Living off borrowed time, the clock tick faster
A retrospective on MF DOOM
Buckle up, folks. This is going to be a long one.
In the moments after the announcement of Daniel Dumile’s passing, an outpouring of tributes flooded the hip hop scene for the late, great MF DOOM, each with a compelling story or analysis on Dumile’s immense talent. I would also like to offer my take on the man behind the mask, albeit with a slightly different perspective. There have been many essays on the mythos of MF DOOM, the brilliance of Dumile’s writing, and the incredible production chops he displayed. But many of those pieces rely upon a baseline knowledge of DOOM’s catalog or hip hop in a broad sense. For my first piece on Substack, I would like to break down what made Dumile great, irrespective of one’s background knowledge of hip hop.
My first introduction to Daniel Dumile—the man behind the mask of MF DOOM—was the song “Gas Drawls” off Operation: Doomsday, his solo debut. It must have been 2006, well after the 1999 release of the album; I was a bit young in ‘99. But DOOM came onto my Pandora feed through some small miracle. That short introduction was enough to stoke a fire of fandom that has lasted fifteen years.
A simple kick (bass) drum and snare pattern heralded my inaugural listen of MF DOOM: two quick, thumping kicks, followed by another kick and a snare. Ba-dum-dum-tish, ba-dum-dum-tish. “Metal Face Doom, Operation: Doomsday” calls out the narrator, as descending jazzy piano chords reverberate in the background, accompanied by a vintage vocal sample. The atmosphere emanates classic hip hop, which I’ll elaborate on for those who aren’t familiar.
In exploring that iconic hip hop soundscape, we must dive into the origins of the movement. Hip hop emerged in 1970s New York, born of African and Caribbean music and spoken word traditions, and mixed in with radical Black art and political expression. Public Enemy’s iconic 1989 track, “Fight the Power,” is an example of the logical conclusion of these two interweaving paths. Traditionally, hip hop culture relied on several key elements: rapping (or “emceeing”), deejaying, breakdancing, and graffiti. These are the four original tenets of hip hop culture. Over time, emcees like KRS-One expanded those concepts to include notions like street knowledge and street fashion, but the original four kick-started the hip hop movement.
Early hip hop tracks were fairly rudimentary by today’s standards: simple rhyme schemes (or no rhyming at all) and modest production styles. Hearing a rapper like MF DOOM spit intricate bars on the mic in the early 2000s is a very different beast from listening to Sugar Hill Gang’s revolutionary yet simple 1979 track “Rapper’s Delight.” But over the decade that followed, artists like Eric B. & Rakim and Big Daddy Kane added manifold layers to hip hop expression, incorporating multisyllabic rhyming, innovative flows (the rhythm of a person’s rapping), and increasingly sophisticated music production.
Moving into the 90s, the hip hop scene exploded in every direction. De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest elevated smooth, jazz-inspired tracks with eccentric lyricism. N.W.A., Snoop Dogg, and 2Pac ushered in the era of G-Funk in the West, extrapolating from the music of funk legends George Clinton and Zapp to create a synthesizer-drenched gangsta rap sound. On the East Coast, a gritty street-inspired opulence emerged from the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, Nas, and the Wu-Tang Clan. Finally, the South created wildly divergent sounds—the wistful soul of Outkast, the lyrically dizzying hustlers of UGK, and the crunk sound of Three 6 Mafia. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it provides a synopsis of some of the major players of 1990s hip hop. And, speaking of the 90s, that brings us back to DOOM in 1999.
MF DOOM’s sound on Operation: Doomsday was avant-garde and jazzy like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, with a healthy dose of that trademark New York kick drum and snare—the boom bap sound. Pioneered by titans of the industry like DJ Premier, Pete Rock, and 9th Wonder, boom bap flooded the airwaves of New York in the 90s and comprised the beats of some of hip hop’s most iconic tracks (e.g. Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.”). And Dumile’s production followed suit on his first solo LP. So, when you hear that ba-dum-dum-tish, ba-dum-dum-tish on “Gas Drawls,” realize that Dumile was creating his own interpretation of a classic hip hop sound.
