Will the Real MF DOOM Please Stand Up?
The A-side to Track 02 // Vol. 01: The Case for Alter Egos
Recap:
Hello! If you subscribed after last Thursday, welcome! Let me get you up to speed. The Drip drops like this: each month, I’ll choose a concept and break it down through weekly essays that bridge artists and ideas in hip hop and art history. For more complex themes and connections, sometimes I’ll break down the track into two posts—an A side and a B side—so that we have more time to marinate. I’m doing that here with Track 02, posting this A-side today and the B-side tomorrow.
April’s theme is about alter egos and asks, how can transforming into someone else reveal more of who you are? If you missed last week’s post, catch up here, Vol. 01: The Case for Alter Egos. It’ll provide more context for this one, but if you’re eager to forge ahead, go for it!
Radio Edit:
This week, let’s consider the alter ego’s relationship to vulnerability. Is it armor for the artist? A liberator from the expectations of their past work? An enhancement or distraction to the craft? In my own interest of cultivating an internet alter ego, I’m curious to know how different personas add value to the oeuvre.
For MF DOOM, who I’m talking about today, personas separate and protect his personal life and true identity. We, the audience, have no other choice than to focus on the craft, the technique, and the message put before us. But for artists who create art based on their own personal experiences, the alter ego functions differently from a shield. Eminem and Tracey Emin, both extremely graphic and autobiographical artists who I’ll be talking about in tomorrow’s post, weave their own kevlar against the ballistics of public scrutiny by revealing their own pain and trauma. Rather than protect, their alter egos appeal to our deep desires to flirt with perversion and darkness but still maintain the right to judge it.
In the relationship between artist and audience, the strength of the connection depends on a respect for the craft and a perceived vulnerability. These are also metrics for authenticity. How do alter egos contribute to or detract from the connection? And furthermore, how do they affect the authenticity of the artist?
Extended Play: MF DOOM x Slim Shady x Tracey Emin
Before we dive into MF DOOM, grab yer paddle, we’re going up Crit’s Creek. In the early 80s, a group of art historians began to publish work on Picasso, popularizing theories that attributed changes in his painting style to events in his torrid personal life. Meow. In 1981, art theorist, critic, and professor Rosalind Krauss published “In the Name of Picasso,” which in part, addressed these ideas around “art as autobiography.” She refers to scholar William Rubin, who wrote that the changes in Picasso’s art were “a direct function of the turns and twists of the master’s private life.” He added, “With the exception of Cubism, Picasso’s style is inextricable from his biography.” A simpler, spicer reiteration: different lovahs, different styles. Krauss criticizes the trend of reading Picasso’s work this way. She argued that prioritizing details of an artist’s private life over other “transpersonal terms,” such as period style and “shared iconographic symbols” over history, restricts the understanding and interpretation of the work.
When I first read this essay in college, I was confused. Wasn’t knowing the artist’s life the key to understanding their work? Picasso was sad, so he had a blue period, right? No? But kinda?! I thought about this essay again when researching the mysterious underground rapper, MF DOOM. From what I gathered, what little we know of his personal life often becomes anchored in explaining the changes in his career trajectory. I think it’s important to note that while it’s irresistible to connect what we know of an artist’s life to their work, there is room–actually, a world of interpretation—to transcend the biography. That’s what MF DOOM wanted us to focus on: the craft and the music, not the person behind the mask. In a 2003 NPR interview, he explains, “Music first, then everything else. You won’t see me on the cover of an album, with tattoos and big gold chains. None of that.”
Mythology grows from these gaps in knowledge, which enhanced his mystique as a person. But to know MF DOOM is to understand the mythologies of his characters and the robust worlds he created. So let’s dive in, who was MF DOOM?
