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FACT MEETS DOOM, The Undergrounds Greatest Masked Man

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MF DOOMHip Hop’s Super Villain

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Anyone who has nothing more than a vested interest in Hip-Hop could be forgiven for thinking that it’s going through something of an identity crisis. Most of the

modern day commercially successful rappers are wrapped up in braggadocio and bravado, too concerned about lazily making generic club tunes that will guarantee them another platinum record and a big, fat pay check, than they are about making real music. They quote all these iconic emcees and claim they inspired them to start rapping as a kid, and then produce some uninspiring, soulless David Guetta sounding bollocks that will top the charts and get a shit load of views on YouTube. This isn’t some sort of hipster snobbery, with me acting like I’m too cool to like anything in the charts; it is, unfortunately, a blunt look at the state of the majority of Hip-Hop that is circling the mainstream. You do occasionally get successful artists with plenty of talent but, with the ever-increasing focus on image and marketability as much as actual talent, records labels are more focused on making money than promoting good music. They are just as much, if not more to blame than the artists, I mean ,who wouldn’t want to become successful, sell out arenas, and earn millions? We had the Mobos here in Liverpool a few weeks ago, and the list of all the nominees made for genuinely depressing reading.

Still, the wonderful thing about the internet is how easily accessible good music from all over the globe is nowadays. Thankfully, I don’t listen to many of the acts that I first heard as a kid on MTV Base when I was getting in to Hip-Hop, y’know the Ja Rule’s and 50 Cent’s of the world, but I look back on it as a necessary education, and listening to that sort of stuff compared to what I listen to now just makes me appreciate the Hip-Hop that has now made its way on to my iPod. There is one particular name, or one particular man, rather that, over the past few years, has been played through the speakers at Casa Del Woo more than anyone else: he is Daniel Dumile a.k.a The Super Villain a.k.a Metal Face a.k.a Metal Fingers a.k.a Viktor Vaughn a.k.a King Geedorah a.k.a Zev Love X a.k.a MF DOOM.

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mHip Hop’s super Villain

From personal experience, unless you’re a Hip-Hop head you’ve probably not really heard of MF DOOM, which is a fucking travesty. But it’s alright, because you have now, and if you’re new to the work of the Super Villain then lucky you; you’re in for a real treat. As an artist and a producer DOOM is untouchable, and his continued resolution to stick to his principles and not sacrifice creative influence over his work to secure a lucrative record deal, in this day and age, is genuinely admirable. Forget quality over quantity, or vice-versa, he’s been prolific on both sides of the glass over the past fifteen years under the DOOM persona, and the sheer volume and consistency of his work is insane. He is, by default, the greatest rapper Britain has ever produced; he was born in London but his family to moved to New York when he was young. Still claiming him and Slick Rick as ours, though.

MF DOOM is the most enigmatic emcee around, which is no mean feat. Alter egos and pseudonyms are standard practice in Hip-Hop, but nobody holds a crown to DOOM, who could be forgiven for suffering from multiple personality disorder with all the variety of names he records under. Rather than wear a crown, though, he wears a mask; the DOOM character that features most prominently in his music is modelled on Doctor Doom, the Marvel comics’ arch-villain. Dumile has used it as his main alias ever since he came back on the music scene in the late nineties after a four year hiatus, but the villain motif was more than just a creation; it was his instrument to channel the anger he felt from those who had wronged him earlier in his career. DOOM was very much a good guy gone bad.

Older Hip-Hop heads will have originally known him as Zev Love X, who was part of KMD (Kausing Much Damage), a group from New York that burst on to the scene in the late eighties. The crew consisted of Zev Love X, his younger brother DJ Sub-Roc, and Onyx the Birthstone Kid (the original third member, Rodan, left before the group got signed to Electra Records and was replaced by Onyx). Their debut album, ‘Mr. Hood’, dropped in 1991 and is a classic old school Hip-Hop record that tackled that serious issues affecting Black America in a comical manner, like a lot of other artists of the time. The album was laced with smooth beats and witty lyrics that were symptomatic of a lot of more casual rap music coming out at the time, and it contained vintage samples from old television shows; all of this, particularly the obscure sampling, is something that still plays a huge role in DOOM’s work to this day.

