In Memoriam: MF DOOM
Our writers reflect on the inimitable rapper and producer
MF DOOM—born Daniel Dumile Thompson—left us on October 31st, 2020. The general public wouldn’t find out until December 31st, and it was one last gut punch in a year that many of us felt didn’t have much left to lose. It’s always a strange thing to wrestle with something you’ve understood as a fact of life suddenly becoming a part of history. For as long as I’ve known about MF DOOM’s music, he’s been one of the greatest rappers alive. On that day, I had to make an adjustment and file him under “one of the greatest rappers to ever live.” Everyone handles grief differently; I don’t know if I’ve ever processed a loss properly, whatever that may mean. I don’t know if human beings are even equipped to understand what it means to lose one of our own—but on the day the news broke, there was a sense that everyone who knew about DOOM could almost grasp the magnitude of the hole he left in the fabric of our collective history.
MF DOOM was no stranger to devastating loss. His star began to rise in the late ’80s, forming the group KMD with his brother DJ Subroc. At the time, he was known as Zev Love X. The production on their debut album, Mr. Hood, was credited collectively to KMD but primarily done by Subroc himself when he was only 17. They had the approval of 3rd Bass, a feature from the inimitable collective Brand Nubian, and were making good progress on their second album when Subroc tragically lost his life while crossing the Long Island Expressway. KMD’s label, Elektra, shelved the album and terminated their contract the same week. This would be enough to make anyone give up on their career, or maybe on everything—and for a few years, Daniel Dumile was off the grid while he processed his loss and picked up the pieces of his life.
Honing his skills at open-mic nights while obscuring his face with a pair of tights stretched over his head, he assumed a new persona based on a love he maintained for the rest of his life—comic books. Calling himself Metal Face DOOM, after Marvel Comics’s iconic supervillain Dr. Doom, he donned a metal mask—a replica of a prop from the movie Gladiator—and Zev Love X was no more. Apart from a lyrical tribute to his brother on the title track of his debut solo album Operation: Doomsday—“on Doomsday, ever since the womb / ’til I’m back where my brother went, that’s what my tomb will say”—and an interlude which features one of Subroc’s beats, DOOM turned his gaze to the future and made a new path for himself. He would eventually lose his own 14-year-old son and his right to come back to the country where he was raised due to a visa issue, but he didn’t let any of that stop him from making the most of the hand he was dealt. He was beaten down, but never hung his head for too long.
As I think about what DOOM’s loss means to me, I’ve decided not to hang my head about it either. His unfortunate passing stunned people the world over, but what struck me most about the collective memorializing of MF DOOM is how celebratory it felt. There were a wealth of stories about what his music meant to people, personal anecdotes that showed the passion of the man behind the mask, and clips being circulated that are both hilarious and heartening. Everyone’s got a favorite DOOM song they were excited to share, and it’s rarely the same one as someone else’s. We want to honor his legacy in this special issue by showing you some of ours. —Shy Thompson
KMD - “Contact Blitz” (Sub Verse, 1994/2001)
The great paradox of DOOM was that he wore a mask, called himself a supervillain, had multiple sci-fi inspired pseudonyms, yet mostly rapped about normal shit. Not “normal shit” for rap music of the time—luxury cars, private jets, mansions (this is the tail-end of the “Shiny Suit” era we’re talking about). DOOM rapped about shit that was normal to everyday life: brushing his teeth, playing Scrabble, getting turned down for dates by women, going bald. His most memorable lyric concerning the type of wealth rappers usually bragged about lamented how often he misplaced his gold fronts. Each verse was like getting a glimpse into what the Riddler might think about in the shower on his days off.
Many other writers have described DOOM’s layers of mystery and artifice as barriers erected in response to the tragic death of his brother Subroc, and their group KMD’s subsequent forceful ejection from the music business. As Zev Love X, DOOM came off as a regular guy who just happened to be incredibly good at rapping, and despite the six-year gap between KMD and Operation: Doomsday, it was clear that the same guy was still there, underneath that mask.
“Contact Blitz”—the version from the Ruffs + Rares 12” EP—sounds more to me like a DOOM song than any other by KMD. His vocal delivery, the internal rhymes, the narrative logic, the absence of a hook, all clear precursors to the future supervillain he’d become. But it’s also a fairly unremarkable story about smoking weed, the kind only a teenager would think was funny enough to retell. The song describes an incident that occurred while KMD was on tour with the Leaders of the New School—Busta Rhymes’s first rap crew. Traveling from San Jose to Los Angeles, the driver didn’t want the rappers to smoke blunts on the bus. Of course, they did so anyway, and the song’s lyrics imagine that their cranky chauffeur must have gotten a contact high. As far as tour stories go, this one is pretty mild, but that’s its charm. No groupies, no hard drugs, no fist fights between band members. For something that happened to famous rappers, it’s surprisingly relatable. Plenty of people have stories about hot-boxing their friend’s square older brother, or an upstairs neighbor who complained about loud parties and second hand smoke. And as a touring artist myself, I love the accurate rendering of tour’s downtime. Zev is excited to be on the road with his friends—it’s a dream come true—but he doesn’t need to glamorize it. The glamor is in the mundanity.
This aspect of Zev’s writing didn’t change with his transformation into DOOM. Despite grandiose claims of comic book villainy, or identifying as a Toho Kaiju, his focus remained zoomed-in on the small details of existence. This is the paradox, but it’s also the key to his fans’ identification with him—we like to imagine ourselves with dazzling superpowers, but even if we had them, we’d probably still sit on the couch with a beer and watch Jeopardy, too. —William Hutson
KMD - “Sweet Premium Wine” (Sub Verse, 1994/2001)
A recent tweet from San Antonio writer and publisher Shea Serrano helped me put my finger on why DOOM’s passing hit me so hard after a year already full of rough knocks: “rap that you find in high school always feels so special forever.” Madvillainy came out when I was a high school senior and I still remember the guy who sold me the CD, that’s how jammed it is in my memory. It and one other Daniel Dumile full-length are permanently wedged in a part of my brain I don’t usually access. I shared a DOOM obsession with a high school classmate and our favorite deep cut from his repertoire was Black Bastards, the album famously pulled from release in 1994 in an act of self-censorship by its label. Black Bastards circulated as a bootleg while Dumile transitioned from Zev Love X to MF DOOM, eventually seeing a proper label release and gaining retrospective critical acclaim, persisting in DOOM’s discography as a totemic origin story.
