Rap Snacks

Dilla endorses Fruit Gushers
(photo by Roger Erickson)

Jay Dee - "Time: The Donuts of the Heart" (mp3)
(purchase here)

I like food. Really, I just like Cinnamon Apple Cider Donuts. At the Grand Army Plaza market. From the vendor closest to Park Place West. Because their donuts are THE BEST: small and compact, light and fluffy dough with a moderate sugar content. The best part is the texture: as you set to sink your teeth into that chewy flesh, the brown sugar crystals coating the skin crunch and crumble to the side, a perfect counterpoint. The second best part is that the mild sweetness can be chalked up to a balance between sweet dough and the sugary goodness on the outside -- if you really like your sweet content mild, just stop reading. This isn't an effing food review.

Dilla's newest are like my favorite donuts: short, sweet, on point. I like to get a lot of the donuts; he comes through with 30+ goodies. I like the subtle contrasts of each 'nut; he balances sugar, sweet soul with clipped, gurpin' beats (I'm having flashbacks remembering that word). And similar to that feeling of insatiable sadness when I finish a dozen of those donuts, Donuts sounds incomplete. These aren't compositions, so much as little nuggets. I never thought I'd say it, but at least Jay Dee's brain farts are far more digestible than Madlib's. To quote Cocaine, Blunts..., the problem with the latter is "the beats get lost in the ADD quick cut approach. As soon as he gets a nice groove going there's a needle scratch and he drops it in favor of some sample taped off the gong show or some shit. That's cool that [he] has a bunch of weird dialogue records to sample, but maybe he should just make a mixtape or write a book about them or something..." Dilla, on the otherhand, kinda gets away with it by giving you more palatable hooks.

Oh, the point of this was that you can cop that baker's dozen Saturdays at GAP, Brooklyn. And that Dilla joint drops next Tuesday. Parallels between fragment sentences and post subject? Intentional.