But, unfortunately, Hip-Hop as a whole wasn’t going the way he wanted it. Even then, as a teenager, DOOM refused to conform to the demands of Elektra, his record label: music was his platform to express himself, and his defiance towards the path that Hip-Hop was taking, with MTV and the like dictating things, meant that the follow up to ‘Mr. Hood’ had a much darker vibe. All three members of KMD were Black Muslims, and ‘Black Bastards’, their second album, had a much more serious tone; its black nationalist, five-percenter undertones and controversial artwork, which shows a Sambo figure being lynched, had Elektra feeling uneasy. Onyx eventually left the group during the recording of the album, and shortly before the record’s scheduled release date in 1993, Sub-Roc was killed by car when crossing a Long Island expressway.

Elektra Records used the opportunity of Sub-Roc’s untimely death to drop KMD. A few days after his brothers passing, the label’s management instructed Dante Ross to give Zev Love X the Black Bastards master tapes and $20,000 as incentive to leave the label, which he did. Then DOOM went underground, completely off the grid. He was, in his words, recovering from his wounds and swearing revenge against the industry that so badly deformed him. He spent some time in Atlanta as well as New York, living damn near homeless. Then, in 1998, a mystery man started performing at open-mic nights around New York, his identity was hidden as he’d wear a stocking over his face. Eventually he was revealed to be performing underr MF DOOM.

Finally, in 1999, the wait was over. Dumile was back in the game as MF DOOM, armed with a mask to hide his true identity and a mic to wreak havoc on Hip-Hop. DOOM released a few singles on his long-time friend Bobbito Garcia’s label, Fondle ‘Em Records, before his debut solo record ‘Operation: Doomsday’ finally dropped. Around that time, the final KMD record still actually hadn’t been officially released, but was heavily bootlegged, until it was formally came out on the same label later that year, controversial cover art and all. The two albums served as an unplanned juxtaposition of who he was once was, and how he became who he is. DOOM was just the tip of the iceberg, though, and the new millennium didn’t know what was about to hit it.

DOOM took to his lab, and a wealth of bootlegs, compilations, guest appearances, mix-tapes and instrumental albums (the Special Herbs series Vol. 0-9 is the finest set of instrumentals you’ll ever here) surfaced on a variety of different labels, but no further full-length records arrived until 2003, when DOOM introduced some of his accomplices to the world: ‘Take Me to Your Leader’ (Big Dada Recordings) by King Gheedorah, based on the three-headed gold dragon King Ghidorah, a space monster from the Godzilla films; and ‘Vaudeville Villain’ (Sound-Ink records) by Viktor Vaughn, another play on Doctor Doom, whose real name is Victor Von Doom. Another Viktor Vaughn record, ‘Venomous Villain’ (Insomniac, Inc), followed in 2004, but that was the last we really heard of Gheedorah and Vic. They’re still around, though, waiting for the right time to pounce.

His other two solo albums to date are both very much MF DOOM records, with 2004’s wonderfully named ‘MM…Food?’ (Rhymesayers Entertainment) which, in case you hadn’t guessed, has a food theme running throughout it, capped off a ridiculous spell of five excellent records released in around eighteen months. Before issuing his next full-length album, 2009s ‘Born Like This’ (LEX records), he shortened his pseudonym to just DOOM (the MF stood for Metal Fingers, the producer, which was another one of his guises). The record featured Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon and Ghostface Killah (Ghostface rhymed under the name Tony Starks), and there has been a Doom Starks record in the works for five years, which is anticipated to be finished sometime in 2013.

DOOM’s collaborations, whether as a producer or an artist, are as legendary as his solo work. His best known collab was when he teamed up with Madlib for the Madvillain record (Stones Throw) in 2004, which garnered critical acclaim and remains as fresh and revolutionary today as it did eight years ago, and is undoubtedly a game-changing record. The highly

anticipated follow up is apparently all but finished according to the man himself, so it should be with us early next year, or perhaps even sooner. His other brilliant collaborations include Danger Doom’s (with Danger Mouse) ‘The Mouse And The Mask’ (Lex) and his latest album, ‘Keys To The Kuffs’ by JJ DOOM (with Jneiro Jarel, also on Lex). His work as a producer is grossly underrated, although he tends to stick to just producing singles for now. In recent years he has embraced his inner-Brit and worked with the likes of Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn and Beth Gibbons.

His latest few workings with Lex Records seem to indicate that he has finally found a musical home after years of bopping around different labels. It may also have something to do with the fact that, after venturing on a European tour in 2010, he was refused entry back in to America on account of him not actually having a green card; he holds a British passport as he was born here and never sought to change it. Still, DOOM has made no secret of his preference to be living back in his birthplace rather than the States, despite being away from his family, and now he is more focused on his work than ever before – and his reinvigorated work ethic can only be a good thing for music fans everywhere.