My favorite song on it is “Sweet Premium Wine”—the words alone relay the vibe. It was the last track on the A-side of a 1998 12” EP preceding the first official release of Black Bastards in 2001. The buoyant, hypnotic, Chicago Soul-sampling beat is offset by Zev Love X’s opening verse, which doubles as a rowdy youth drinking anthem (he was around 21 at the time, his younger brother Subroc underage) and a sideways glance at the long-term effects of knocking back cheap booze (“Old daddy looked like his age matched his ounces / I guess that's how the B-Boy bounces”). It’s universal and hyperlocal, fuzzy and joyous and ugly in a mix that resonates today. The track’s opening vocal sample comes from ’70s Hong Kong flick World of the Drunken Master, an interesting footnote since around the same time that KMD was producing Black Bastards, RZA was assembling Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) at a budget recording studio in Brooklyn.
DOOM showed up on time with a 40 in hand for an interview with Bay area hip-hop zine 4080 shortly before Black Bastards was pulled in 1994. He talks about drinking and smoking weed to numb the pain of losing his brother Subroc in an auto accident while the two were mixing the album. Playing it back in 2021, “Sweet Premium Wine” is an eerily apt preview of the odd path that DOOM would travel after absorbing the shock of his brother’s death and losing label backing. Here he is already calling himself a “maniacal villain,” carving indelible mental images via oblique, surreal and almost monosyllabic but still soulful lyrical delivery (“He shoulda saved it for eight bucks in his pocket / He coulda used the loot for ice on his eye socket”), rapping with an internal rhyme scheme that feels like it flips every third line, maintaining a teetering juggling act that he somehow never fucks up. It’s a hint of what’s to come and an enduringly (bitter)sweet, timeless track from an album almost lost to time, a harbinger of future DOOM. —Josh Feola
MF DOOM - “Doomsday” (Fondle 'Em, 1999)
I was late to hip-hop. Really late. Not that appreciation of a genre is a game to be won, but I stood out from many of my peers in the South Asian diaspora with a misplaced snobbery that lasted almost into my twenties. A song “worthy” of repeated listening apparently had to be churned out by two guitars, a bass and a drum kit. Sampling was cheating. Owning your own sexuality was inappropriate. Grooves apparently weren’t as interesting as changing time signatures every other bar. It’s the sort of elitism you’d usually find in someone white-born in the fifties who struggles to discuss music without guitar pedals or amps, but for a teenager, you’d expect them to be far more open-minded.
At first glance, this seems harmless. However, in hindsight I can now identify this as anti-Blackness, which was rife around me as an upper-caste South Asian. For the uninitiated, the caste system is a form of social stratification with origins in Hindu scripture which is now prevalent in all major South Asian religions. Put simply, your “caste” is named for your tier in a hierarchy and defines what opportunities are available to you, where you can live, what job you do and even who you can marry. In particular, caste-aligned occupation has a strong link with colourism in the subcontinent (and diaspora), and this is where anti-Blackness anchors itself, through a hierarchy that places outdoor work at the bottom of the ladder. Upper castes pride themselves on being lighter-skinned—it’s still common for parents to tell their children not to stay in the sun too long incase they get too dark. One needn’t look further than the alignment of white supremacists and Indian Americans waving flags at the Capitol Hill riots or the enduring popularity of skin whitening creams like “Fair & Lovely” in India to see that South Asians are locked in the act of opposing black culture and chasing whiteness.
Enter: “Doomsday” by MF DOOM, the top result on YouTube for his name at the time. A chance look into DOOM after a recommendation from a friend proved influential to my musical career in a way I hadn’t truly understood until his passing. That hypnotic two-chord vamp was reminiscent of the electric piano vestiges I’d obsess over on records like Kid A yet playful in a way I’d never heard before—“Spittin’ all out the sunroof, through her missing tooth” still cracks me up when I listen to it. It also rendered a lot of the music I was into at the time utterly humourless. All of a sudden I craved more lyrical wit, not showy demonstration.
MF DOOM was the exact gateway that I needed. He had the charm of a standup with the execution of a laureate. How had my (inadvertent) aversion to Black music like his filtered out a whole world until now? My definition of what “good music” turned out to be a very colonial one on further inspection. The greater the approximation to whiteness within the tropes of a genre, the greater the value I attached to it. It was a grim realisation and one I obsessed over dismantling from then on in my listening.
I took the news of his passing as if he’d been a relative, and it went beyond mere admiration for the back catalogue of his I’d devour—it was listening to him that marked the beginning of dismantling my anti-Blackness. —Kapil Seshasayee
MF DOOM - “Rhymes Like Dimes” (Fondle 'Em, 1999)
Before music was available on every Wi-Fi enabled device in the world, there was downloading. There was a broadband connection, there were forums and music blogs, there was LimeWire. And there was me, a kid in a cold basement on a Windows 95 desktop, clicking ‘download’ on every mp3 file that looked even vaguely interesting. From some corner of the web an MP3 of “Rhymes Like Dimes” by MF DOOM made its way onto the hard drive of my parents’ Dell and onto the 128mb mp3 player that soundtracked my adolescent life.
