‘Was Dog a Doughnut’: How Cat Stevens accidentally had a huge influence on hip hop with his bizarre electro venture
Cat Stevens once said, “In music, you can use metaphors with ease – if a person doesn’t understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.” This is evidenced perfectly by the utterly confounding effort, ‘Was Dog a Doughnut’, from his 1977 electro album Izitso.
It is hard to decipher exactly what this instrumental is trying to convey with its odd, impassive jazzy arrangement, where flourishes of instrumentation are dispersed like samples. Izitso arrived shortly before he converted to Islam and took up the moniker of Yusuf. While ‘Was Dog a Doughnut’ might sit in his second-to-last record before this spiritual transition, hinting that he was, perhaps, in a headspace searching beyond the stilted environment that the studio had become for him, you couldn’t quite accuse the track of being filler, merely for the level of experimental innovation at play.
However, from a singer who only a few years prior was plumbing the depth of timeless heartbreak and reconciling the everyday with folk masterpieces like Tea For the Tillerman and Mona Bone Jakon, there’s a level of puzzlement that comes with the pure sonic experimentation of the emotionless ‘Was Dog a Doughnut’. Alas, perhaps that is all that is at play: a cool-sounding experiment. Does there need to be more? This is a tenet that hip hop would soon relish in, often prising a cool backing track with no fixed emotive spirit in order to push creative wordplay to the fore and allow the poetry of the topline to have footloose feel rather than ushering it towards a set sentimental key.
As a result, the former folk icon‘s largely forgotten electro oddity soon became a huge influence in hip hop circles, entirely unbeknownst to Cat Stevens, and completely inadvertently. It might have peaked at 70 on the Billboard Chart, but over on the hip hop tally it rose to 53. This was a sure-fire hint at its unexpected influence.
Years later, Questlove would meet Steves (now Yusuf), and explain to him how pivotal his forgotten misfit proved. “We talked about an obscure album cut from 1977 called ‘Was Dog a Doughnut?’“ Questlove told Paste Magazine. “It was really just him creating a filler cut, experimenting with some electronic instruments – he fucked around, man, and created a B-boy classic. What was just him messing around for four minutes in the studio wound up being a staple in the hip hop world, which he was very shocked to discover.”
The track came about in a decidedly hip hop-like manner too. Using an Arp 2600, an effect was accidentally crafted that sounded a shade like a barking hound. So, using this unusual tone, a two-beat drum pattern was put to tape by Stevens, and his collaborators Jean Roussel and Bruce Lynch (Ringo Starr was also involved with Izitso somewhere along the line but his contributions were shelved). This allowed them to create a loop. Then with this backbone in place, they could simply layer in synth bass, guitar riffs, and chuck keyboard whizz Chick Corea on there, while Stevens added some drums. The Arp Sequencer was then ran through a synth to create the singular, looping song, rife for improvisation.
In hip hop, this method makes perfect sense. The genre relies so much on topline lyrical melodies and wordplay that you want the backing to have an almost key-less core so it can waver where ever the rapper pleases. But what exactly was Stevens hoping to convey with his instrumental? Well, in 2014, while discussing the song’s urban afterlife, he told Uncut: “In the ’70s, there was an article that made me furious, but also made me laugh, called ‘Was God An Astronaut?’ The whole premise of putting God into a space rocket was so outrageous I just decided to have a go and wrote that song.“
Quite how a funky jazz sequence captures that is another mystery, maybe it was just the collision of absurdity but an otherwise cool concept?
Check out the infectious Disco Perfection version below.