It’s not smiles, however. In true villain fashion, DOOM has caused controversy with his live shows, having allegedly sent impostors to perform several of his dates. Whilst the man himself has never admitted to it although his promoter did give the game away by saying it was an intentional ploy to gain heat he did say in a recent interview: “everything that we do is villain style. When you come to a MF DOOM show, come expecting to hear music, don’t come expecting to see.” He originally claimed he lost around five stone in 2007 which led to significant changes in his appearance, but such is his penchant for mischief and chaos that it’s hard to discredit the accusations.

Whatever the truth is, there is no doubt that DOOM captivates and intrigues like few other artists can. There is no need to recommend single records to purchase; just go and get your hands on everything he has ever worked on. His body of work over the past two-and-a-bit decades is truly remarkable, and thankfully it shows no signs of letting up, with two more mouth-watering collaborations with Jay Electronica and Nas in the pipeline once the Madvillain and Doom Starks records are complete. He may be the Super Villain, but in reality DOOM is very much Hip-Hop’s hero.

The DOOM takeover on Benji B’s Radio 1 Show earlier in the year. Features a whole host of his best tunes and an interview with the man himself. Best two hours you’ll spend listening to all year.

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mf doom is the most enigmAtiC emcee around. Here’s wHy tHe man wHo dubs Himself tHe super Villain is actually Hip Hop’s saViour.

MF DOOM: Hip Hop’s Super Villain

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meet tHe sHape-sHifting superstar of tomorrow… if you can keep up witH Him.

Elusive Loop Digga

Here’s something you might want to type into Google to help you make your own personal radio show: the Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble.

You might just want to type it into Google because it’s a very lovely thing to type. And then, as a reward, it will take you somewhere. You’ll come across a new album by them called Miles Away (Stones Throw), which isn’t totally what you think it is because of that title, and yet is – it’s not directly a Miles thing but an electronically moderated tribute to a kind of hard, ethereal post-bop jazz that mixes the free and the arranged, the drum and the horn. Put it this way: it’ll take you nicely on your radio show from Ascenseur pour l’échafaud Miles to this minute’s Gorillaz. Then you can play Floating Points, Flying Lotus and Flying Lizards, and take it from there.

Actually, Miles Away sounds like music you could hear on Radios 2, 3 and, to some extent, 4, but it’s not likely to appear on many commercial playlists. As smart, accessible, gorgeous and right on the dissolving, accelerating now as it is, as elegantly conceived to look and sound great as a prized vinyl object, summoning all sorts of longing and learning, it doesn’t fit into known grooves, or safely known avant-genres, even though ultimately it’s jazz-related and rooted in hip-hop adventure. It’s jazz for those who like their jazz deeply cosmic, to suggest where the great Blue Note acts might be in a post-sampling, post-rock, post-web, post-computer game world, jazz for those who like their jazz to have a relationship with tradition that is both respectful and mischievous.

The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble is yet another alias of the sound-spinning, time-jumping, music-mapping many voiced multi-instrumentalist Madlib, who never stops, who cannot keep still and is hard to keep up with, as he sorts out his agile, vigilant mind by jumping from character to character, project to project, scene to scene, decade to decade, punch line to punch line. He’s Prince as hallucinated by Philip K Dick, Coltrane running through the veins of Burroughs, himself more or less aka someone else altogether. He’s spent a lot of the past few years fixing into place, and then moving away from that place, eloquent fusions of hip-hop and jazz, inventing groups, and then playing all the roles and instruments in these imaginary groups, so that he’s Kamala Walker of the Soul Tribe, Monk Hughes of the Outer Realm, Eddie Prince with the Fusion Band, Ahmad Miller of the Suntouch; he’s everyone in Yesterdays New Quintet, jamming among his many competing, combining selves. I think. Don’t hold me to any of this.

As soon as you think you might have caught up with his new name(s), latest release, current sound, freshest calculation, he’s somewhere else, following a new lead, reworking an old gag, digging up more buried treasure, on the run to the inside and outside of everything.

