OK, I've been bumping the shit outta him right now. I heard him back in the KMD days, but I hadnt listened to him until Rock Co Kane Flow. Now ive been swooping up all his shit, this dude is sick. I got Mm Food, Venemous Villain and Madvillain. Im trying to get my hands on that King Geedorah next. For all those that havent heard him I suggest buying his shit, his rhymes are crazy, I always catch myself saying "I cant beleive he said that..."? Also his production and Madlibs production is so fucking tight...
Official MF Doom Thread
- Thread starter Ry
- Start date
^^ you gotta cop MadVillain, its my fav DOOM album
If you guys didnt hear, supposedly Operation: Doomsday is gonna be rereleased sometime within the next year. Which is awesome news, especially if you dont have the $90-120 to buy the OG off Ebay
The DangerDoom album is gonna be out this year (Like MadVillain but with DangerMouse production) and Doom is doing some songs for the new Gorillaz album (Which DangerMouse is producing)
Theres also a rumor of DOOM doing a collabo album with Ghostface. At first they were just gonna do one song, but now theres a rumor of a Iron Man vs. Dr Doom album
anyhoo...how bout them Yankees?
If you guys didnt hear, supposedly Operation: Doomsday is gonna be rereleased sometime within the next year. Which is awesome news, especially if you dont have the $90-120 to buy the OG off Ebay
The DangerDoom album is gonna be out this year (Like MadVillain but with DangerMouse production) and Doom is doing some songs for the new Gorillaz album (Which DangerMouse is producing)
Theres also a rumor of DOOM doing a collabo album with Ghostface. At first they were just gonna do one song, but now theres a rumor of a Iron Man vs. Dr Doom album
anyhoo...how bout them Yankees?
heres a new interview with DOOM from Wire Magazine
WIRE MARCH 2005 "MASK OF SORROW"
The mask must be in the box - one of those black
flightcases with reinforced metal corners. It's as long
as a loaf of bread but wider and half as thick. The
sturdy clasp and metal fittings suggest importance;
the box itself looks like it could withstand severe
interrogation without coughing up its secrets.
The first time I meet Daniel Dumile, there is no sign
of the rapper MF Doom. Doom is known for two things:
fantastically dense rhymes and an impassive silver
mask that rarely leaves his face. Dumile is known for
being Doom. The first time I meet Dumile, it is in the
back of a club in Chicago, and the mask is in this box,
clutched against his body. Headphones pinch his neck
and his fingers grasp a bottle of Coke with barely one
swig left. His perfectly round belly juts from under a
shirt that, surprisingly, isn't baggy enough to obscure
it. Everything about his physical presence - the way he
stands; the way his glasses crookedly splay across his
face; the gold fronts and the jagged, gummy smile; the
random sprigs of cheek fuzz; the way he desperately
hugs the box - is a bit off. It is loud in the back of the
club, so we retreat to the truck his manager has
rented for the next two days. The truck is in a back
alleyway, beneath a thin membrane of snow.
The mask is on the floor. I know this because as I
am climbing into the back row of the truck, I feel
something underfoot - I look down and the mask is
on the floor, face down, harmless. I softly boot it out
of the way. As Dumile and his crew climb in, nobody
seems to care. He picks the mask up off the floor,
places it in his lap and continues protecting his box.
He and a friend gossip about the rapper Viktor Vaughn
- they wonder what Vaughn will do next, speculating
as if he were a real person and not merely one of
Dumile's many stage names. But then again, they are
never real.
Dumile opens the box. It is filled with CDs. First
mystery solved.
THE THREE
Daniel Dumile's artistic life consists of three
movements. As a teenager, Dumile rapped under the
name Zev Love X as part of KMD, a group he had
started with his brother, Dingilizwe. Precocious and
witty, KMD found middling success at the dawn of the
1990s as contemporaries of Brand Nubian and the
Native Tongues collective. This is the first part. Dumile
talks only sparingly about the second: the years
between his brother's death in 1993 (and KMD's
subsequent disbandment) and 1998, when he
resurfaced, unannounced, at an open mic poetry
session at New York's Nuyorican Poets' Cafe. It was
the first time in years that he had appeared in public
and he wore a stocking cap over his face. "I was like
a new MC, " he remembers.
We are in the midst of the third movement, the one
that began that night and has, you could say,
redeemed Dumile. These are the years that allow him
to look back at the first 25 or so and not feel
persecuted by quest\ons and memories. \-\s so\o
career has inspired a cult-like following. He rarely
appears in public without a metal faceplate
constructed out of a replica from the film Gladiator.
Since 1999, he has released six solo albums;
collaborative projects with Madlib, MF Grimm and The
Monster Island Czars; and at least six volumes of
instrumentals. He currently records under the names
King Geedorah (on Big Dada), Viktor Vaughn (on
Sound-Ink) and MF Doom, and he is toying with the
idea of bringing Zev back as well. He is best known for
being Doom, the central character on two of his better
albums, the disarming 1999 debut Operation:
Doomsday (Fondle 'Em) and last year's celebrated
Madvillainy (Stones Throw), recorded with fellow recluse
Madlib under the name Madvillain. In the coming year,
there are plans for a Madvillain follow-up,
a new KMD album and possible collaborations with
Wu-Tang Clansman and fellow associative thinker
Ghostface Killah.
It is often difficult to parse where one of Dumile's
character ends and another begins, because all of
them are variations on the same theme. "The classic
villain with a mask, Phantom Of The Opera-style," he
explains. "There's a little Dr Doom in there, even a
little Destro from GI Joe. It's an icon of American
culture." The fact that all of his characters traffic from
behind the same mask complicates matters, as does
Dumile's tendency to conflate the details of each
one's storyline. Each character's respective rhyme
style doesn't betray identity either - they all speckle
their hyper-imagist, first to third person raps with the
same Old English chivalry and pop dustbin references.
But Dumile relishes the instability: it makes for
sharper twists and richer cliffhangers. "The villain," he
eagerly adds, "always returns."
