taken from the spoken introduction: “Another batch from the one they call Jay Dee.”










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