I was 14 during the summer of 2021, when I went to stay with my first cousins once removed in Toronto, which is such a ridiculous title that I tend to completely ignore it. They feel like cousins to me, even with the 25-year age gap that makes them more like fun aunts and uncles. In my time there, I learned what it was like to live in the heart of a metropolitan city, taking in all the unique sights and sounds Toronto had to offer. One of those sounds was the steady rotation of the albums they loved.
My aunt’s apartment was narrow and quiet, incense omnipresently floating through the air. On a quiet afternoon, I wandered through the hallway and stopped in front of a framed image that I hadn’t yet stopped to take a longer look at. It was a record cover that hung like art: “J Dilla Donuts.” The colors were faded and the man on the cover wore his hat over his eyes, but was still smiling back at me.
I planned to ask her about it, but she was busy cooking, so I went back to the pullout bed I was sleeping on and typed “J Dilla Donuts” into my phone. That search became a deep, deep rabbit hole of articles, documentaries, interviews and Reddit threads. I quickly learned that Dilla was a Detroit producer, which explained the Tigers hat on the album cover. He shaped the sound of hip-hop without ever needing the spotlight, as “Donuts” is strictly instrumental save for some old vocals he samples. He made this final album from a hospital bed while fighting a rare blood disease. He knew his time was short and waning, but still created something overflowing with life.
When I listened to “Donuts” for the first time, it felt like I just unlocked a new part of my brain. The track that stuck with me the most on first listen was “Time: Donut of the Heart.” It starts with a warm, rising melody flipped from the Jackson 5’s “All I Do Is Think of You,” and vocals from multiple “Sweet” Charles Sherell’s songs sprinkled throughout. Hearing Dilla reshape that sound decades later reminded me of a time I never lived, like I was borrowing nostalgia from people I never met. My aunt heard me listening to it one morning as I was making my bed and exchanged a knowing glance. In this moment, sampling pulled us closer because we had a language to talk about our shared love for music.
What I didn’t expect was how familiar “Donuts” would sound in the context of the music I love today. The final track on the album, “Welcome to the Show,” plays out like the curtain has just closed, but suddenly, it opens once more for the final encore. Every time I listen to it, I hear Boldy James rapping over the beat without changing a thing, or the Alchemist flipping it into a darker, grimier loop. They are part of a loose circle of modern rappers and producers sometimes grouped under the Griselda umbrella, known for sample-heavy beats. Once I could recognize Dilla, it became apparent how much of modern rap traces back to him. The way their beats sit still instead of building outward feels like a direct inheritance and a quiet conversation with the past.
My aunt and uncle became part of that conversation for me without meaning to. Once I got hooked on “Donuts,” I wouldn’t shut up about it, and they were more than happy to entertain my amusement. It sounds small, but talking about music with them became its own routine. It gave us a place to meet that didn’t depend on age or what stage of life any of us were in.
That first summer was all discovery. I would play them whatever I was into at fourteen, usually some producer I thought no one else had heard of, and they would send me back down the hallway to the record shelf with a new name to look up. “Donuts” was just the starting point. A summer later, when I went through my first teenage heartbreak, my uncle sent me Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago” and James Blake’s “Overgrown.” They became my rainy-day albums, the ones I still play quietly at night when everything feels heavier than it should.
Even now, we text each other songs a couple of times a week. I try to put him onto whatever I’m listening to, and he makes sure I don’t miss the generation of music that shaped him. Music became our common ground and a way for us to stay close.
Remembering sounds and paying homage is a key element of sampling, too. It lets a pubescent teen hear soul records from the seventies and feel something real and familiar, without needing to live it firsthand. It honors the original artist and provides them with a new audience that wouldn’t have found them otherwise. When Madlib chops a sixties Brazilian jazz record or revitalizes a forgotten soul sample, he’s paying respect to music history and giving it life for a new generation.
Sometimes I still think about that framed record in her hallway. It was a doorway into the music that shaped her, and letting me walk through it is part of what brought us closer; a reminder that music evolves to find new listeners who will carry that time in history forward. Sampling blurs the lines between generations and can hold completely different memories depending on who hears it. What was nostalgia for her became discovery for me, and somehow both experiences fit inside the same melody.
Sinan Walji PO ’28 has made peace with the fact that Blonde might be the last Frank Ocean album. He finds the wait painful and a little ridiculous. He wonders if Frank is laughing. He almost hopes he is.
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