MUCH DAMAGED
In 1990, Americans truly feared a black planet.
According to a Gallup poll released that year, the
'average' American, no doubt influenced by the media
and popular culture, estimated that about 30 per cent
of the nation's population was black. Yet at the time
black Americans constituted maybe half of that figure;
even that estimate required context. The 1980
election of Ronald Reagan coincided with an overhaul
of the longstanding war on drugs. The war became
more than a legislative package: it was a mindstate, a
way of recalibrating the idea of crime. Over the next
20 years, a drop in the crime rate (a dip social
scientists argue would have happened regardless of
Reagan) coincided with a rapid expansion of American
prisons, and a feverish crusade to fill them as quickly
and efficiently as possible. Currently, the Justice
Department reports that one eighth of black
Americans in their twenties and early thirties were
incarcerated last year. A black man in the United
States has a one in three chance of going to prison.
A weird thing happened over those 20 years: people
started disappearing.
POSITIVE KAUSE
Just as every assassin has grammar school
classmates, every villain starts out a mere seed.
Dumile was born in London in the early 70s and his
family shuttled between New York's boroughs before
settling in Long Island. HipHop was a constant for
Daniel and Dingilizwe. They would preserve late night
HipHop radio broadcasts by holding a tape recorder up
to the old clock radio they shared. In 1985, the
brothers had scraped together enough cash to buy
some modest recording equipment. They gave
themselves a name befitting two part-time graffitists:
Kausin Much Damage, or KMD for short. Daniel
renamed himself Zev Love X; Dingilizwe became
Subroc.
It was an innocent time. De La Soul and JVC Force
had secured Long Island's place in HipHop lore and
Dumile grew up a half-generation behind Public Enemy,
EPMD and De La, who he refers to as his
"colleagues" . In neighbouring Far Rockaway, Queens,
lived a young rapper named MC Serch. Serch and
Dumile became fast friends, and when it came time
for Serch and his group 3rd Bass to ink a deal with
Def Jam, he asked Dumile if he wanted to take a
guest verse on one of their singles.
The result was 1990's "Gas Face". Built on the
prattling piano of Aretha Franklin's "Respect" and
smart-alecky ribbing, the track was one of the best
and most joyful singles of what has become enshrined
as HipHop's Golden Era. "I kinda came up with the
concept," Dumile recalls. "We used to joke around a
lot, so I came up with the term 'gas face' - it's just
that face you make when you're shocked or surprised.
Like when somebody catches you off-guard."
Soon after, KMD signed with Elektra Records and set
to work on their debut, Mr Hood (1991). They'had
rebranded their moniker - it now stood for " a positive
Kause in a Much Damaged society" - and added a
third member, Onyx The Birthstone Kid. Dumile and
his brother were both in their teens and they would
troop from Long Island to Manhattan's Chung King
Studios every night. "We did that whole album at
night. The whole album is exactly how it was: me in
my mom's crib, doing beats, cuttin' hair for extra
cash, trading records and whatnot. Fun times, you
know? It was adolescence, that teenage time."
WIRE MARCH 2005 "MASK OF SORROW"
The mask must be in the box - one of those black
flightcases with reinforced metal corners. It's as long
as a loaf of bread but wider and half as thick. The
sturdy clasp and metal fittings suggest importance;
the box itself looks like it could withstand severe
interrogation without coughing up its secrets.
The first time I meet Daniel Dumile, there is no sign
of the rapper MF Doom. Doom is known for two things:
fantastically dense rhymes and an impassive silver
mask that rarely leaves his face. Dumile is known for
being Doom. The first time I meet Dumile, it is in the
back of a club in Chicago, and the mask is in this box,
clutched against his body. Headphones pinch his neck
and his fingers grasp a bottle of Coke with barely one
swig left. His perfectly round belly juts from under a
shirt that, surprisingly, isn't baggy enough to obscure
it. Everything about his physical presence - the way he
stands; the way his glasses crookedly splay across his
face; the gold fronts and the jagged, gummy smile; the
random sprigs of cheek fuzz; the way he desperately
hugs the box - is a bit off. It is loud in the back of the
club, so we retreat to the truck his manager has
rented for the next two days. The truck is in a back
alleyway, beneath a thin membrane of snow.
The mask is on the floor. I know this because as I
am climbing into the back row of the truck, I feel
something underfoot - I look down and the mask is
on the floor, face down, harmless. I softly boot it out
of the way. As Dumile and his crew climb in, nobody
seems to care. He picks the mask up off the floor,
places it in his lap and continues protecting his box.
He and a friend gossip about the rapper Viktor Vaughn
- they wonder what Vaughn will do next, speculating
as if he were a real person and not merely one of
Dumile's many stage names. But then again, they are
never real.
Dumile opens the box. It is filled with CDs. First
mystery solved.
THE THREE
Daniel Dumile's artistic life consists of three
movements. As a teenager, Dumile rapped under the
name Zev Love X as part of KMD, a group he had
started with his brother, Dingilizwe. Precocious and
witty, KMD found middling success at the dawn of the
1990s as contemporaries of Brand Nubian and the
Native Tongues collective. This is the first part. Dumile
talks only sparingly about the second: the years
between his brother's death in 1993 (and KMD's
subsequent disbandment) and 1998, when he
resurfaced, unannounced, at an open mic poetry
session at New York's Nuyorican Poets' Cafe. It was
the first time in years that he had appeared in public
and he wore a stocking cap over his face. "I was like
a new MC, " he remembers.
We are in the midst of the third movement, the one
that began that night and has, you could say,
redeemed Dumile. These are the years that allow him
to look back at the first 25 or so and not feel
persecuted by quest\ons and memories. \-\s so\o
career has inspired a cult-like following. He rarely
appears in public without a metal faceplate
constructed out of a replica from the film Gladiator.
