25: You heard it on the radio, tape it
MF DOOM, drawn by Jaime Hernandez for the New Yorker. The article is written by Ta-Nehisi Coates from 2009 and is absolutely incredible.
As drawn by Arturo Torres, get a print.
You may have heard by now that MF DOOM died. News broke just after I hit send on my previous newsletter on NYE. I’d been working on getting things together for my year-end retrospective DJ set on Twitch when I saw the news on Twitter (that sentence is my own personal hellscape). It gave me a chance to play some of my favorite records of his, but the news combined with a high-pitched whine in my stream to scuttle my desires to DJ until the ball dropped. You didn’t miss much, is what I’m saying, but I’ll keep trying to livestream every so often. I flirt with trying to establish a schedule (like Weds from 10 pm to midnight lol), but I find it difficult to adhere to a weekly commitment in this post-calendar world.
Here are a few of my favorite articles about DOOM:
One of my favorite pieces of music journalism is this article written by Jeff Weiss, one of my favorite music journalists. Madvillainy seems to be the agreed-upon singular classic that DOOM created with Madlib. Will agree with anyone that wants to heap praise and plaudits on that record.
Here’s an incredible interview with DOOM by David Ma from Jeff’s blog Passion of the Weiss.
This story from Tidal goes long on Operation Doomsday, his debut album and the blueprint for the rest of his career (and maybe most post-2000 underground Hip-Hop).
This elegy for the man is maybe the best overview of his accomplishments.
Finally, this is a fascinating deep dive into the sample DOOM used on a beat that remained a mystery for 20 years.
El Muntz & I hosted a show focused on MF DOOM, Earl Sweatshirt, and the Brainfeeder record label & L.A. beat scene, but it had been lost to the digital ether until yesterday, when a very nice dude rescued it from Sark and the Master Control Program. We posted our radio show from March 13, 2019 on our Mixcloud, but you gotta be signed up for a paid account to listen there. Because the DMCA doesn’t like free streaming if you include more than four songs by the same artist. WHATEVER.
Here’s a link to download the set if you don’t wanna pony up for fancy Mixcloud lol.
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On New Years Eve at about 11 pm, when I gave up on the stream, I finally just kicked on Madvillainy and played video games, staying up into the new year drinking Redbreast & Modelo Especial and listening to the metal faced villain drop rhyme after rhyme that had been with me for years. My first introduction to him was “Blacklist,” a song from Prefuse 73’s Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives that was released in June of 2001, with DOOM & Aesop Rock on features. DOOM’s voice intrigued me and his punchlines cracked me up.
When I was teaching high school in 2003 & 2004, he released King Geedorah’s Take Me To Your Leader and Viktor Vaughn’s Vaudeville Villain, which were in constant personal rotation. The latter was a display of MF DOOM’s prowess as an MC, featuring an all-star cast of producers providing diverse beats, The former had DOOM on the boards with the golden sounds and on the mic as King Geedorah, rhyming in triplets and threes while laying waste to corny MCs. I fell in love with his music as a producer, and his rhymes as a rapper, and I was hooked.
One of my favorite rules I had when I taught was that kids could listen to their own music if I had music on. This was in the era just after iPods were released, but before streaming services or cell phones with wifi & streaming. So, I got the win of being able to listen to the music I wanted to while I worked, and the kids got the benefit of tuning it out if they hated it. If we were doing independent work, or work that didn’t require up-front instruction, I would fire up a huge iTunes library I kept on my school computer that was hooked up to the stereo in my room. I had a projector, and these were the early 2000s, so I could blow kids’ minds with nature documentaries and whatnot.
If there was a rap song I loved enough, I’d go through the monotonous process of censoring the song by flipping the swear words, so they were masked backwords. Shit was ish, you know the science. Sometimes it would take me an hour just to get one Wu-Tang song edited correctly lol. DOOM placed high on the list of MCs I was willing to provide the labor to be able to play for my students. Plus, he released his own instrumentals as the Special Herbs series, so I had a bunch of those in the mix.
I definitely connected with kids on all kinds of music when I taught, and I will admit that I didn’t fully appreciate Hip-Hop as much as I should’ve then, but the kids that dug DOOM were on to the good shit. Every once in awhile, they’d ask me about the beats with cartoon samples and goofy rhymes, and I’d tell them about the enigmatic metal faced villain with a million identities. Some would get hooked, and a few even met up with me to go record shopping. In fact, in writing this article right now, I just googled the name of one of my former students.
Turns out, he was also livestreaming on Twitch on NYE, playing DOOM songs. He’s a pro DJ now with an impressive resume and sweet beats on his soundcloud page.
Maybe I have done some good in this world.
DJ Mr. Mom
January 2, 2021
North Portland, OR