Madvillain

How DOOM hold heat and preach non-violence?

Shhh, he about to start the speech, c’mon, silence

On one starry night, I saw the light

(“Raid”)

The iron mask, like General Maximus Decimus Meridius, hides the wounded gaze of a man who's chewed on everything and its opposite, forced into exile after being disillusioned by the rules of the record industry. A musician betrayed, wounded, deceived by the petty dynamics of a circuit he saw as largely fake — a "villain" (fittingly enough) to the bone.

Before spending roughly four years living almost like a vagrant, and before crossing paths with the Los Angeles circle of his friend Madlib's Stones Throw, the London rapper Daniel Thompson Dumile, aka MF DOOM, moved widely through the underground hip-hop circuits of his native London and, later, his adopted New York. His path, forged in the early '90s alongside his younger brother Dingilizwe, aka DJ Subroc — killed in a hit-and-run in 1993 at just twenty years old — is paved with bizarre releases, equally unusual monikers (Zev Love X, King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn), explosive crews (Monsta Island Czars, KMD), a mountain of side projects, and an ever-open door at Manhattan's Nuyorican Poets Café. In short, a true volcano.

But Dumile is, above all, an innovator. A serial devourer of beats, hard-to-find records and comic books. His avatar MF DOOM is in fact a tribute to Marvel's famous Doctor Doom, whose real name is Victor Von Doom. With the character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Dumile shares the tragic event, the grief that annihilates the soul and ultimately reshapes it. With a Trinidadian mother and a Zimbabwean father, forever travelling from one continent to another, Daniel is in a sense a child of "wanderers" just like Victor. And like him, he knows what it means to be a complete recluse. That same "malice" comes through in his verses — a necessary cynicism that he wields without ever tipping into the cheap, self-serving bluster of someone playing at being a hardened rapper without ever having tasted life's dramas firsthand.

In Dumile's alter ego, the goodness that triumphs through the warfare of the Roman general played by Russell Crowe and the erudite ruthlessness of Marvel's villain par excellence intersect, depending on the occasion, even in his live performances. His is an apparent, deceptive dichotomy, one that in fact represents the unease of a strong personality nevertheless forced to give way.

With Otis Jackson Jr., known to everyone as Madlib, Dumile struck up a friendship and deep mutual respect right from the start. There's a real rapport between the two, despite their somewhat different approaches — as shown by the wonderfully candid interviews given during the launch of their duo Madvillain.

It's the first quarter of 2004, and Chris Manak's Stones Throw headquarters is like a mission control room at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, with one very specific mission: to transform that thing called hip-hop by any means possible, using tons of vinyl dug up from every corner of the earth, dissected in the studio to extract the best rhythms, melodic fragments looped for a few seconds before splicing in a new sample — creating a climax that seems inscrutable, dense with melancholy that unfolds without pause.

In all this magical whirlwind, alongside an older Jackson already at the top of his game, there's already a "younger" one ready to take the plunge with an intriguing debut, "Disrupt". Then there's Dilla in a state of grace and already at the door, about to move from BBE to Peanut Butter Wolf's label and shortly after give life to that unrepeatable miracle that is "Donuts". And not just that: there's also Gary Wilson's synth-funk and a whole wagonload of projects in the works. There's really a lot going on. What's missing, though, is the first collaborative record able to change the game entirely.

Well, "Madvillainy" is the album everyone is waiting for. A work that, in its own way, feels complete within a sprawling sea of scattered ideas. "DOOM is like my super-intelligent cousin. We talk about books, records, Sun Ra, Charlie Parker biographies," Madlib has said on more than one occasion. Madvillain is indeed a two-headed creature. A paradoxically calm monster that prowls in the distance, tiptoeing about. Yet capable of biting with nothing more than a look.

The sound is meticulously crafted by Madlib, who draws on virtually everything within reach of his vast vinyl collection. Countless are the invisible stitches, the borrowed beats, and the imperceptible shades that form the melodic backdrop of 22 mostly short tracks. Jazz textures, rock riffs, alien sounds, funky basslines, Motown-flavored vocals, shifting tempos, sudden stop-and-go moments, sampled speeches scattered left and right, harps, piano sequences set spinning for a few instants before giving way to a breakdance groove: "Bistro" and "Raid" are, respectively, the best examples up front to decode the chemistry between DOOM and Madlib.

It's a constant sonic mutation that unfolds across "Madvillainy", one that at the same time matches an equally shifting narrative — never tame, forever on guard, ready to land blows from every direction, as if Jackson and Dumile were two disciples of the sacred Hokuto school. Into this ongoing scramble step in, here and there, friends MC Wildchild and M.E.D., along with the promising neo-soul singer Stacy Epps, a fleeting presence of the era with only one album to her name, released in 2008, the highly recommended "The Awakenings". All the while MF DOOM speaks of a Black community now half-corrupted ("Accordion"), and Madlib philosophizes, in fits and starts, on the importance of the values of the past ("Shadows Of Tomorrow").

The light of the past is the light which was

The wisdom of the past is the light of the past

The light of the future is the light which is to be

The wisdom of the future is the light of the future see

Yesterday belongs to the dead

Tomorrow belongs to the living

The past is certified as a finished product

Anything which has ended is finished

That which is perfect is finished

The perfect man is no exception to the rule

The perfect man of the past is made according to the rule of the past

The rule of the past is a law of injustice and hypocrisy

And the samples? A phantasmagoric blend. Just to name a few of the legends drawn upon: Bill Evans, Osmar Milito & Quarteto Forma, Philip Proctor and Peter Bergman, Steve Reich, The Mothers of Invention, Lew Howard & the All-Stars, Maria Bethânia, Lata Mangeshkar, Sun Ra, Boogie Down Productions, snippets from the TV show Pinky and the Brain, and so much more.

The sheer variety of the duo's sampling is therefore the key to understanding a recipe unlike any other, one that would define an era and help elevate that strange figure commonly known as the beatmaker, along with all the largely instrumental hip-hop that took shape on the West Coast in the '80s and spread like wildfire across much of the West. The hypnotic flow of tracks like "Figaro", the barely-sketched sweetness of "Curls", the ethereal soul-tinged interludes of "Eye", or the elusive arrangements — like the disturbed score of a blaxploitation film — of "All Caps" define the singular structure of a genuine masterpiece. The supreme legacy of a musician who left us far too soon. A giant of the hip-hop scene who will always be missed.

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05/12/2021