I forgot how I originally found out about MF Doom. Maybe some forums, maybe from older kids at the skatepark, or maybe a blog. By the time I had memorized the lyrics it didn’t matter. I was in love with the song—the wonky Quincy Jones sample, Bobbito’s ridiculous outro, the cryptic furor of Doom’s lyrics and delivery—and it followed me for years.
I was never a superfan of MF Doom—I didn’t pore over his discography, have a poster, or study his lyrics—but the space he occupied in my musical trajectory was sacrosanct. Through the years I hardly ever had an iTunes library that didn’t have Rhymes Like Dimes, if not Operation: Doomsday in full. He was just one of those artists who I kept around because he needed to be there, if only to ask, “what would hip-hop be without me?” Because there’s a line to be drawn, however zig-zagged, from DOOM to the rap that would define later eras: Lil B, Odd Future, Chief Keef, Young Thug. It’s not that such artists sound like or even claim to be overtly influenced by MF Doom; it’s that MF Doom’s appeal—an aesthetic cult-of-personality, a demeanor both serious and playful, self-determined and raw—was that of an artist, not just a rapper. And that’s what rap has become: not a genre, but an artist’s tool, a means through which to realize a persona. Rap is perhaps the only genre that’s still consistently experimental without being overtly concerned with—or classified as—the avant-garde. Which is to say, rap is indeterminably present, an actualization of the juncture between past and future where the artist sits. How else would it reign dominant in a breakneck world obsessed with immediacy? If MF DOOM was anything, he was immediate, in a lane that you knew was his, determined with ease.
I tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to Great Artist mythologizing, lest the infinitely complex nature of cultural output gets reduced to the efforts of one person. And yet, sometimes there are individuals whose contributions were so indispensable that they require special emphasis, even reverence. If you’re here reading this, you probably already appreciate that MF DOOM falls into that category. He belongs there: selling his rhymes like dimes, bragging about broker times, Bobbito howling with laughter in the background as the rest of us piece together the meaning of his legacy. —Alex Brown
MF DOOM - “Tick, Tick…” (feat. MF Grimm) (Fondle 'Em, 1999)
I first discovered DOOM through his beats. I was into turntablism in the early ’00s and I kept seeing these Metal Fingers beat records show up online. A few years later I found CDs of Special Herbs Vol. 1 & 2 and Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun on the same day, and both became important windows into two seemingly different areas of music. When I finally heard DOOM rhyme, after having been obsessed with his beats, I was floored, but for some reason the track that really opened my mind didn’t even feature him on the mic. “Tick, Tick…” was the first time I had ever heard a producer make a beat that changed speeds, and it was a revelation. It’s such a simple idea, and yet I still haven’t heard many producers do it. Also, MF Grimm swings so hard over the speed changes that it makes the whole thing work that much better. This single track hooked me on DOOM and I tracked down everything I could find. Every production was important, every guest spot crucial. The deeper I dug, the more ideas and approaches opened up and the more new/old music it led me to. I started meeting some DOOM collaborators online—was introduced to the music of and became FB friends with Arthur Verocai, started a free jazz trio that exclusively played Special Herbs beats, got the MM..Food Drive CD package that came with a t-shirt… I was in deep.
This hunger eventually inspired me to work with some emcees for my old experimental band Glows in the Dark, and I was lucky enough to be able to work with some of DOOM’s friends, Jneiro Jarel, John Robinson and Count Bass D. In this case, I had the emcees send me acapellas with no beat for context. I wrote new music for the band to play behind the rhyming, and then we glued the whole thing together during mixing, incorporating grooves and free-time. I even got Morgan Garcia to master it (he did a lot of DOOM’s stuff).The final album, Research and Development, was a kind of culmination of a decade’s obsession with DOOM’s music, and it all really started with “Tick, Tick...” —Scott Burton
MF DOOM - “I Hear Voices, Pt. 1” (Sub Verse, 2001)
The promos we got, the scene roundups we loaded, everything seemed to revolve around New York. This was, like, an entire-ass adult ago: pawing through the weekly Misshapes photo dump, looking our call letters up in CMJ and imagining actually doing the Marathon. (I envisioned one subway that would keep opening to a different club.) Accent notwithstanding, I didn’t peg DOOM to that map. I was stranded in nerdcore—a hip-hop subsubculture that pulled lyrical niceness from the New York rap deck and tossed all the other cards into a storm drain—and thus heard him with that frame of reference. I got into trading battle-rap sixteens on phpBBs for like a week; MC Frontalot praised one of my posts and I still think about that. There but for the grace of U-God.
It took me years to understand that MF was NY first and foremost, no matter how many of my kind first fell for nerdy high-concept projects like Madvillainy or The Mouse and the Mask. Neither ever really did it for me; the best DOOM productions—insistent, gauzy, often balearic—came from the man himself. (What supervillain outsources his masterplan?) He considered himself a DJ first, and like anyone chasing a high he remembered the first circumstances: dropping records that played with the ladies and the fellas. Keith Sweat, Jody Watley, the slower EPMD cuts. I hear voices saying “That’s Erick Sermon” / Not only from the women, but from the men…
It’s all here. The walkoff wordplay (“It’s risky business like hand-to-hand crack sale / With rappers who’s better off on the cover of Black Tail”); the anything-for-the-bit syntax (“For any fan of the limelight / In the mic stand was left a lit stick of dynamite”); the cocktail of haughtiness, playfulness and menace; trying to navigate your hectic day-to-day while fending off delusions: that’s New York, baby! DOOM opens the track with a couplet that suggests the Gramercy Riffs catcalling in the cypher (“Out in the streeeeeeeets / You won’t survive with... wack-ass beeeats”) and records the whole thing through public-access glass. That was New York to me, when the century started: an opaque spectacle. You peel off some meaning, and the maker trots up a few flights to parse thoughts you could never imagine. All I do is audition geniuses and pull beers from the fridge down the hall. Nothing’s changed. —Brad Shoup
Prince Paul - “Chubb Rock Please Pay Paul His $2200 You Owe Him (People, Places, And Things)” (feat. Chubb Rock, MF DOOM & Wordsworth) (Antidote, 2003)
DOOM is known for his ability on the mic first and foremost, but something else people strongly associate with him is his work with world class producers. It’s hard to imagine Madvillainy without the character of Madlib’s disjointed comic book panel vignettes, or Vaudeville Villain without the saw-toothed edge of the Sound-Ink collective’s beats. DOOM’s own masterful production serves as the backdrop for the vast majority of his work and he chooses his collaborators carefully, so it’s only natural to daydream about what he might sound like if he worked with any number of great producers.