He moves so fast and fluidly through ideas and possibilities, creating a personal, brilliant history of music as he mixes himself and his other personalities with possibly real collaborators and ways of paying tribute to, say, Stevie Wonder, the Trojan label, the Blue Note label, movie soundtracks, jazz hybrids known only to the most fervent connoisseur, that he almost becomes invisible. Perhaps if he stayed in one place one time, instead of tripping behind blurring names, masks, identities, passions, visions, revisions, disclosures, his latest album, his latest blast from a past he makes seem like the future, he might get more of the fashionable attention. But fame to him is just another illusion he’s messing around with. He’s taking the chasing of freedom to sensational extremes.

Another way of looking at it is that Madlib, this master manipulator of history, ego, sound, electronics and image, this boastful anti-publicist, is the ultimate superstar of a new ghostly, free-forming alternative universe, a dark, crazed underground you can reach into through that tempting Google door, another shape-shifting reality made up of found and remade realities, a hyper-electric zone where you can organise endless presences, and presents, for yourself.

Yes, there are numerous attractive pop stars out and about at the moment, all piling on top of each other, all building on the shapes, poses, publicity stunts and role-playing antics of various antecedents, sounding wonderful if a little shallow, all being showered with awards, places in pop charts and playlists, stars on Amazon, all relishing their ability to exploit and dominate the far-fetched internet era to ensure the success of their ever-present glamour and state-of-the-art fuss – but this far into the 21st century, to be as fixed, as regular, as just another update, a latest minor correction, to Prince or Bowie or Madonna or Bolan or Grace seems a little old-fashioned, a tame, actually conservative way of reacting to and reflecting all the technological and environmental changes happening everywhere at each given moment.

Hidden deep in the turbulent centreless centre of all this diverting possibility, cut off from the lively but mundane pop civilisation as represented by the award shows, the famous faces and the mainstream indie websites, fragmenting his personality, his relative fame, his musical enthusiasms into more and more randomly interrelated bits, exists Madlib. The racy, shady, mad king of this other, oddly realer, world. The invisible, improvising, abstract superstar, experimenting with time, scattering clues all over the less than secure place, checking out the limits of the imagination, hinting how we might operate in the future, where we will be able to freely select, compile and adjust our multiple identities and the numerous dimensions we inhabit. Now that’s what you want a musician to do: see into the future by listening to the past to remake the present. Even if very few notice at the time.

tHe underground’s greatest masked manfACt meets doom

I’m sitting in the lobby of Red Bull Studios, having been drafted in at the last minute to cover FACT’s interview slot with larger than life hip-hop legend DOOM, a.k.a Daniel

Dumile, and formerly MF DOOM (he dropped the MF in 2009). Chalk it up to brand awareness perhaps. After all, the man is entering his third decade of activity as a producer and MC, a remarkable feat considering he never broke into the mainstream as others did, singling him out in hip-hop’s modern pantheon as uniquely as the mask that identifies him.

Despite the promise that I would be on shortly after making it to the studios, 10 minutes of sitting around with no PR or DOOM make it clear that the rapper isn’t here yet. It was never going to be a straight forward press day this is, after all, a man who has been accused of sending masked substitutes to his own gigs. As I sit looking at a giant TV screening the Olympics I wonder if the allure of London’s 2012 sports extravaganza got the best of the masked super villain. Maybe he’s really into rowing and decided to sack it all off.

With my laptop battery dying on its (non-Mac) backside, I scramble around the net for research and ideas beyond my own nerdish desires to question him on random things I care about. DOOM’s here to promote Key To The Kuffs, his latest release on Lex Records and an album entirely produced by label mate Jneiro Jarel. It’s his second full-length of 2012 following Son of Yvonne, a collaboration with Masta Ace, released in June and on which Dumile handled production duties by digging around his cabinet of Special Herbs (again). JJ DOOM is the real 2012 attraction for this fan though, not least because Jarel’s production skills are among the best in the new school instrumental hip-hop game. Sonically, Key To The Kuffs neatly fits alongside the classic Madvillainy and Vaudeville Villain as one of DOOM’s more interesting projects, with the added bonus that it’s no longer weird or uncool to rock those sort of non-standard hip-hop productions in 2012.

Staring out the studios’ big window I see a figure walk past that seems familiar. Moving my gaze down the lobby to the door I see that same figure walk in, face down. As he looks up he plunges his hand into a bag, drags out a familiar looking mask, dons it and then turns to the bar and grabs a beer before remembering to ask the staff if it’s okay to do so. Dumile’s arrived, and has transformed into DOOM. As he walks to the interview room I try and think of a way to flip the MF into a relevant joke/pun about my waiting around. I fail miserably.

