Tyler, The Creator, who flipped out like a fanboy the first time he met MF DOOM, kept it simple: "safe travels villain. Denzel and I made UNLOCKED talking about DOOM every single day just trying to channel an ounce of the feeling." Kenny Beats, a producer indebted to MF DOOM's idiosyncratic boom-bap style, tweeted: "I heard that some authors rewrote entire novels by the greats just to see how it felt. Posting an image from 2004's Madvillainy, Flying Lotus wrote, "All u ever needed in hip hop was this record. Upon the announcement of his death, tributes from peers and admirers poured in. ![]() But in collaborations with Bishop Nehru, Czarface and Westside Gunn, you heard sparring partners in awe of the master, as old sparks found new sounds. The Wondrous Rhymes of MF Doom By Hua Hsu JanuFor the wildly original rapper, who died at age forty-nine, the mask he wore while performing offered a narrative device and protection. MF DOOM released Key to the Kuffs as JJ DOOM, with producer Jneiro Jarel providing a far more spacious palette for DOOM to stretch out. His output continued, but at a slower pace. I have no friends here apart from the dudes at my record label, and I didn't go to school with no one. ![]() MF DOOM returned to London in 2010, explaining to The Guardian, "I spent 35 years growing up in the U.S., and it had its ups and downs, but this is a new place for me. You won't see me on the cover of an album with tattoos or a big gold chain none of that." Throwing on the mask was just a good way to switch it up."īut mostly, as he told Day to Day in 2003, "The music first, then everything else. The Marvel Comics evildoer sported his fake visage to obscure the disfigurement that inspired his villainy MF Doom, meanwhile, wore his tragic origin story on his sleeve, the title track to his. I though it'd be an easy way for people to see and differentiate between characters, sorta like when an actor gains weight for a role. I decided the mask would just add to the mystique of the character as well as make DOOM stand out. The DOOM thing is to be able to come at things with a different point of view. One of hip-hop's most beloved anti-heroes, the ever-inventive MF Doom (often referred to as simply DOOM, in all caps) received widespread praise for his sharp, candid rhymes as well as his choppy, sample-heavy production style. "Zev Love X was a character too, most people think that's me but he wasn't. "It's really just another character," he told writer David Ma around the release of 2009's Born Like This. And yet his influence is far-reaching, and clearly evident in the work of Tyler the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, Westside Gunn, and Jonwayne, to name a few.Like the comic-book characters he emulated, MF DOOM disguised his identity by performing behind a mask. DOOM’s most prolific period came during a time when hip-hop was fully integrating into the mainstream, but he remained too weird to ever have a proper crossover moment. After moving to the U.S., he got his professional start in 1988 under the moniker Zev Love X in the alt-rap trio KMD with his younger brother, DJ Subroc, and friend Onyx the Birthstone Kid. The masked MC, who posed as a supervillain, was born Daniel Dumile in London, England, in 1971. But from a bird’s eye view, his vision always comes into focus, like an art house film that dazzles yet requires repeat viewings to fully appreciate its complexity. MF DOOM exited this world as mysteriously as he emerged. The narratives in his songs betray this technique, often sounding disjointed and sometimes difficult to follow. When writing to a beat, he would pull pieces from its pages, assembling dazzling word collages. When Ta-Nehisi Coates profiled him for The New Yorker in 2009, he had the privilege of sifting through his rhyme book, finding disjointed couplets and haphazardly recorded sketches, like puzzle pieces still waiting to be conjoined. ![]() He approached his work as a producer in a similar way, assembling various sampled loops and clips ripped from VHS tapes into beats, preferring to leave them mostly intact, offering a roadmap into the influences that formed his psyche. He was a collage artist of sorts, absorbing pieces of ephemera from his life and youth, collecting them in the form of scattered rhymes in notebooks. A “writer’s writer,” DOOM had a distinctive style defined by wildly inventive single-syllable rhymes that rewrote the rules of rap. But despite the controversy behind his reclusivity and use of proxies, his talent as a lyricist is unquestioned.
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