A rarely discussed DOOM cut, which has emerged as one of my favorites as I mined the back catalog over the years, comes by way of the legendary Prince Paul. Unless you’re the most avid DOOM fan you might only recognize this song from the Live from Planet X set as “Name Dropping,” if at all. If you’re a hip-hop acolyte you might also recognize that the beat is nearly identical to the one that appears on track four of De La Soul Is Dead, “Pease Porridge.” Paul knew he’d struck gold with the sample he used—a slowed down snippet of Brother Bones’ “Bye-Bye Blues,” (erroneously labeled in this video) a B-side of to song you might know as the theme of the Harlem Globetrotters—so he used it again. It’s a sample so good that I spent an entire afternoon reading up about the history of the bones, the instrument the sample is built upon—originally just actual slabs of rib bones, but these days they tend to be made of a hard wood.
The full title of the track—“Chubb Rock Please Pay Paul His $2200 You Owe Him (People, Places and Things)”—is an attempt by Prince Paul to get Chubb Rock, who stole a couple thousand from him and skipped town, to pay him back. The idea was that this track would become so strongly associated with Chubb that any time he made a public appearance he’d be asked about Prince Paul’s 2.2 grand until he broke down and paid it back. “I’ll gladly make a record ‘Thank You Chubb Rock for Paying My Money, You’re a Nice Guy,’” Paul said in an interview. “But I’ve yet to make that record because he has yet to pay me.”
Normally a story as incredible as that would be the thing worth nothing about a track like this, but it’s completely eclipsed by the fact that DOOM murders this beat and sends it to the crematorium. Chubb Rock provides a decently serviceable 40-second verse at the start—which is probably only here so that Paul could slap his name on it—before Wordsworth comes in with something a little more substantial. Half of the song is still left on the runtime after the hook, in which DOOM proceeds to make both of the MCs you just heard sound like chumps as he takes a wrecking ball to this beat for nearly two minutes. No disrespect to Plugs 1, 2 and 3—I love “Pease Porridge,” it’s one of my favorite of their tracks—but DOOM makes you feel like De La only borrowed the beat and he’s ready to have it back. Near the end of this monster of a verse it feels like he’s stating the obvious when he tells us that “DOOM could write a rhyme on demand.” I’m impressed, but he probably wrote this thing in his sleep. —Shy Thompson
King Geedorah - “Fazers” (Big Dada, 2003)
Follow The Light. The Light is Your Guide.
Spirituality is a concept so nebulous that it almost invites cynicism. When the boundaries of the unknown are exactly that—unknown—it’s easy to disregard it as a mere attempt to sugar-coat the meaninglessness of existence. Nevertheless, Daniel Dumile’s MF DOOM and his adjacent personas were a project on the human spirit; it showcased that no matter the inevitability of our demise, there are 10,000 ways to be alive and even more ways to tell your story.
As any other Mexican-American can relate to, I grew up Catholic. I remember my first communion. I remember my first confession. I remember being confirmed—against my wishes. Despite the heel-turn on my familial faith, as an adult I’ve come to reconcile any grudges my hormonal teenage self had against spirituality. Though I do not subscribe to any particular religion, there is a beauty in spirituality and the idea of life everlasting. There is an ease that comes with the idea of transitioning to the next life. There is a comfort provided in knowing that our corporeal selves are merely containers for something special. Yes, I know I sound like a namaste-pilled yoga instructor, but who are we to say that it isn’t possible? What evidence exists that says an afterlife is, without a shadow of a doubt, not going to happen? Even if it isn’t true, and that this life is all that we are dealt, is not the belief in something spiritual a uniquely human experience? We owe it to ourselves to lean into the weirdly sublime, to make our mark beyond time.
So, when Daniel Dumile passed away, we can only come to one obvious conclusion: his work, talent and love have no expiration date; his spirit exists in perpetuity. And this spirit took on many shapes. Producer, rapper, father, husband, lover, enigmatic jokester. All of them resided within him and continue to breathe life within our own minds as listeners and fans.
This is exemplified best in one of his production aliases, King Geedorah. The name references King Ghidorah, the three-headed dragon from either outer space or another dimension (depending on who you ask), who serves as the archenemy of anti-hero Godzilla. Dumile’s obsession with kaiju is no secret. But what makes King Geedorah one of his most unique personas is that it blends the bombastic nature you’d expect an extraterrestrial dragon to have with an inflection toward his own humanity. He is both a destroyer of worlds and an empathetic father figure.
On the opening track, “Fazers,” we hear the dichotomy and struggle of wanting to be both over a swelling of strings, vinyl crackle and 808 kicks: “Born alone, die alone, no matter who your man is / Hope he live long enough to tell it to his grandkids.” Through the three-headed dragon, he spoke of fatherhood the way he speaks about his talent, acidulous and disciplined but with just enough silliness to let his little king know he cares. King Geedorah knows when to bite his tongue, when to unleash it, and when to do both, whether in the streets or at his son.
When I’m in the hood, razors on tongue / Nowadays it’s amazing raising young / Rule number one: Keep your fazers on stun.