Two and something hours after arriving I’m let in to speak with the newly London-based DOOM. Originally born in the capital before moving to the US as a child, he’s a little like Slick Rick in a way: a bonafide US rap legend which the English can sort of lay claim to. If there was a rap Olympics I’m sure they would. I’d heard rumours that DOOM had been living here since a mix up at customs after his first European shows in 2010 had left him stranded, away from his life and family. The album’s lyrical content and its promotion, including this press day, confirmed that these rumours were in fact true.

As DOOM requests another beer I sit down, hoping my last minute filling in won’t lead to a boring convo. That’s when I realise that having got carried away looking at old stories for info I forgot to even check the press release for the album before my laptop died. I’m sure someone else will cover the important bits, I just want to know how many copies of the mask exist. I press record and we start, my inner rap nerd excitement increasing as the familiar tone of voice emerges out from under the mask. Dumile is an amiable character despite the multiple personas he’s cultivated over the years, his answers delivered with the same mix of excitement and nonchalant manner that characterise his best raps.

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it’s luncHtime on a surprisingly Hot august friday Afternoon in CentrAl london.

FACT MEETS DOOM: The Undergrounds Greatest Masked Man

tHe underground’s greatest masked man [laugHs]

“it Has to be myself. i tHink i’m tHe best.”

How did the JJ DOOM project come about? How did you guys link together?“We both do work for the same label. It was the label putting it together. They sent me beats from Jneiro Jarel as part of just sending me beats from different people. The way it started I think is back when he had Shape of Broad Minds out [Jneiro Jarel’s project for Lex], well when he was working on that project. He requested a guest appearance from me through the label. I said ‘ok well, first of all how much…’ [laughs] nah I said ‘where’s the beat?’ and that was my first experience with JJ in terms of musically hooking up. After that I met him out in L.A., I was working on the Madvillain record and he was out there working on something too, so we would be bumping into each other. We lived close by, so we would kick it, talk about music. We had mutual interests, equipment, shit like that. At that time we wasn’t really doing no work together, more like ‘yo you heard this?’, ‘where you get that from?’, ‘how you make that sound?’, ‘you got an 808 I can borrow?’ shit like that, you know. And then I moved here and it was the label’s idea to do a song with JJ, do a song for this compilation which then snowballed into an album. It wasn’t expected to be an album at first, but I ended up choosing a lot of JJ’s beats and he ended up being the main producer on it, actually the only producer on it. “I was going to say all the beats are his…“Yeah he got a wide variety. He got a lot of styles…”He’s one of the more slept on producers among the new school of hip-hop producers who came up in the last decade I think. He’s got a real ear for flipping stuff in new ways.“Yeah he’s definitely pushing boundaries. Some of the beats I was listening to, I don’t even know how he did that! I’d be like ‘what?’ And then it changes, and I’m like ‘is it live?’ When a producer can’t figure out what another producer did, that’s a good sign.”Did that help for you getting hyped about the project then?“Yeah we had a good variety of beats and they were different. I was looking for the most different sounding, you know… something that people wouldn’t expect to hear me on.”How did you work on the project? Over a distance or did you actually spend time in the studio together?“Well he sent the beats, I’d choose them and record in Pro Tools and I’d mix it. Sometimes send them back. He came out here for a short period of time too and we kinda pow-wow’ed for a second, after we had recorded everything. We also did a lot over the phone, like ‘yo what do you think about this? How about one less db? OK’, so I’d turn it down, send it back to him. It’s almost like we were working together in the same space but, you know, through the phone and just knowing our equipment. The way the sampling works on the album, specifically the intro, skits and the use of vocal snippets throughout, that really reminds me of you. It reminds me of the King Geedorah project for example. Was that part of the album something you looked after?“Yeah I definitely… well you know we spoke about it like ‘it definitely needs to have skits on it’ and JJ would be like ‘yo DOOM you need to put some skits on there’ and I was like ‘yeah I got some stuff, I got some stuff’. But I had to wait until the last minute because collecting these voices is not as easy as it sounds [laughs]. I gotta watch hours and hours of old vintage footage, listen to hours and hours of lectures. I’m sleeping while playing this shit, listening, and then in the third hour of some long lecture it’ll say the right word. So then it’s like ‘oh shit there it is!’ Wake up and look at the timer, note the time when it happened and go back to sleep. When I wake up I’ll find it again and chop it and put it in. It’s a real tedious process, but as I’m writing songs I’m collecting pieces, and I’m collecting pieces that pertain to the songs, and then I condense them and make the story. I like to put an intro so people get a feel for what’s going on. It sets the tone, almost like scenery.”I remember reading in a previous interview that you’d spent hours collecting stuff, I think you were talking about King Geedorah again. So despite having done that for years, and I’m assuming collecting a fairly sizeable library of samples, you’re still at it?“Yup, yup. It’s entertaining, you know? I don’t watch TV but I do that all day. I be cleaning the house and playing some obscure, weird shit. And it’ll be fun stuff, I bump into some interesting things around me.”