Too, much like RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, Dumile incorporated old clips from shows and movies (called “samples”) to further a narrative—for Dumile, comic-themed villainy; for RZA, kung fu sensibilities. However, while the martial arts mythos of the Wu-Tang Clan aided in creating an artistic flair for their projects, it was largely an accessory to an already compelling story. In Dumile’s case, the sample material became the artist. Dumile fashioned an identity from the comic book supervillain Dr. Doom, using the nom de plume of MF DOOM. Dumile wore a metal mask to his public appearances, including this interview where he explains the nuances of its inclusion into his persona. His lyrics often represented these fictional villainous tendencies, and Dumile’s insertion of old comic book television show clips into his music furthered that character. And, if that wasn’t enough, Dumile was known to send out imposters wearing the DOOM mask to shows, instructing them to lip-sync to his songs. He lived and breathed the role of the supervillain.
But MF DOOM was not Dumile’s only character. For one, there was King Geedorah, the kaiju-like space monster modeled off Godzilla’s King Ghidora. Another was Viktor Vaughn, a space-travelling rapper and scientist who fled a ban of hip hop in his home dimension. Metal Fingers was Dumile’s pseudonym for his production efforts, while Zev Love X was the masked emcee’s first moniker. Dumile had created an entire universe for his personas to interface, an unparalleled feat of imagination in hip hop. Yet Dumile never strayed too far into the obscure; his references could appear cryptic, yes, but he managed to maintain the listener’s interest with wit, charm, and pure technical rapping ability.
Let’s turn back to “Gas Drawls.” MF DOOM opens with a fusillade of bars:
By the way, I re-up on bad dreams, bag up screams in fiftys
Be up on mad schemes that heat shop like jiffy-pop(pop)
In a instant get smoked like Winston Cigarettes
Ho's get ripped off like Nicorette patch
In real life the real trife scene
Might snatch ya life like assault machine
Rifle, dead up setup like bull-fight
Be blunted how we like couldn't white or in full flight
“Gas Drawls” is typical of the DOOM catalog: clever punchlines, double entendres, potent rhyming, recondite references, and imaginative slang. In just eight bars, MF DOOM spans the gamut of his lyrical prowess through incorporating drug dealing lingo (“re-up” and “fiftys"), offbeat allusions (conjuring gunfire from popcorn with “jiffy-pop[pop]”), and double meanings (using “smoked” to denote cigarettes and getting shot). Yet, despite the verse’s seemingly violent contents, DOOM isn’t really talking about killing anyone. All the tough talk he spits is a metaphor for his prowess on the mic; DOOM likens his words to weapons and his rhymes to bullets that might penetrate an opposing emcee’s chest. This is the incredible power of Daniel Dumile’s pen—bar after bar could pass you by without hearing a single line with a straight meaning.