The death of Daniel Dumile wasn’t the end, and he above all knew that. I can only hope that when I’m old and I look back at what I’ve done, that it is not failures and accomplishments that come to an expiring mind, but what I’m about to do next. —Adrian Rojas
King Geedorah - “Krazy World” (feat. Gigan) (Big Dada, 2003)
King Geedorah is my favorite of all MF DOOM’s works, linking as it does the kaiju movies I loved in childhood with Daniel Dumile’s parallel-universe boom-bap. Just as I carried around plastic toys of rubber-suit monsters to build a shield against the social wounds of adolescence, he deploys dialogue ripped straight from old Godzilla tapes to construct the deadpan conceit that ties together the four sides of Take Me To Your Leader. But we can’t keep our conceits up at all times, and just as my own guard had to come down in time to face my vulnerabilities, Dumile’s monster mask also slips.
Big feelings are nowhere more mask-off than “Krazy World,” which queues up at the tail end of Side A. As with the bulk of the album, DOOM doesn’t rap, leaving the mic in the capable double-clutch of the pseudonymous Gigan. He raps just fine, even if he sticks to standard tough-guy lyrical shit. But I challenge you to name a more vulnerable beat than this one.
It’s built atop reliably funky chunks of MPC rhythm, but the chops wobble and come close at moments to going off-beat completely, as if the Metal-Fingered One was tapping the beat out in real time, struggling to control his machinery. More telling than this borderline naivety beatmaking, however, is the hook, one of a trifecta on the album that features strings.
A cursory Internet search reveals that it’s sampled from The 5th Dimension’s tune “Requiem: 820 Latham.” The bassline is as supple as you’d expect from a Quincy Jones cut, but the plaintive, stepwise counterpoint of the orchestra isn’t tough—it’s tender. In fact, until I prudently researched the sample while writing this piece, I’d thought it was Laura Palmer’s theme from Twin Peaks, and even though I know better now, I’ve come to hear “Krazy World” as a lament of the excruciating co-mingling of love and sorrow, and its tender softness throws Gigan’s verses about wanton sex and hustling drugs into ironic relief. Did Dumile let it happen on accident? Or is it possible that super-villains get in their feelings, too? —Lance Higdon
Viktor Vaughn - “Let Me Watch” (feat. Apani B) (Sound-Ink, 2003)
There’s no DOOM song I’ve heard more than “Let Me Watch.” As a teenager, it was the track that me and my friends obsessed over most, mainly for how funny it was. As an adult, it still makes me laugh, but I also have a deep love for its depiction of two people in a budding romance. Regarding the Viktor Vaughn persona, DOOM’s said, “Vik speaks from a heart place. It just has more testosterone. He’s a young whippersnapper so he talks shit.” You can hear the gleeful and brazen shit-talking on the title track, but it’s on “Let Me Watch” where his “heart” and “testosterone” become the source of humor-through-humanness, something DOOM captured elegantly across all his personas.
The 6680 Lexington sample’s curlicue melodies and descending bassline are mischievous and romantic, functioning as the perfect stage-setting for a secret, adolescent infatuation (“‘Call me back, my mother home,’ spoke to tone, again”). As we hear the story of two people meeting and going on a date, Apani B’s voice is sultry—far more sophisticated than DOOM ever sounds—and it plays well into capturing her character, Nikki. While she’s composed, strong, and eager to shut down DOOM when he disrespects her, DOOM reveals himself to ultimately be really horny (“All this talking shiddit and V ain’t even hit it yet / It’s uncharacteristic of the vet”, “Vaughn can’t wait to long-stroke it on the late-late”).
DOOM being a normal-ass dude was one of the best things about him, so it feels especially apt that a song where he actually hurts someone (“I wound up on Prozac from all the shit he put me through,” says Apani B) is in a real-world, relatable scenario. When Apani B raps about hickies and blushing cheeks, there’s a breathlessness that makes clear how much she cares about this new fling. For DOOM to respond crassly with “How about a nightcap, maybe a bottle of Mo’ / So V can bite your titties like a baby toddler, ho” is, then, a hilarious miscalculation—a perfect depiction of when dudes let their dicks get the best of them, unable to read the tone of an intimate conversation between lovers.
While “Let Me Watch” has funny lines—the titular punchline is one of DOOM’s greatest—the whole scenario is funny in and of itself: a powerful supervillain unable to work out a relationship, acting vile in the least supervillain of ways (that is to say, the most normal, human, familiar). A lot of people have talked about DOOM as a figure who helped them realize their potential for being more, but “Let Me Watch” is a song that reminds you that normal people can be wicked too. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Viktor Vaughn - “Saliva” (Sound-Ink, 2003)
Buried in the middle of Daniel Dumile’s first album as Viktor Vaughn is a less than 3-minute shortie called “Saliva.” And buried in the middle of that song is a throwaway line for MF DOOM that’s actually quite revealing: “True victory, a new sick story / I never met a chick that was too thick for me.” In a feature with XXL Mag, DOOM points out that “I change for the character […] It’s a little more vulgar than DOOM would be. That’s the obvious thing you can tell. Viktor say whatever the fuck is on his mind.”
For DOOM, it wasn’t enough that in the years between 2003-2005, he was incredibly prolific. When he created a new alias, he also embodied this new being and did his best to distinguish them as a rapper from his other aliases, and so this line, which would have just been an empty brag in anyone else’s hands becomes a ‘case-in-point’ of what made DOOM special beyond the insane rhymes. And of course, the song offers plenty of that too: rhyming “Zantac, Ahk” with “Anaphylactic shock” and then “Standoffish” with “Canned raw crawfish.” DOOM was someone who loved to rhyme words to the point that I’d be willing to bet he could beat out RhymeZone. And if he doesn’t, well, no chick is too thick for him.