Since 1999, he has released six solo albums;
collaborative projects with Madlib, MF Grimm and The
Monster Island Czars; and at least six volumes of
instrumentals. He currently records under the names
King Geedorah (on Big Dada), Viktor Vaughn (on
Sound-Ink) and MF Doom, and he is toying with the
idea of bringing Zev back as well. He is best known for
being Doom, the central character on two of his better
albums, the disarming 1999 debut Operation:
Doomsday (Fondle 'Em) and last year's celebrated
Madvillainy (Stones Throw), recorded with fellow recluse
Madlib under the name Madvillain. In the coming year,
there are plans for a Madvillain follow-up,
a new KMD album and possible collaborations with
Wu-Tang Clansman and fellow associative thinker
Ghostface Killah.
It is often difficult to parse where one of Dumile's
character ends and another begins, because all of
them are variations on the same theme. "The classic
villain with a mask, Phantom Of The Opera-style," he
explains. "There's a little Dr Doom in there, even a
little Destro from GI Joe. It's an icon of American
culture." The fact that all of his characters traffic from
behind the same mask complicates matters, as does
Dumile's tendency to conflate the details of each
one's storyline. Each character's respective rhyme
style doesn't betray identity either - they all speckle
their hyper-imagist, first to third person raps with the
same Old English chivalry and pop dustbin references.
But Dumile relishes the instability: it makes for
sharper twists and richer cliffhangers. "The villain," he
eagerly adds, "always returns."
MUCH DAMAGED
In 1990, Americans truly feared a black planet.
According to a Gallup poll released that year, the
'average' American, no doubt influenced by the media
and popular culture, estimated that about 30 per cent
of the nation's population was black. Yet at the time
black Americans constituted maybe half of that figure;
even that estimate required context. The 1980
election of Ronald Reagan coincided with an overhaul
of the longstanding war on drugs. The war became
more than a legislative package: it was a mindstate, a
way of recalibrating the idea of crime. Over the next
20 years, a drop in the crime rate (a dip social
scientists argue would have happened regardless of
Reagan) coincided with a rapid expansion of American
prisons, and a feverish crusade to fill them as quickly
and efficiently as possible. Currently, the Justice
Department reports that one eighth of black
Americans in their twenties and early thirties were
incarcerated last year. A black man in the United
States has a one in three chance of going to prison.
A weird thing happened over those 20 years: people
started disappearing.
POSITIVE KAUSE
Just as every assassin has grammar school
classmates, every villain starts out a mere seed.
Dumile was born in London in the early 70s and his
family shuttled between New York's boroughs before
settling in Long Island. HipHop was a constant for
Daniel and Dingilizwe. They would preserve late night
HipHop radio broadcasts by holding a tape recorder up
to the old clock radio they shared. In 1985, the
brothers had scraped together enough cash to buy
some modest recording equipment. They gave
themselves a name befitting two part-time graffitists:
Kausin Much Damage, or KMD for short. Daniel
renamed himself Zev Love X; Dingilizwe became
Subroc.
It was an innocent time. De La Soul and JVC Force
had secured Long Island's place in HipHop lore and
Dumile grew up a half-generation behind Public Enemy,
EPMD and De La, who he refers to as his
"colleagues" . In neighbouring Far Rockaway, Queens,
lived a young rapper named MC Serch. Serch and
Dumile became fast friends, and when it came time
for Serch and his group 3rd Bass to ink a deal with
Def Jam, he asked Dumile if he wanted to take a
guest verse on one of their singles.
The result was 1990's "Gas Face". Built on the
prattling piano of Aretha Franklin's "Respect" and
smart-alecky ribbing, the track was one of the best
and most joyful singles of what has become enshrined
as HipHop's Golden Era. "I kinda came up with the
concept," Dumile recalls. "We used to joke around a
lot, so I came up with the term 'gas face' - it's just
that face you make when you're shocked or surprised.
Like when somebody catches you off-guard."
Soon after, KMD signed with Elektra Records and set
to work on their debut, Mr Hood (1991). They'had
rebranded their moniker - it now stood for " a positive
Kause in a Much Damaged society" - and added a
third member, Onyx The Birthstone Kid. Dumile and
his brother were both in their teens and they would
troop from Long Island to Manhattan's Chung King
Studios every night. "We did that whole album at
night. The whole album is exactly how it was: me in
my mom's crib, doing beats, cuttin' hair for extra
cash, trading records and whatnot. Fun times, you
know? It was adolescence, that teenage time."
The Mr Hood sleeve features a black and white
photograph of African-American children playing in the
streets of New York. Taken by Arthur Leipzig in 1950,
there is tranquillity to the scene, a concentrated
stillness to the young boy leaping among chalk-
outlined squares on the pavement, to the delight of
hypnotised onlookers. Even though you shudder to
think what might have been happening just beyond the
frame, Leipzig's image fixes on something above
politics. The boy is not yet a man. He is entitled to his
unbridled joy, to bask in the eternal summer of youth.
In the background - in screaming, dayglo colour -
stand the members of KMD, but they might as well be
part of the original photo. Mr Hood feels untouched. It
is infected with the buoyancy and effervescence of
puberty; it is fun. "Crackpot" details the evolution of a
playground bully-turned-neighbourhood drifter with an
almost do-gooder innocence, while the cork-pop fizz of
"Peachfuzz" finds the trio eager to grow, counting their
chin hairs and puffing their chests in the mirror. They
sample liberally from Sesame Street. While the
standout single "Who Me?" assails longstanding
stereotypes of African-Americans - the song begins
with an excerpt from a children's record about a
character named Little Sambo - its slapstick funk
backing douses some of its threat. Mr Hood has
plenty of rage - against stereotypes, inequality and
the not-yet-enlightened - but it is a manageable, pint-
sized rage. In the top right corner of the album sleeve
is the KMD 'Sambo' logo, a crossed out cartoon of a
white man in blackface, but even this suggests a
degree of playfulness.
The album was mildly successful. A video for
"Peachfuzz" cracked MTV's rotation and the trio
toured with the likes of Queen Latifah, Digital
Underground, Big Daddy Kane and 3rd Bass. The
brothers were working it out.
