MF DOOM, the masked MC, your favourite rapper’s favourite rapper, is gone. It’s an ongoing theme of the blog that writing about music is always, to some degree, a failure. With MF DOOM – or King Geedorah, or Viktor Vaughn, or any other number of alias’ he released albums under – I confront my purest version of that problem; I don’t know how to do him justice. I can write down his lines that thrilled me, and you may see how many impressively dense, multi-syllable rhymes he creates – in some cases all the syllables of the set up line will rhyme with all the syllables of the line that follows (“The rest is empty with no brain but the clever nerd/ The best emcee with no chain ya ever heard”) — but it wouldn’t communicate much. You simply have to listen.
Born Daniel Dumile of Trinidadian and Zimbabwean parents in London, MF DOOM grew up in New York and started his musical career as Zev Love X in KMD, one of the great “what might have been” early 90s rap groups. The endeavor ended in tragedy when DJ Subroc, Dumile’s younger brother, was hit by a car and killed in 1993, and the group was dropped from their label later that same week. Doom withdrew from the music industry for years.
It served something of a supervillain origin story — in 1999 he returned with Operation: Doomsday, now calling himself MF DOOM and wearing a metal mask. It’s all pretty much there, the personas, the love of antiquated language, the wonky humour, the hand-stitched beats – it sounds like nothing that had come before and while DOOM is without doubt one of the most influential rappers of his generation, it doesn’t sound like much that came after.
It began the creation of a wonky little extended universe with DOOM playing all the characters, so that a later song featured one of his alter egos confronting his girlfriend about cheating with another of his alter egos.
His masterpiece is probably Madvillainy, coming in the centre of his incredible 2003 -2005 run of six great albums (all but two released under different names), and one of the most stoned records in history. It’s where DOOM’s aesthetic found its perfect music analogue in producer Madlib. 22 tracks over 46 minutes, free associative rhymes over free associative beats; Bollywood, old movies, soul, psychedelia, prog and a tonne of jazz. The beats pop, spit and crackle under years of dust and wear, tactile and indulgent. Never has DOOM – simultaneously mush-mouthed and graceful throughout — sounded more at home. Or to put it another way, never has a line linking a “tech-9 holder” to rappers who “don’t know their neck shine from Shinola” – a bastardisation of a world war two era saying to denote ignorance — sounded more at home.
From there we got the relentlessly catchy Danger Mouse and Adult Swim collaboration, The Mouse and The Mask, the glorious pitch-black mess of Born Like This, the clunking shuffle of Keys to Kuffs (with Janel Janeiro) and collabs with Ghostface Killah (one of the few mainstream rappers that could match him for sheer weirdness), CZARFACE and Bishop Nehru. And then, appropriately for one as elusive as him, we got the news of the first day of the year that he had died two months earlier.
What DOOM does, as well as anyone in any genre, is communicate a pure love of the possibilities and depths of language. Apart from the famed density (“perpetrated odd favours/perforated Rod Lavers”, “Acronym/Afro trim” “Here, share a strawberry morning/Gone, an more important spawning, torn in, poor men sworn in”), he threw old words and phrases like “tarnation”, “a jot and a tittle” “completely Bonkered”, “Ipso Facto” and “Shinola” into hip hop’s vocabulary. Forced to return to his native England for the last years of his life, he put out a record filled with references to Cockney rhyming slang and ‘allo guv’nors.
You can hear it in his boredom with obvious rhymes – having primed us with “wishes/glitches/twitches” on “Great Day”, he declares the party could use more … before clearing his throat and saying “booze” which sends him off on a different tangent.
But again, simply listing the pay-offs and punchlines don’t quite do it justice – you need to hear how densely packed it all is, the joy of it, the impatience to the get to the next rhyme, the cramming of another syllable to link it all up like a puzzle piece.
If you’re a hip hop fan, you probably know all of this. If you’re not, well, like I said, this piece will be a failure, because you simply have to listen, and listen for a while, until that rackety, crowded, messy logic of MF DOOM’s world starts to make sense.
I found DOOM via Danger Doom around the time I was first getting into hip hop. The opening track, El Chupa Nibre – cartoonish, faintly ominous, packed with allusions, was one of the strangest things I’d ever heard. I can put it no other way. After DOOM, my understanding of music was different. I know a lot of people who feel the same.
Remember, All Caps when you spell the man name.
Dancing to Architecture 