“Saliva” stands out for another reason: it’s the rare RDJ2 production. When RDJ2 released his debut album Deadringer on Def Jux, El-P declared that it was going to “change the motherfuckin’ world,” and for a few years there RDJ2 was often mentioned in the same breath as DJ Shadow for their sample-based approach to instrumental hip-hop. RDJ2 didn’t change the world, but the beat for “Saliva” makes me wish it did: a whirlwind of triumphant horns and lilting strings—replete with a bangin’ soul sample as if it were a house beat—that earns the Jerry Lee Lewis reference at the start. Goodness gracious! Great balls of fire, this one. —Marshall Gu
Madvillain - “Raid” (feat. M.E.D.) (Stones Throw, 2004)
Among Madvillainy’s many achievements is “Raid”’s synthesis of Madlib and MF DOOM’s power. The sampling is immaculate; Bill Evans Trio and Osmar Milito & Quarteto Forma blended without difficulty, with some George Clinton thrown in for good measure. It’s why, on “Money Folder,” DOOM uses “Raid” for a callback: “They flipped it like Madlib / did a old jazz standard.” The villain’s audacity is at his height here, giving us one of the all-time opening lines “How DOOM hold heat and preach non-violence?” and juxtaposing it with third-person poetic license as only he can.
It’s why M.E.D.’s verse, while very good, simply pales in comparison to the Madvillain symbiosis that was performed here. In 60 seconds, DOOM spits some of his most iconic lines, tells tall tales and creates mythos, and plays with rhyme schemes alchemically. The song is the perfect encapsulation of why DOOM fans were so devoted and annoying about him. Would you tell those who love the English language to shut up about Shakespeare or Toni Morrison? Sit the fuck down and enjoy the greatness. —Eli Schoop
Madvillain - “Operation Lifesaver aka Mint Test” (Stones Throw, 2004)
Throughout the annals of hip-hop there have been a number of cunning, witty lyricists that have come and gone, but arguably none greater than the artist known as MetalFace. What made DOOM stand out from the rest was not only how smart and educated his obscure references could be, but also how damn funny the motherfucker often was as well.
While a few lines might come to mind (“Bitches think he’s overly chauvinistic / Giving ya’ll nothing but the lick like two broads”), I always go back to track 13 off his magnum opus Madvillainy. As a fan it is always exciting when you discover something upon repeat listens that adds depth and context to the listening experience. You can imagine how dumbfounded I was after finally realizing this whole track is basically DOOM talking shit about a fine female who has stanky breathe (“Some of ‘em need to eat the whole thing of Crest”). Clocking in at only 90 seconds, could you blame me? Madlib productions tend to preoccupy your mind enough, let alone with double-entendres about procuring a breath mint layered on top (“Her big butt and smile was like camo, hit up the men’s room, we need more ammo”).
Not just any rapper can dedicate a whole song to such a comical situation and still be able to pull it off artistically. To me this track is very indicative of the most likable aspect of MF DOOM’s personality: using his big brain to talk about some dumb shit that only educated degenerates would understand. As a fan of rap, comedy, & chasing woman on occasion, this song hits home for me.
As any supervillain does, DOOM has a plan for dealing with the situation he has described: just hit her with the “Do you need a mint?” test.
“I hope she don’t take this the wrong way.”
I sure hope DOOM had the last laugh.
Rest In Power
Daniel Dumile
1971-2020
Madvillain - “Figaro” (Stones Throw, 2004)
I first consciously heard MF DOOM when I was 12 years old. In hindsight, the Gorillaz were the first to introduce me to the masked villain, but that was before I knew to dig deeper into the music I enjoyed. Growing up in very-white, very-religious, very-country/rock-centric Salt Lake City, most of my friends were not listening to much rap outside of the extremely high-profile—Eminem was quite popular (I’ll let you connect anthropologic dots). I can think of a total of three people in my life who knew who MF DOOM was as I was growing up. Myself, my friend Carl, who ran a short-lived music news and reviews Blogspot with me in middle school, and my friend Eli’s older brother, Leo, who babysat me when I was a bit younger. By the time I finished high school, the general knowledge of DOOM’s existence by my peers grew, but only to maybe four or five more people than those previously listed.
In that way, DOOM felt like a personal secret—one of the earliest tastes of “underground” music pretension that would eventually grow into me writing for newsletters like Tone Glow. Hearing Madvillainy for the first time my brain melted, and ”Figaro” was the track that snapped everything into focus: This is it. More of this. This is what I am looking for.
The track of course was produced by Madlib but the use of deep-cut audio samples also defined DOOM’s own production style. “Figaro” was surely the first time I’d ever heard Lonnie Smith, and the dizzying cyclone-of-a-beat that was harvested from those songs taught me to investigate where the sounds of my music were coming from. Some of the first Google rabbit holes I ever found myself down was because of Madvillainy.
None of the rappers I had ever heard rhymed like DOOM. It seemed as though not a single syllable was left without a pairing and each word propelled the song’s whirling momentum further. He transitioned into different rhyme schemes, slowed down, and sped-up over the beat as if his voice and the music were sewn together at the heels. And because of these seamless, intricate transitions, each of the most impressive sections of DOOM’s verse—from “It’s too hot to handle” to “overdose No-doz pills” is perhaps the most awe-inspiring passage—are intrinsically tied together. “The clever nerd / The best MC with no chain you ever heard.” It’s two and a half minutes of unrelenting magnificence and DOOM knows it. There’s nothing in it that’s non-essential.