Their parents had separated and the two remaining
men of the house leaned on HipHop to lift their
mother and sister out of poverty. They reserved very
modest hopes for themselves: "Get our own cribs and
<w1s, \We ts supposed to e." When t came
time to record their follow-up in 1993, what was
"supposed to be" didn't gel with the reality of young
adulthood. The departure of Onyx had left KMD a duo.
Daniel and Dingilizwe were older, and their lyrics bore
a wearier, worldly edge. They decided on the title
Black Bastards.
"Crazy time right there," Dumile sighs slowly. "That's
when we were growing up. During the album, I had my
first son and my brother had his daughter - early
manhood memories. Things was changing, shit was
going crazy, both in the game and in life.
"The game was changing - gangsta rap took over
the shit. Then, just being that age, a lot of stuff
happens, too." He pauses, searching for the language
to match the glaze overtaking his eyes. "Especially
living in America, being brown people, or whatever you
want to call it, that age is a very pivotal time. That's
when you get hit with a lot of traps."
I HEAR VOICES
Dumile had crossed the line, the traps were set, he
had turned 20. "In this country, being original people,
a lot of things be happening at a certain age, right
when you reach manhood. A lot of things start
happening. Strange shit." Dumile's friends started
disappearing - "murdered, jailed or whatever". One
day, he looked around and everything had changed.
He was no longer a precocious teen with a record deal
and respectably fat pockets. He was a young man.
"I'm just noticing my peoples disappearing - good
people, not bad people. Now, I'm like the only one left
from that era from my crew." With two songs left to
record, Dumile's brother joined the missing. Subroc
was killed in a freak car accident.
"How did I deal with it?" he asks. "I don't even know.
I had to stay focused. I had to make sure we came up
out of it. The goals that me and my brother set... they
had to still be met. It was up to me. You know what it
reminded me of? We was big Boogie Down Productions
fans back in the days. When that thing happened to
Scott LaRock [the BDP DJ was shot in the street in
1987] - God bless - it was kinda like.., a prerequisite
to this, to what happened. When that happened and
we both peeped it, automatically we thought of
ourselves in those shoes. If the same thing was to
happen to one of us - you know what I'm sayin' - what
would we do?
"So we saw how Kris [KRS-One] handled that
situation," he continues. "He could have quit. We
didn't know what he was going to do. Was he going to
come out with another album? Then he came with that
shit - [1988's] By All Means Necessary. So that
showed us what to do in that situation. You persevere,
you keep going, you strive and you do it. So it made
us ready for something to happen in life."
As a young teen, witnessing his hero KRS-One
recover from the murder of his beloved partner LaRock
had intellectually prepared Dumile for such a loss. He
did his best to stow the pain away until later, soldiering
ahead with Black Bastards and pouring himself into the
album's dense funk and sharp polemics.
At times, Black Bastards is every bit as playful and
supple as Mr Hood. "Sweet Premium Wine" and the
skirt-chasing "Plumskinzz" indulge harmless libertine
urges, while the charmingly raffish "Contact Blitz"
finds KMD graduating from mom's crib to a hot-boxed
tour. But gone are the play-acted rage and wide-eyed
boyishness. Instead of Sesame Street and children's
records, there are vocal samples from Melvin Van
Peebles's shockingly defiant Sweet Sweetback's
Badassss Song soundtrack and The Last Poets' Gylan
Kain's browbeating Blue Guerrilla album. This, after
all, was the anxious, brooding record Dumile played at
Subroc's funeral, a scene 3rd Bass's Pete Nice
described to Spin magazine as "just surreal".
One difference between KMD and other HipHop
groups is contained in the difference between two
epithets: 'nigga' and 'sambo'. After a stormy, much
debated career, the former term has been reclaimed
and rehabilitated by African-American culture, its
demeaning sting metamorphosing into a term of
wicked, macho endearment. The latter, though,
remains an ugly term from a distant time; there is no
way to flip or ironise a word designed to reduce
African-American males to coy, easily terrified babies.
As their peers perfected their lean, heartless glares
and struts, KMD fretted about self-destruction. The
Dumiles had been raised as part of the Five Percent
Nation, an offshoot of the black Muslim faith that also
counted Wu-Tang Clan, Brand Nubian and Rakim as
adherents. They sought to reconstruct the "deaf,
dumb and blind" heathen, but they wanted to do it in
a sympathetic, playful way, as boys but not babies. At
times, the album seems to laugh to keep from crying.
The cover of Black Bastards featured a crude drawing
of the half-grinning, half-exasperated Sambo being
hung. Lynching the logo was meant to suggest the
death of a stereotype.
In April 1994, one month before its slated release, a
Billboard columnist named Tern Rossi came across
the cover artwork. Rossi, who neither listened to the
album nor understood KMD's ironic intentions, wrote a
piece for the influential tabloid blasting Elektra. Jackie
Martinez, head of KMD's Hit U Off Management,
argued that it addressed "what [black] people were
once portrayed as, nothing more than that. The
artwork is just the opposite of what people interpreted
it to be."
At the time, though, the recording industry found
itself a tempting pawn in the culture wars. Only two
years earlier, the furore around Ice-T's "Cop Killer"
had led to high-profile boycotts, divestment campaigns
and testy debates about public morality. The last thing
KMD's label wanted was anything resembling
controversy. Short of ditching the cover, there was no
way to quell Rossi. Dumile, who had drawn the
picture, would not relent. The album was pulled from
production and KMD were released from their
contract. (The complete version only appeared in
2000, on the Subverse label.)
"Can you imagine?" he asks, exasperated. "During a
six month period, it was like, shit was changing so
drastically fast, in all aspects. It was some hard shit.
At the time it didn't seem so crazy but now when I
think of it, it was some hard times."
So Dumile did what he had to: he disappeared, too.
COLD FISSION
A mess of bodies smear themselves against the
glass-walled DJ booth, eager to see what is
happening. Despite blizzard warnings, curious
Chicagoans have shown up en masse to see a rare DJ
appearance by MF Doom. Earlier that night, with no
mask, Dumile roamed the club freely, clutching his box
and soda. Now, hundreds of fans crane their necks,
elbow for room and tiptoe on each other's toes, just
to catch a spare glimpse of Doom's face, which is
covered by a mask.