The Origin Story of MF DOOM
MF DOOM was the masked persona of Daniel Dumile (1971-2020), an elusive person with a huge impact on the world of hip hop. Chances are, he is probably in your favorite rapper’s top 5 list of G.O.A.T. MCs. Inspired by Marvel comic book villain, Doctor Doom, MF DOOM stands for Metal Face DOOM as a rapper, and Metal Fingers DOOM as a producer. As a character, MF DOOM is a supervillain sent to destroy hip hop in order to save it. In the same NPR interview he tells listeners, “I came to destroy rap the way it is, to rebuild it back up to the way it was or the way it should be…It seems like a lot of these rap cats aren’t taking responsibility for what they’re saying.” In a 2015 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, he describes his character: “He’s the bad guy with a heart of gold. He’s for the children, a Robin Hood kind of character. Loved by the people, but the powers that be may not get down.”
Dumile first emerged as MF DOOM in the late 90s after personal tragedy and career setbacks with his previous record label. He started out in the music industry in 1988 as Zev Love X, performing alongside his brother Dingilizwe Dumile, aka DJ Subroc in the group KMD (Kause Much Damage). In 1993, before completing their second album, Dingilizwe died in a car accident. Amidst the devastating loss, Dumile managed to finish the record, only to be dropped by Elektra Records before its release due to its controversial album cover. In the years that followed, Dumile retreated from the music industry, battling depression, alcoholism, and homelessness through the mid 90s. In previous reports, MF DOOM recounted this period as the time he took to recover and plot his revenge against “the industry that so badly deformed him.” MF DOOM’s origin story is a rebirth from deep loss and disappointment. After the industry betrayed him the first time around, MF DOOM would make music only on his own terms.
Villainous Rhyme Schemes
The origin story is one piece to understanding the supervillain. To fully comprehend MF DOOM’s full powers, you have to listen to his lyrical prowess. He introduces himself in “Doomsday,” off of his first album as MF DOOM, Operation: Doomsday (1999), like this:
Definition: Supervillain, a killer who love children
One who is well-skilled in destruction as well as building
“Doomsday” is a stand-out track in his discography because it breaks from MF DOOM convention in two ways. First, he includes a reference to his personal life in referring to his brother in the chorus, which he rarely does. Second, it actually has a chorus! Unlike most rap songs, MF DOOM’s song structures rarely include hooks or choruses. As listeners, we expect hooks and choruses. They act as sticky, sonic loops that make songs easier to sing and get stuck in our heads. The chorus in “Doomsday” shows what he does best:
On Doomsday, ever since the womb
‘Til I’m back where my brother went, that’s what my tomb will say
Right above my government; Dumile
Either unmarked or engraved, hey, who’s to say?
It’s better if you hear his own phrasing to the beat, but he packs so much in so little time. He rhymes womb with tomb, but crosses the bar-line after “tomb” so that “tomb will say” also rhymes with his last name, “Dumile,” (pronounced Doom-il-ay) in the next bar. “Dumile” is also a play on words for “DOOM will lay,” as he references his final resting place. MF DOOM’s rhyme patterns make him one of the most skilled lyricists of all time. He often flexed his ability to write entire lines that rhymed together with a clever, unexpected punchline. MF DOOM was also the king of holorimes, a form of multi-syllable rhyming made out of phrases composed of different words and meanings. Here’s an example from “Figaro” off of Madvillainy (2004):
Off pride tykes talk wide through scar meat
Off sides like how Worf rides with Starfleet
(Did you get the Lion King and Star Trek references? Read it back again.)
Also on Madvillainy, his song “Meat Grinder” is famous for its holorime-heavy bars, which you can visualize here. Holorimes are impressive feats of lyricism because the rhyming structure further limits word options, but not the ideas conveyed. To go further down the rabbit hole, this Vox video, “Rapping deconstructed, The best rappers of all time” does a fantastic job breaking down MF DOOM’s complex patterns.
