He plays the affable maître d’ at the Madvillain Bistro Bed and Breakfast Bar and Grill. He embodies Mark Twain’s epigram that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter-'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and lightning.”īut Twain never described himself as “the worst-hated God who perpetrated odd favors, demonstrated in the perforated Rod Lavers.” DOOM breaks out into drinking songs about Drano. The words seem absurdist and improvised, but reflect precise diction, alliteration, and internal rhyme. His opus is the antidote to these aired grievances. The indictment lacerates rappers who lack showmanship, who refuse to edit their verses, who are vulgar to the point of silliness, who are too self-obsessed, who say “you” too frequently, who use excessive choruses, who scream too much, who are too fashion-obsessed, who pose half-naked (“When I buy the album, I want to listen to it, not take home soft porn.”) Authored by DOOM, it’s as close as you’ll find to a metal-faced mission statement. There’s a yellowing never-digitized article on “How to Spot a Wack Emcee”, cut out and hanging from the wall of Poobah Records in Pasadena. It’s the work of two men still enchanted by hip-hop’s possibilities, but exhausted by its tedious posturing. Madvillainy absorbed this ethos, but refused to adhere to an orthodox code of ethics.
Lyrics gravitated towards elliptical concerns about lyrics-either a rapper’s superior bars or a rival’s wack ones. Beats opted for an austere boom-bap purity. Photos by Eric Coleman.įor all the liberty ostensibly granted to independent hip-hop, the majority of records from the millennial underground boom followed a verse-chorus-verse approach. Madvillainy is both unmoored from the gravity of its time and a product of its temperature.ĭOOM in Los Angeles circa 2002. They are unclassifiable and unpredictable: a Saturday morning cartoon with Saturday night sensibilities.īy the time of their fusion, Madlib and MF DOOM had mastered the rules, understood when to break them, and knew how to forget their existence in the first place. They are resolutely shadowy and esoteric, a hieroglyph with a translation open to interpretation. (Aside from Madvillain, the only true rival in unalloyed supervillainy is Eazy-E.) And unlike most great anti-heroes, Madvillain escaped unscathed. It’s a genre filled with flawed protagonists and faceless corpses. Burns, Heather Locklear on “Melrose Place”, and Madvillain all glimmer in the hall of cracked mirrors. They are gloriously wicked, self-possessed and theatrical, one step ahead and smirking into the fourth wall: Ric Flair, Kobe Bryant ( admittedly), Satan in Paradise Lost, Destro from “G.I. A supervillain not only understands their nefarious tendencies, they revel in them. Two Historical Figures, Outlaws, and DesperadoesĪ villain rarely admits their immorality.
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