HipHop celebrity can be a curious thing. HipHop
presents itself as a wholly literal music, concerned
less with thems or symbols than reportage. It is
judged by the quality of autobiographical minutiae and
the gruesomeness of the first person and it becomes a
given that, when Rapper X mutters that he committed
Act Y, he is offering some approximation of the truth.
These are the kinds of meta-issues Dumile ruminated
on during his years away from HipHop's machinery.
photograph of African-American children playing in the
streets of New York. Taken by Arthur Leipzig in 1950,
there is tranquillity to the scene, a concentrated
stillness to the young boy leaping among chalk-
outlined squares on the pavement, to the delight of
hypnotised onlookers. Even though you shudder to
think what might have been happening just beyond the
frame, Leipzig's image fixes on something above
politics. The boy is not yet a man. He is entitled to his
unbridled joy, to bask in the eternal summer of youth.
In the background - in screaming, dayglo colour -
stand the members of KMD, but they might as well be
part of the original photo. Mr Hood feels untouched. It
is infected with the buoyancy and effervescence of
puberty; it is fun. "Crackpot" details the evolution of a
playground bully-turned-neighbourhood drifter with an
almost do-gooder innocence, while the cork-pop fizz of
"Peachfuzz" finds the trio eager to grow, counting their
chin hairs and puffing their chests in the mirror. They
sample liberally from Sesame Street. While the
standout single "Who Me?" assails longstanding
stereotypes of African-Americans - the song begins
with an excerpt from a children's record about a
character named Little Sambo - its slapstick funk
backing douses some of its threat. Mr Hood has
plenty of rage - against stereotypes, inequality and
the not-yet-enlightened - but it is a manageable, pint-
sized rage. In the top right corner of the album sleeve
is the KMD 'Sambo' logo, a crossed out cartoon of a
white man in blackface, but even this suggests a
degree of playfulness.
The album was mildly successful. A video for
"Peachfuzz" cracked MTV's rotation and the trio
toured with the likes of Queen Latifah, Digital
Underground, Big Daddy Kane and 3rd Bass. The
brothers were working it out.
Their parents had separated and the two remaining
men of the house leaned on HipHop to lift their
mother and sister out of poverty. They reserved very
modest hopes for themselves: "Get our own cribs and
<w1s, \We ts supposed to e." When t came
time to record their follow-up in 1993, what was
"supposed to be" didn't gel with the reality of young
adulthood. The departure of Onyx had left KMD a duo.
Daniel and Dingilizwe were older, and their lyrics bore
a wearier, worldly edge. They decided on the title
Black Bastards.
"Crazy time right there," Dumile sighs slowly. "That's
when we were growing up. During the album, I had my
first son and my brother had his daughter - early
manhood memories. Things was changing, shit was
going crazy, both in the game and in life.
"The game was changing - gangsta rap took over
the shit. Then, just being that age, a lot of stuff
happens, too." He pauses, searching for the language
to match the glaze overtaking his eyes. "Especially
living in America, being brown people, or whatever you
want to call it, that age is a very pivotal time. That's
when you get hit with a lot of traps."
I HEAR VOICES
Dumile had crossed the line, the traps were set, he
had turned 20. "In this country, being original people,
a lot of things be happening at a certain age, right
when you reach manhood. A lot of things start
happening. Strange shit." Dumile's friends started
disappearing - "murdered, jailed or whatever". One
day, he looked around and everything had changed.
He was no longer a precocious teen with a record deal
and respectably fat pockets. He was a young man.
"I'm just noticing my peoples disappearing - good
people, not bad people. Now, I'm like the only one left
from that era from my crew." With two songs left to
record, Dumile's brother joined the missing. Subroc
was killed in a freak car accident.
"How did I deal with it?" he asks. "I don't even know.
I had to stay focused. I had to make sure we came up
out of it. The goals that me and my brother set... they
had to still be met. It was up to me. You know what it
reminded me of? We was big Boogie Down Productions
fans back in the days. When that thing happened to
Scott LaRock [the BDP DJ was shot in the street in
1987] - God bless - it was kinda like.., a prerequisite
to this, to what happened. When that happened and
we both peeped it, automatically we thought of
ourselves in those shoes. If the same thing was to
happen to one of us - you know what I'm sayin' - what
would we do?
"So we saw how Kris [KRS-One] handled that
situation," he continues. "He could have quit. We
didn't know what he was going to do. Was he going to
come out with another album? Then he came with that
shit - [1988's] By All Means Necessary. So that
showed us what to do in that situation. You persevere,
you keep going, you strive and you do it. So it made
us ready for something to happen in life."
As a young teen, witnessing his hero KRS-One
recover from the murder of his beloved partner LaRock
had intellectually prepared Dumile for such a loss. He
did his best to stow the pain away until later, soldiering
ahead with Black Bastards and pouring himself into the
album's dense funk and sharp polemics.
At times, Black Bastards is every bit as playful and
supple as Mr Hood. "Sweet Premium Wine" and the
skirt-chasing "Plumskinzz" indulge harmless libertine
urges, while the charmingly raffish "Contact Blitz"
finds KMD graduating from mom's crib to a hot-boxed
tour. But gone are the play-acted rage and wide-eyed
boyishness. Instead of Sesame Street and children's
records, there are vocal samples from Melvin Van
Peebles's shockingly defiant Sweet Sweetback's
Badassss Song soundtrack and The Last Poets' Gylan
Kain's browbeating Blue Guerrilla album. This, after
all, was the anxious, brooding record Dumile played at
Subroc's funeral, a scene 3rd Bass's Pete Nice
described to Spin magazine as "just surreal".
One difference between KMD and other HipHop
groups is contained in the difference between two
epithets: 'nigga' and 'sambo'. After a stormy, much
debated career, the former term has been reclaimed
and rehabilitated by African-American culture, its
demeaning sting metamorphosing into a term of
wicked, macho endearment. The latter, though,
remains an ugly term from a distant time; there is no
way to flip or ironise a word designed to reduce
African-American males to coy, easily terrified babies.