It was an instant addiction and to this day the rap that I tend to favor the most always prominently features MF DOOM as an influence. He showcased his intelligence and nerdiness with so much confidence that even I felt like I was kinda cool for enjoying the same things. In reflecting on my experience with DOOM’s art, I was somewhat astonished to realize how vital of a creative voice he has been for me since I first heard him. Since I was 12, his breathy, deep, New York accent has consistently stayed in my ears, cracking jokes, building worlds, and mystifying me. So few of even the best writers accomplish what MF DOOM, Daniel Dumile, made as a core principle that could be attributed to almost all of his work, and it’s an idea that I continue to aspire to: Make every word valuable. —Evan Welsh
De La Soul - “Rock Co.Kane Flow” (feat. MF DOOM) (Sanctuary, 2004)
By 2004, late night TV had long grown irrelevant. What was once a friendly place for the alone to seek solace at the end of a long day had become another alienating sideshow on the idiot box. No one cared about what was going on with these old men night after night. Instead, solo flyers were finding new virtual companionship via other channels on the pre-YouTube, pre-streaming video internet. To win back the coveted youth audiences, late night shows took more chances with their music bookings.
I wasn’t a regular viewer of Last Call with Carson Daly, but I was often awake at 1:35am. In those days I was one of those internet trawlers, digging through folders on Soulseek and reading the Okayplayer boards late into the night while the TV glowed passively in the corner. I remember reading on one of those early ’00s rap gossip sites that MF DOOM would be performing with De La Soul on Last Call. I loved De La but that was the moment in time for DOOM, right before MM…Food, and a few months after Madvillany.
The performance starts with a quick verse from Posdnous and this looks like a typical fun rap group in front of a late night TV audience. Then it happens at the :35 mark, as DOOM sneaks up from behind the DJ booth to centerstage. Wearing a Patrick Ewing jersey, he made me want to tear through my grandma’s attic to find mine that was stored away years earlier as the Nets shamefully took precedence as my team of choice in the early ’00s.
DOOM’s presence immediately takes this from a nice performance to an all-timer—something that wouldn’t be seen on TV again. The metal-fist terrorist, the villain himself invading American homes through the antennae we held so sacred. Not even cable, this was network TV. Insomniac grandmas and grandpas across the country would be radicalized into the possibilities of where rap could go from here! The mask alone would make this unforgettable to the key Last Call demographic, whoever that may have been.
“From the top of the key, for three! VILLAIN!” what a way to start a verse. There’s nostalgia here with references to Schwinn, Atari, and The Partridge Family; there’s NY with the leather goose V bomber jacket and LILCO; and it’s funny and combative, threatening to “slay youths when it comes to who’s more cleverer.” It’s a perfect DOOM verse as so many are. DOOM’s second verse on the track is great too, but there’s nothing topping the shock of first seeing De La Soul on stage and then DOOM appearing outta nowhere. “It’s DOOM! His image is on the television screen! He came right on in the middle [of the show!]” as the classic cartoon intro sample to “I Hear Voices” goes with the DOOM character responding “You thought I was done for eh? But you’re wrong. I’m very much alive!” —Erik Sutch
MF DOOM - “One Beer” (Rhymesayers, 2004)
I was lucky to see MF DOOM perform twice, first in June 2004, three months after Madvillainy was released, and again in February 2005, three months after MM… Food. The June show was at DC’s 9:30 Club and found DOOM opening for Talib Kweli, while the February show was at a ballroom on GWU’s campus, booked by rap writer Andrew Nosnitsky. I feel obligated to talk about how fun these shows were because DOOM was so often trashed for his live antics.
Heading to his shows on DC Metro, I felt like I was on my way to see both a brilliantly devised fictional supervillain and the most relatable down-to-earth figure in rap. Listening back to a recording of the June show, he’s charmingly offbeat, maybe in tribute to headliner Kweli.
The man was a presence on stage, an uncle-like lyrical genius with near perfect breath control on his best nights. He’d move around like he took a performance 101 class, somewhat awkwardly remembering to reach every inch of the stage. It should have been obvious when he sent imposters because he was so one-of-a-kind up there. He was engaging and kept his sets QUICK like most performers should. Every artist wants to play the new shit, and it wasn’t a problem at all for DOOM to keep the crowd happy with what was new for him in that era.
By my count, DOOM was the lead or co-creative force on nineteen albums in his lifetime, and ten of those came between 2003 - 2005. For me, that’s a lot of teenage newspaper delivery money being spent at Sandbox Automatic, HipHopSite, and Tower on DOOM CDs. There were always nice giveaways included with the albums, the 7” for “One Beer” with Madvillainy for one, and MM...LeftOvers with MM...Food.
“One Beer” still feels like the song most representative of that era of DOOM. Madvillainy feels very specifically like DOOM rapping with a Stones Throw twist over Madlib beats, but “One Beer” sounds like DOOM channeling his Operation: Doomsday days with Madlib mimicking the way DOOM would use samples chaotically. “One Beer” is the bridge between the two big 2004 DOOM albums in a funny way. It was recorded for Madvillainy but the duo decided it didn’t fit, so Stones Throw issued it on a 7” as a bonus with the LP, unaware until MM...Food came out in the fall on Rhymesayers that DOOM was including it on that album too.
I turned 33 two days before DOOM’s death was announced. On my bday, a friend posted a video of me at 16, driving around and rapping along to “One Beer.” I sent back one of me in a rental car I had taken that afternoon to a kangaroo sanctuary, rapping along to Playboi Carti “King Vamp.” It felt like a fitting modern continuation of the weirdo inclusive stylings of DOOM.
Though I saw what was undeniably the real DOOM (or did I?), I wish I also had the chance to see the imposter. Imagine being one of the first to see that, and picking up on little nuances through the set that felt off, but with no reason to assume it could be anybody else behind the mask. Small villainous acts are so amusing—it’s ridiculous people were upset at the time! I’ll wrap this up with one of my favorite lines on “One Beer”:
Crooked eye, mold, nerd geek with a cold heart
Probably still be speaking in rhymes as an old fart
I wish he had lived to fulfill the prophecy because he was one of the few in rap who figured out how to switch styles with age and still make it work. —Erik Sutch
MF DOOM - “Deep Fried Frenz” (Rhymesayers, 2004)
I had just begun obsessively checking for the records sampled on my favorite rap beats around the time MF DOOM’s music clicked with me. This is how, at age 14, I learned about Ronnie Laws, whose sax lines the masked artist looped for “Deep Fried Frenz.” Far later in life, I would read that DOOM’s sample library didn’t consist of the coolest records, the jazz fusion of the ’70s being one of them. But it’s through that very quaint collection of cultural ephemera that I will forever remember him by.