Now, that is not to say that Dumile was purposefully opaque or inaccessible. He just happened to have an unreal store of references of myriad genres, an objectively impressive vocabulary, and transcendent rhyming abilities. Let’s look at another MF DOOM cut, “Figaro,” off the collaborative album with producer Madlib, Madvillainy. Forgive the wall of text, but this deserves an extensive look:
The rest is empty with no brain, but the clever nerd
The best MC with no chain ya ever heard
Take it from the TEC-9 holder
They've bit but don't know their neck shine from Shinola
Everything that glitters ain't fishscale
Lemme think, don't let her faint get Ishmael
A shot of Jack got her back it's not an act stack
Forgot about the cackalack, holla back; clack-clack, blocka
Villainy, feel him in ya heart chakra, chart-toppa
Start-shit stoppa, be a smart shoppa
Shot-a-Cop day around the way 'bout to stay
But who'd a know there's two mo' that wonder where the shooter go
If you click on each of the links above, you can reach the annotation for the lyrics. I highly recommend taking a look. But, in any case, here is a quick breakdown of just the first two lines:
In those two bars, MF DOOM completes three separate multisyllabic rhymes in succession. As if that weren’t enough, DOOM fits some clever wordplay and multiple meanings into two lines. “The rest is empty with no brain, but the clever nerd” is a rather inventive way to present a relatively pedestrian statement—that other rappers don’t possess the intelligence of DOOM. But “the best MC with no chain ya ever heard” is jaw-droppingly impressive. At face value, DOOM appears only to be spitting about his excellence as a rapper, just without a typical chain (jewelry). But the Dumile pen is infrequently that perfunctory. Instead, in looking at the context of the song and his other works, DOOM is relaying multiple things: his distaste for the materialism of jewelry and appearance-driven hip hop, his spurning the chains of a record deal (DOOM was an independent artist), and possibly even the idea that DOOM eschewed a chain (his ego) by assuming the villain persona, which afforded him the ability to focus solely on his music. It’s an incredibly dense series of 20 words.
Line after line follow with cunning lyricism and impeccable rhyming. Seriously, watch this video if you want a visual indicator of how absurd Dumile was at stringing together rhymes. And here’s another example. And another. Do you need me to keep going? Point is, Dumile was perhaps the best ever at rhyming. But that is only one facet of emceeing. Let me quickly run through some of his wittiest punchlines for good measure.
Madvillainy’s “Great Day”:
Last wish: I wish I had two more wishes
And I wish they fixed the door to the matrix, there's mad glitches
Spit so many verses sometimes my jaw twitches
One thing this party could use is more... ahem
Booze
You see where “ahem” is? The rhyming pattern makes sense for “bitches” to be the next line, but that would be too easy for DOOM. He relies on the listener’s expectation of the punchline, then subverts that expected result for a funny quotable. Oh, and “booze” rhymes with “use.” Missing the rhyme just wouldn’t do.
Vaudeville Villain’s “Lickupon”:
There's four sides to every story
If these walls could talk, they'd probably still ignore me
Dumile plays with the word “story” here, meaning the traditional narrative sense and a story of a building. Typically, the phrase goes, “there’s two sides to every story.” But Dumile sees the opportunity to tie another common phrase, “if these walls could talk,” to the first line to create double entendres. He inserts some self-deprecating humor to say that if the four sides (walls) of the story (building) could talk to him, they’d have nothing to say. Dumile uses this to either hint at his own triviality in the world (the walls see nothing of merit) or a gesture at mental illness (he’s talking to walls, but they aren’t talking back). It’s nothing short of brilliant to create such intricate poetry in only two lines. But Dumile does that time and time again.
Finally, a short bar from Madvillainy’s “Rhinestone Cowboy”:
Got more soul than a sock with a hole
Get it? It’s not as complex, but it always draws a chuckle from me.
The point is… Dumile was a genius. I haven’t even mentioned one of his best albums, MM…Food, which revolved solely around food topics: “Beef Rap” (a song about rap feuds, known as beefs), “Guinnesses” (a song about using alcohol to numb the pain of a relationship ending), and “Kon Queso” (a reference to cheese, which is slang for money). And I barely touched on his production prowess or his influence on other rappers and producers. You could write a dissertation about his music (which I have partly done here).
Daniel Dumile was a singular talent, and he will be sorely missed. I recommend taking a dive into his entire catalog, but if you have to prioritize, the essentials are Madvillainy, MM…Food, Vaudeville Villain, and Operation: Doomsday. There are various other solo DOOM projects out there and ones with different collaborators (Danger Mouse, Bishop Nehru, Czarface, and more), but the albums I listed are my personal favorites.
Here’s to everything, DOOM. Just remember ALL CAPS when you spell the man name.
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