A DOOMED Universe
MF DOOM is the alter ego character of Daniel Dumile. But MF DOOM himself has his own alter ego characters, with their own back stories and motivations. They all live in the same universe as collaborators, sometimes featured together on the same tracks. Viktor Vaughn, is a plucky, younger protégé to MF DOOM and King Geedorah, is a 300-foot, three-headed, telepathic golden space lizard, modeled after Japanese ‘kaiju,’ like Godzilla. Both alter ego characters released albums under their own names, which are considered part of the MF DOOM canon. The 2003 album Vaudeville Villain, tells the story of how scientist and rapper Viktor Vaughn, from a bizarro universe, travels through space searching for a safe place to rap after an intergalactic ban on hip hop. He somehow gets stranded on Earth trying to get back home, and tours the planet’s hip hop circuits, clubs, and open mics, similar to the vaudeville era of the early 1900s. Play that back—what is happening?!
Involved narratives aside, MF DOOM’s audio references and multimedia aesthetics enhance the immersive-ness of his universe, drawing inspiration from comic books and his childhood memories with music. Most of his music videos and album covers look fresh out of a stylized comic strip, like his video for “All Caps.” The opening tracks of his albums always include a lo-fi sonic montage of sampled old-timey cartoons, retro sound effects and news clips, priming the listener for entering a different reality. This trademark is an homage to the late night radio shows he listened to as a kid in the early 80s. He recalls in an interview, “The DJs would spin breaks, funky drums, Apache, something from an old comedy joint, like Monty Python. I always found that real bugged out. I didn't know where that was coming from. It was like another layer of digging. Not only did you have to find where the break was from, you gotta figure out that voice. I always like to do something like that as a tribute to that style.”
With such varied references, his music belongs to an era and space beyond the trends and styles of the time in which he created it. The two seminal albums he released in 2004, Madvillainy and MM…FOOD belong to the same shared universe, but not to the sounds of mid-aught hip hop. For perspective, 2004 marked the ascension of the Motown sample-heavy hooks of Kanye West and the futuristic percussion of The Neptunes, both of which dominated the aughty soundscape.
The FanDOOM
What I find most interesting about MF DOOM was his ability to amass a self-selected, diehard fandom, without ever showing himself, centering his experience, or going mainstream. He narrated his lyrics, stating in an interview, “I hardly use I; I say ‘he’ a lot.” Like a hook or chorus in a song, lyrically “I” is sticky too. “I” grounds us in an experience, it allows the listener to project onto it and assume the main character of the song. The absence of “I” begets an absence of “we.” The point of live music and concerts is to dissolve into the “we” of the crowd and performer. As a side note, MF DOOM sometimes sent DOOMBOTS—imposters wearing the same mask to perform his shows, in true supervillain fashion. How then was MF DOOM able to connect so strongly to people without expressing the “I” in art, or at times, not even showing up to shows at all?
I argue that he created the “we” through his vast worldbuilding and love of the craft. MF DOOM created spaces for those who want to lose themselves in the complex rhyme scheme of a bar, in a rich soundscape, in an intergalactic story, in masked obscurity. There is a kind of ‘feeling seen’ that comes from shared points of reference and inspiration. He invited people into the things that moved him and showed the potential of imagination when you disregard the rules others follow. Although he is widely recognized and admired in the world of hip hop, MF DOOM still feels like a secret, granted to those who brave the unknown end to the rabbit hole. It takes commitment to be an MF DOOM fan, you earn the right by putting faith in the craft over the commodity, the music over the marketing. Rest in beats.
Ok, let’s hit pause here. The B-side to this track drops tomorrow when we hit play again to bring Eminem and Tracey Emin into the mix.
Thanks for reading! See you tomorrow.
Loved finding out about what MF Doom stands for, his backstory, his disdain for hooks or even the world “I.” Didn’t know any of that!
Thank you for such an indepth account of hiphop artists and their messages. I must admit I hadn't paid that much attention to the the subtle and layered messages in their lyrics. So much talent to discern: of both the hiphop artists and the writer of this blog!