For all that others claim about DOOM’s samples being this cheesy slice of music, though, there’s not a hint of corniness to pick up from “Deep Fried Frenz.” It’s instead soberly earnest with Laws’s tender yet melancholy sax riff striking a mood fit for the rapper’s meditation on the wariness of human relationships. “Friends! How many of us have them,” ask Whodini, who echoed a similar sentiment about friendship in the borrowed hook from the classic “Friends.” The timeline harkens deeper once you discover the sampled Ronnie Laws song is “Friends and Strangers,” the title track to his 1977 album. Decades separate Laws, Whodini and DOOM, but they’re all at the mercy of the same, strange forces.
“You can ignore this advice or take it from me,” DOOM raps. Being a teenager, always sulking about the small stuff, I indulged in the latter option. No, I was not robbed of money or back-stabbed, but I was in constant worry that my friendships weren’t what it really seemed. I figured it’d be safer to imagine to be in on some non-existent ploy than be humiliated falling into a real one out of ignorance—I was 14 and infinitely more insecure!
Certainly inspired by actual experiences, DOOM wrote about his ambivalence toward relationships in such an artful manner. While many pull the most ridiculous arrangement of rhymes and syllables to showcase his writerly skills, it’s these solemn verses of “Deep Fried Frenz” that has made a mark on me. When I was a teenager, I was enamored by DOOM’s love of wordplay, but I also wished I could articulate my feelings with as much concision and creativity as he did. —Ryo Miyauchi
MF DOOM - “Deep Fried Frenz” (Rhymesayers, 2004)
Grief, for me, is a non-linear process, and I will never forget the moment when I learned of Daniel Dumile’s passing. As I logged onto Twitter with my morning coffee and joint, and saw #RIPDOOM and #MFDOOM trending, my heart sank into an unfathomably deep and confusing part of my chest. As I began frantically scrolling, my worst fears were soon realized and they hit me with the force of a rear end car wreck; chaotic, alienating, violent—a sudden and shocking transportation to a dark world encased in cold, twisted, metal.
The experience of listening to the music of MF DOOM and specifically MM..Food for the first time was one of the most profound musical listening experiences I can ever remember. The way he talks about: obscuring his image, navigating a world as someone with a potential food addiction; alienation, the desire to be in a different space, in a different body, maybe multiple bodies at the same time; a world defined by craft and creativity, not “content”; the long-running theme of addressing his own mortality and themes of trauma through the loss of his brother, and later the loss of his 14-year-old son. It’s all there, not to mention it single-handedly made up for every time I was fat-shamed in middle school.
On the epic Whodini-flipped anthem “Deep Fried Frenz” DOOM takes the classic loop for a bass-heavy accelerated ride through a frantic lyrical masterclass outlining his experience of his own isolation. Simultaneously criticizing the artificial vanity the music industry is built upon, as well as the complexities of navigating a myriad of relationships while working as an artist who never really wanted visibility in the first place, “Deep Fried Frenz” speaks to the anxiety and uncertainty around ourselves and our relationships, now exacerbated through social distancing. Perhaps DOOM was practicing social distancing before many of us through his evasion of almost all press, accolades, and at various times, even his own performances.
The mysterious gifts and instructions he left throughout his work are like puzzle pieces from another dimension. His work unearths very profound and longstanding communal questions around human interaction, trust, and magic, and the complexities of the simultaneous creation and destruction of these worlds. Waking up in a universe where MF DOOM does not exist, is simply unconscionable. —malocculsion (Ratskin Records, Decaycast Magazine)
DANGERDOOM - “Mince Meat” (Epitaph, 2005)
Growing up in rural Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada, an hour and a half’s drive away from the closest city, my options for concert-going as a teenager were limited. Occasionally I’d catch some fourth-rate southern Ontario screamo band at the local curling rink or Lions Club, but I didn’t attend a proper music festival until I moved to Toronto for university in 2008. Besides my dad’s Dylan and Clash records, my musical tastes skewed towards angsty pop-punk and nu-metal, including Linkin Park, Sum 41, and Vans Warped Tour compilations, which would inevitably get “borrowed” or passed down to my two younger brothers.
One day my brother Adam—who had a subscription to Alternative Press and once painted his bedroom walls colourfully to match a Fall of Troy record—brought home a copy of Punk-O-Rama 10, the latest in the compilation series by Epitaph Records (the label started by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz). Next to selections from NOFX, The Offspring, Dropkick Murphys, and From First to Last was DANGERDOOM’s “Mince Meat,” a collaboration between MF DOOM and producer Danger Mouse (previously best known for his copyright-flouting The Grey Album). We didn’t have cable in our house so the Adult Swim references went over my head, but I was mesmerized by how many quotable lines this cognac-swigging, Boggle-playing, gruff-voiced villain could pack into one song. In just over two-and-a-half minutes, he puts on a masterclass in rapping, gleefully taunting “whippersnappers,” comparing himself to an air purifier, and making sexual innuendos using Loony Tunes characters. Who else could sample a 1966 cartoon about a cat Mountie and his French-Canadian mouse nemesis for a hook and make it sound so sinister? I revisited DANGERDOOM’s The Mouse and the Mask after hearing the recent news of the rapper’s passing. When I heard the opening hums of “Mince Meat,” I was transported back to my childhood bedroom, furiously rewinding my Sony Discman to make sure I wasn’t missing a single bar. —Max Mertens
Thank you for reading this special issue of Tone Glow. Rest in Power MF DOOM.
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