As their peers perfected their lean, heartless glares
and struts, KMD fretted about self-destruction. The
Dumiles had been raised as part of the Five Percent
Nation, an offshoot of the black Muslim faith that also
counted Wu-Tang Clan, Brand Nubian and Rakim as
adherents. They sought to reconstruct the "deaf,
dumb and blind" heathen, but they wanted to do it in
a sympathetic, playful way, as boys but not babies. At
times, the album seems to laugh to keep from crying.
The cover of Black Bastards featured a crude drawing
of the half-grinning, half-exasperated Sambo being
hung. Lynching the logo was meant to suggest the
death of a stereotype.
In April 1994, one month before its slated release, a
Billboard columnist named Tern Rossi came across
the cover artwork. Rossi, who neither listened to the
album nor understood KMD's ironic intentions, wrote a
piece for the influential tabloid blasting Elektra. Jackie
Martinez, head of KMD's Hit U Off Management,
argued that it addressed "what [black] people were
once portrayed as, nothing more than that. The
artwork is just the opposite of what people interpreted
it to be."
At the time, though, the recording industry found
itself a tempting pawn in the culture wars. Only two
years earlier, the furore around Ice-T's "Cop Killer"
had led to high-profile boycotts, divestment campaigns
and testy debates about public morality. The last thing
KMD's label wanted was anything resembling
controversy. Short of ditching the cover, there was no
way to quell Rossi. Dumile, who had drawn the
picture, would not relent. The album was pulled from
production and KMD were released from their
contract. (The complete version only appeared in
2000, on the Subverse label.)
"Can you imagine?" he asks, exasperated. "During a
six month period, it was like, shit was changing so
drastically fast, in all aspects. It was some hard shit.
At the time it didn't seem so crazy but now when I
think of it, it was some hard times."
So Dumile did what he had to: he disappeared, too.
COLD FISSION
A mess of bodies smear themselves against the
glass-walled DJ booth, eager to see what is
happening. Despite blizzard warnings, curious
Chicagoans have shown up en masse to see a rare DJ
appearance by MF Doom. Earlier that night, with no
mask, Dumile roamed the club freely, clutching his box
and soda. Now, hundreds of fans crane their necks,
elbow for room and tiptoe on each other's toes, just
to catch a spare glimpse of Doom's face, which is
covered by a mask.
HipHop celebrity can be a curious thing. HipHop
presents itself as a wholly literal music, concerned
less with thems or symbols than reportage. It is
judged by the quality of autobiographical minutiae and
the gruesomeness of the first person and it becomes a
given that, when Rapper X mutters that he committed
Act Y, he is offering some approximation of the truth.
These are the kinds of meta-issues Dumile ruminated
on during his years away from HipHop's machinery.
Dumile rarely offers details about this unintended
sabbatical. When nudged, he laughs, "I plead the
fifth." He divided his time between Atlanta, where his
family had relocated, and New York, where he still
lived. Mostly, he was busy raising his son and piecing
together a recording budget. He began dating the
woman he would later marry. He poured himself into
the songs that eventually became Operation:
Doomsday. At the time, he was subsisting on the
barest of necessities: a few old records, his faith and
the occasional beer.
"At that time, I was damn near homeless, walking
the streets of Manhattan, sleeping on benches and
shit," he admits. He says that the next KMD album
(tentative title: Mental Illness) will focus on these
"lost years". "It was a really, really dark time. But I
still thought I was gonna get mine, regardless."
Dumile knew he was at least as good as the rappers
who bubbled to the surface in the mid-1990s. He was
lifetimes removed from being Zev Love X; whenever he
heard songs like "Peachfuzz", he felt weird. He saw
HipHop as a masquerade ball, and he needed a
creative way to crash it. "In HipHop, we get kinda
confused," he says. "I think we limit ourselves with
the whole 'I'm the guy' kind of thing. Like, 'I this, you
that'. In HipHop you're the guy, and it's too much
responsibility - you don't want to be that guy. So I'm
like, if HipHop is all about bragging and boasting, then
I'm going to make the illest character who can brag
about all kinds of shit. Like, why not? It's all your
imagination - go as far as you want."
Dumile renamed himself MF Doom - ME stood for
Metal Face, while Doom was both homage to
consummate Marvel Comics villain Dr Doom and an
adaptation of a childhood nickname. The more he
thought about his creation, the more it intrigued him.
"The way comics are written shows you the duality of
things, how the bad guy ain't really a bad guy if you
look at it from his perspective. Through that style of
writing, I was kinda like, if I flip that into HipHop,
that's something niggas ain't done yet. I was looking
for an angle that would be brand new. That's when I
came up with the character and worked out the kinks
- that's the Villain."
The character gave a story arc to the mountain of
tracks he had recorded since Black Bastards. In 1997
Bobbito Garcia, a friend from the "Gas Face" days,
released some of the Doom material on his fledgling
Fondle 'Em label, to delirious reviews. Dumile returned
to the stage in 1998 and his debut album followed
later that year. Musically, the album was highly
unusual. Hijacking the soft sounds of 1980s soul and
squeezing the last ounces of life from exhausted
sample sources, Doomsday sounded like an eerie
echo of days past. "That's the nature of the
production style of Doom," he explains, "the
obvious/not-obvious, the in-between. Using what you
have to make something totally new. I had a limited
number of [records] then. I was like, yo, there's
something in-between that I have to get. There's
infinite amounts of layers and dimensions, it's just,
which one can you tap into?" Swearing vengeance on
the industry that had disfigured him, Doom became
one of HipHop's most colourful folk heroes.
"I'm an author. It just so happens that what I write is
in rhythmic form and it's over music. So for me to get
different points across, just like an author would in a
novel, I come with different characters." In 2003 he
released Take Me To Your Leader as King Geedorah
(inspired by Godzilla's peer, Gidra), and another,
Vaudeville Villain, as Viktor Vaughn (adapted from Dr
Doom's real name, Victor Von Doom). Dumile explains
the method in his mitosis: "I can make multiple
characters, and they can even have conflicting views.
