“By candlelight, my hand will write these rhymes until I run out,” MF Doom sings at the beginning of “?”, The last song before the epilogue to his 1999 debut album, “Operation: Doomsday”.
In his video, Doom is really at the end of his wick. He staggeres through a park, holding a machete in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. He’s wandering, unstable. You feel for him.
The song ends with an affectionate remembrance for his brother, Subroc, who died in a car accident in 1993. “My twin brother, we did it all together / From a hundred rakat salahs to cut butter leather,” Doom says, and then concludes the verse with a portrait of sadness and resilience: “Truly the most dynamic dynamic duo in the whole block / I get a click from you with a machete sword / Everything is going according to plan, man.
Near the end of the video, Doom is lying on a park bench while he is rapping this part, and that photo flashes on the screen; Doom insisted that it be included in the final clip. His boots are off, resting beside his feet, and his characteristic mask is on the floor. His hand is spread across his face, cloak and shield. The sadness in your eyes is practically damp.
Sometimes, in “Operation: Judgment Day,” Doom rapped about death directly and heavily. But even when he didn’t, the clouds still hung low over him. Listening to the album was like being outside in a summer storm. You felt soaked, drained, punched in the stomach, short of breath. The album served as a multi-layered memorial – an act of mourning for a lost loved one, a dark tribute to an approach to music that was becoming extinct and an unpretentious yet high-level act of artistic recalcitrance.
In “Operation: Doomsday,” Doom – whose death in October was announced on New Year’s Eve – shaped a rap and production approach that was full of memory. His voice was slurred, almost like a dream. He could sound like he was rambling, which belied his surprising sense of skill. In an era when hip-hop was polishing its tough spots for mainstream acceptance, Doom was almost completely inside – it looked like he was rapping to himself. The music was intimate, almost quixotically personal.
More crucially, however, Doom produced almost all of the songs for “Operation: Doomsday”; he was a fourth author before becoming the norm. His sound choices were radical – no-fi and elegant, full of history and emotion. He used familiar sentimental songs as a reference and basis – “One Hundred Ways” by Quincy Jones and James Ingram in “Rhymes Like Dimes”, “The Finest” by the band SOS on their eponymous track – and built beats around them that looked like they were woven into the sample material itself. Sometimes he had older songs resonated with slightly altered lyrics – Sade’s “Kiss of Life” in “Doomsday”, Atlantic Starr’s “Always” in “Dead Bent” – in a way that seemed totally inhabited.
This approach was a conceptual innovation in addition to a simple sample or interpolation. He suggested that you could not so much reinterpret or borrow from history, but become one with it, experience and memory, all bleeding together into something that was not exactly present or past, but something else ineffable.
This made “Operation: Doomsday” one of the most idiosyncratic hip-hop albums of the 1990s and one of the defining documents of the decade’s independent hip-hop explosion. It was seismic in the true sense – a change in terrain that exposed a geological fault that had been developing for some time and revealed a whole other realm of creative possibilities, an opportunity for an alternative story.
It is not that Doom – who first found success in the early 1990s under the name Zev Love X as part of the adjacent Native Tongues group KMD – was working from a radically different handbook from the mainstream, many of whom were his own generation pairs. They were also making new songs based on past successes. But theirs was glazed; Doom’s was cooked. While mainstream hip-hop was optimizing for an impending takeover of pop, here was someone who had chosen to leave, a combination of refusenik and mourning.
All of this made him a hero for the desolate. Central to the narrative and myth of “Operation: Doomsday” – which was released by the independent label Fondle ‘Em after a series of 12 singles “- was the creation of the supervillain character MF Doom. Naturally, this supervillain, like everyone else, had a story of tragic origin: the death of his brother, the subversion of the genre he loved, the overriding desire to continue making music outside the system that sustained him and then spit him out. (In 1993, a few months after Subroc’s death, KMD was removed from Elektra Records before his second album, “Black Bastards”, was released due to a controversy over the cover art.)
Hence the mask. In Doom’s early years, he experimented with different versions – the one worn by WWE fighter Kane, a Mexican fighter, a torn sock around his face – before landing on what became his signature.
They all served the same purpose, however. “I wanted to go on stage and pray, without people thinking about the normal things people think about,” he told The New Yorker in 2009. “A look always makes a first impression. But if there is a first impression, I can also use it to control the story. ”The mask was the lie that protected the truth.
Destiny also became a prankster, or at least an exorbitantly reluctant famous person. He would occasionally send other people in his place to concerts or photo shoots, using the metal mask instead. It was a way to continue to de-emphasize the commodified self, to retreat further into the sound. This allowed him to exist in the world as a memory, long before I left him.