We're growing up as all this is going on - we're going
to change our minds. The public looks at that and is
like, oh, he's contradicting himself. When you got
multiple characters you never contradict yourself. Have
another character come with another point of view."
The most thrilling aspect of all this is that the rhymes
rarely betray the identity of the narrator. Doom's
characters pop up as guests on each other's albums;
they help each other out with production duties; and
Dumile looms above them, unafraid to lapse into
second or third person. He is quick to point out that all
of these characters are characters, not shades of his
(or Doom's) personality. "I never interject," he claims.
"I keep myself out of it - I feel I'm too corny, it's not
going to be fun. It's gotta be those guys." There are
subtle differences. Geedorah's Take Me To Your Leader
assesses Earth matters from the perspective of a
"space monster" - "King Geedorah, three-finger ring
fever/Spring chicken eater/IDed as the ringleader, " he
offers by way of introduction, before asking, "Who
needs a heater?" The Geedorah disc makes its point
by painting Earth racism, Earth hedonism and Earth
corruption in the most outlandish terms possible - the
truth is disguised in his science fictions. Vaughn is
more of a straight shooter, a 1980s-obsessed thug
with bloated self-esteem - "Viktor the director flip a
script like Rob Reiner/The way a lotta dudes rhyme
their names should be 'knob-shiner'. " "Vik is frustrated
now," Dumile sighs.
Doom - "Bound to go three-plat/Came to destroy
rap" - is the most interesting character, the
misunderstood villain who loves humanity but hates
humans. "From the point of view [of America], we're
the villains. But I'm the super-villain." The point of the
ruse is to find a different way to convey the same
message from his KMD days. "Out here it's been so
desensitised... I had to figure out a way to get the
point across and still make it interesting, or make it
seem like a race thing.
"Doom is about bringing people together," he
continues. "I like to show different perspectives - put
yourself in this guy's shoes for a second and this guy
ain't so different from you. The Villain could be
anybody. The character Doom is a brown person, but
he could be anybody, any race." The mask reminds
you to pay attention to the words, not the personality.
Although Dumile uses his characters to talk about
things that concern him, he maintains that they never
betray his actual emotional make-up. This is hard to
believe. Notable for droopy, downcast arrangements
and Dumile's slurred verses, Doom's records can
sound exceedingly sad. Sometimes it seems as
though the characters are a way to distract from his
melancholy, or at least disguise it as otherworldly
fantasy. Sometimes they seem haunted by the
memory of his brother, even as he resists recording a
song that directly speaks to his feelings. On
"Doomsday", he defuses that yearning with an aw-
shucks concern over etchings: "Ever since the womb'
till I'm back where my brother went/That's what my
tomb will say/Right above my government, Dumile
[Doom-will-I ay]/Either unmarked or engraved - hey,
who's to say?" "Gas Drawls" finds him cracking a
brew for Subroc - "I hit the brew up like.., nobody
knows... how [Zev Love] X the unseen feels" - before
veering way off-course, to ridicule rivals and then
curse "the invisible bitch" from the Fantastic Four.
It's easy to dismiss Dumile when he raps that all he
needs is a "metal-face mask with a built-in frown" ("It
Ain't Nttin") and a steady supply of beers (nearly
every other song) when the adjacent verse invokes
space monsters or, on his latest disc, Mm... Food
(Rhymesayers), meats and spices. Even when Dumile
reminisces that he and Subroc "is like the brown
Smothers Brothers" ("Kon Karne"), he maintains that
this is actually Doom's voice. At the very least, it is
Zev. But it is never Dumile. "All of them are
characters," he insists, "they're never me." Perhaps.
Sometimes, Dumile doesn't even seem like Dumile,
as though he really doesn't feel himself without the
mask. While those around him disappeared, he
replicated himself, just to keep good company. His
stable of characters continues to hint at the saddest
story HipHop has ever told but, like some HipHop
Charlie Kaufman, even Dumile himself doesn't claim
to know what they will end up doing or saying. They
are beyond his control, following their own arcs.
"Them dudes are crazy," he laughs. "They can do it.
Doom is an ill character - he's going to be around
forever. I look up to that dude."
sabbatical. When nudged, he laughs, "I plead the
fifth." He divided his time between Atlanta, where his
family had relocated, and New York, where he still
lived. Mostly, he was busy raising his son and piecing
together a recording budget. He began dating the
woman he would later marry. He poured himself into
the songs that eventually became Operation:
Doomsday. At the time, he was subsisting on the
barest of necessities: a few old records, his faith and
the occasional beer.
"At that time, I was damn near homeless, walking
the streets of Manhattan, sleeping on benches and
shit," he admits. He says that the next KMD album
(tentative title: Mental Illness) will focus on these
"lost years". "It was a really, really dark time. But I
still thought I was gonna get mine, regardless."
Dumile knew he was at least as good as the rappers
who bubbled to the surface in the mid-1990s. He was
lifetimes removed from being Zev Love X; whenever he
heard songs like "Peachfuzz", he felt weird. He saw
HipHop as a masquerade ball, and he needed a
creative way to crash it. "In HipHop, we get kinda
confused," he says. "I think we limit ourselves with
the whole 'I'm the guy' kind of thing. Like, 'I this, you
that'. In HipHop you're the guy, and it's too much
responsibility - you don't want to be that guy. So I'm
like, if HipHop is all about bragging and boasting, then
I'm going to make the illest character who can brag
about all kinds of shit. Like, why not? It's all your
imagination - go as far as you want."
Dumile renamed himself MF Doom - ME stood for
Metal Face, while Doom was both homage to
consummate Marvel Comics villain Dr Doom and an
adaptation of a childhood nickname. The more he
thought about his creation, the more it intrigued him.
"The way comics are written shows you the duality of
things, how the bad guy ain't really a bad guy if you
look at it from his perspective. Through that style of
writing, I was kinda like, if I flip that into HipHop,
that's something niggas ain't done yet. I was looking
for an angle that would be brand new. That's when I
came up with the character and worked out the kinks
- that's the Villain."
The character gave a story arc to the mountain of
tracks he had recorded since Black Bastards. In 1997
Bobbito Garcia, a friend from the "Gas Face" days,
released some of the Doom material on his fledgling
Fondle 'Em label, to delirious reviews. Dumile returned
to the stage in 1998 and his debut album followed
later that year. Musically, the album was highly
unusual. Hijacking the soft sounds of 1980s soul and
squeezing the last ounces of life from exhausted
sample sources, Doomsday sounded like an eerie
echo of days past. "That's the nature of the
production style of Doom," he explains, "the
obvious/not-obvious, the in-between. Using what you
have to make something totally new. I had a limited
number of [records] then. I was like, yo, there's
something in-between that I have to get. There's
infinite amounts of layers and dimensions, it's just,
which one can you tap into?" Swearing vengeance on
the industry that had disfigured him, Doom became
one of HipHop's most colourful folk heroes.
"I'm an author. It just so happens that what I write is
in rhythmic form and it's over music. So for me to get
different points across, just like an author would in a
novel, I come with different characters." In 2003 he
released Take Me To Your Leader as King Geedorah
(inspired by Godzilla's peer, Gidra), and another,
Vaudeville Villain, as Viktor Vaughn (adapted from Dr
Doom's real name, Victor Von Doom). Dumile explains
the method in his mitosis: "I can make multiple
characters, and they can even have conflicting views.
We're growing up as all this is going on - we're going
to change our minds. The public looks at that and is
like, oh, he's contradicting himself. When you got
multiple characters you never contradict yourself. Have
another character come with another point of view."
The most thrilling aspect of all this is that the rhymes
rarely betray the identity of the narrator. Doom's
characters pop up as guests on each other's albums;
they help each other out with production duties; and
Dumile looms above them, unafraid to lapse into
second or third person. He is quick to point out that all
of these characters are characters, not shades of his
(or Doom's) personality. "I never interject," he claims.
"I keep myself out of it - I feel I'm too corny, it's not
going to be fun. It's gotta be those guys." There are
subtle differences. Geedorah's Take Me To Your Leader
assesses Earth matters from the perspective of a
"space monster" - "King Geedorah, three-finger ring
fever/Spring chicken eater/IDed as the ringleader, " he
offers by way of introduction, before asking, "Who
needs a heater?" The Geedorah disc makes its point
by painting Earth racism, Earth hedonism and Earth
corruption in the most outlandish terms possible - the
truth is disguised in his science fictions. Vaughn is
more of a straight shooter, a 1980s-obsessed thug
with bloated self-esteem - "Viktor the director flip a
script like Rob Reiner/The way a lotta dudes rhyme
their names should be 'knob-shiner'. " "Vik is frustrated
now," Dumile sighs.
Doom - "Bound to go three-plat/Came to destroy
rap" - is the most interesting character, the
misunderstood villain who loves humanity but hates
humans. "From the point of view [of America], we're
the villains. But I'm the super-villain." The point of the
ruse is to find a different way to convey the same
message from his KMD days. "Out here it's been so
desensitised... I had to figure out a way to get the
point across and still make it interesting, or make it
seem like a race thing.
"Doom is about bringing people together," he
continues. "I like to show different perspectives - put
yourself in this guy's shoes for a second and this guy
ain't so different from you. The Villain could be
anybody. The character Doom is a brown person, but
he could be anybody, any race." The mask reminds
you to pay attention to the words, not the personality.
Although Dumile uses his characters to talk about
things that concern him, he maintains that they never
betray his actual emotional make-up. This is hard to
believe. Notable for droopy, downcast arrangements
and Dumile's slurred verses, Doom's records can
sound exceedingly sad. Sometimes it seems as
though the characters are a way to distract from his
melancholy, or at least disguise it as otherworldly
fantasy. Sometimes they seem haunted by the
memory of his brother, even as he resists recording a
song that directly speaks to his feelings. On
"Doomsday", he defuses that yearning with an aw-
shucks concern over etchings: "Ever since the womb'
till I'm back where my brother went/That's what my
tomb will say/Right above my government, Dumile
[Doom-will-I ay]/Either unmarked or engraved - hey,
who's to say?" "Gas Drawls" finds him cracking a
brew for Subroc - "I hit the brew up like.., nobody
knows... how [Zev Love] X the unseen feels" - before
veering way off-course, to ridicule rivals and then
curse "the invisible bitch" from the Fantastic Four.
It's easy to dismiss Dumile when he raps that all he
needs is a "metal-face mask with a built-in frown" ("It
Ain't Nttin") and a steady supply of beers (nearly
every other song) when the adjacent verse invokes
space monsters or, on his latest disc, Mm... Food
(Rhymesayers), meats and spices. Even when Dumile
reminisces that he and Subroc "is like the brown
Smothers Brothers" ("Kon Karne"), he maintains that
this is actually Doom's voice. At the very least, it is
Zev. But it is never Dumile. "All of them are
characters," he insists, "they're never me." Perhaps.
Sometimes, Dumile doesn't even seem like Dumile,
as though he really doesn't feel himself without the
mask. While those around him disappeared, he
replicated himself, just to keep good company. His
stable of characters continues to hint at the saddest
story HipHop has ever told but, like some HipHop
Charlie Kaufman, even Dumile himself doesn't claim
to know what they will end up doing or saying. They
are beyond his control, following their own arcs.
"Them dudes are crazy," he laughs. "They can do it.
Doom is an ill character - he's going to be around
forever. I look up to that dude."
i think the single thing that makes him MF Doom is the fact that he rarely uses hooks. . .i read an interview in a snowboarding magazine on him and he said "hooks is coo, you know, if you need em". i thought that was on point, poems dont have hooks. . .your listening for the lyrics, hooks can trivialize the song IMO, this has stuck with me ever since.