Well on the subject of skits, who’s your favourite skits producer in hip hop?[Ponders silently]“It has to be myself. I think I’m the best [laughs].”OK, apart from yourself then?“OK, let me see who else be messing with the skits pretty ill? [pauses] Well Prince Paul of course, nah’m sayin…”Yeah he took that shit out there.“He pretty much started that whole thing, he started the whole bulk of it. People was doing it before, little things, little scenarios. Even when you think of how Dre and Snoop, when they had their little talking skits describing scenarios at a party or what’s going on, you know?”Did that era of skits in hip-hop influence your own work with the skit format?“Well it made me say ‘oh shit! We can do this’ but we was doing it before. Ever since young, like Saturday Night Live, I’m like 12 years old, we would pretend to be Eddy Murphy and record it, you know? Double tape deck kinda thing, so we were doing skits… let me think about it… Black Bastards, or even Mr. Hood, that shit was 1991, and we was doing it before then. It didn’t necessarily influence me but it made me say ‘Oh snap! We’re not the only ones, we can do it, sell records, let’s do this!’. It motivated me.”Going back to the JJ DOO M album, the press release hints at – and so does the music – an English, even London, influence.“Definitely.”Did that in turn impact your writing for the album? Were you purposefully writing something that reflected your time out of the US?“Not really. I was just like ‘OK how quick can I finish this song? I need information… what’s going on?’ and I’d look for anything. ‘What’s the most recent word I heard?’, as a writer you sometimes gotta go for yours, clear your mind. So somebody walking past might be speaking in that London accent and say a word and I’d be like ‘oh shit, what’s that?’ and I’d write it down. Or watch a little bit of… when I first got here I was watching regular TV, not cable, the free TV shit, so I’m catching a lot of old cop shows and shit like that and the way they flippin’ it is funny to me. ‘What did he say? What did he do?’, sometimes there’d be some serious shit going on but in their way of saying it that was my exposure to the culture here, how people speak and how they communicate with each other. It’s almost like… I only been here for like two years, so it’s like I’m a two year old child just learning to speak really, from the things around me and that’s reflected in the rhymes and in the skits.”So you don’t have any early memories or anything from being born here?“Nah… maybe if they hypnotise me one day I might be like ‘the Queen!’… I don’t know.”This album is almost like a return to your roots then to a degree. How does that feel?“Feels excellent. It feels great. Come back to a place where you were born but you don’t remember it and it’s a fucking excellent place though? It exceeds my expectations by far. I love it. The people are friendly. I’m learning how things work here, I’ve not had any bad experiences out here.”So you’d give London…“I’d give it a good rep, it definitely gets a good rep. It’s like my favourite place.”What do you miss most from NYC that you can’t get here?“…No comment! [laughs] Nah, that I can’t get here? Let me think… New York got a certain feel to it. Harlem. Harlem had a certain feel, at that time it was different, now Harlem has changed you know? Gentrification, it’s not the same Harlem as when we used to be able to sell oil and incense and little jewellery on the streets, with a table. And we really did that. So now, you can’t do that, they made it against the law. Come on, what’s Harlem without being able to go buy a book from a brother and your favourite fragrance, real quick. There’s a certain commerce feeling and a community feeling that’s changed, you know what I mean? It’s always there in time and in memory you know, so that’s my memory of New York. Lower East Side, Downtown, you know? IYeah.“A certain feeling to it that was unique at that time and it’s changed but it’s still there, you know?”

You’re living in South London right?[awkward silence, then in a funny robotic voice] “I can’t reveal it.”Ha not to reveal it or anything but to pinpoint the area you spend time in, it’s a big city don’t worry.“Yeah I think that’s where it is… they just kinda threw me out there. So I’m like ‘ok where is this? London?’ everything is London to me, North, South, East, whatever.”Do you travel much around the city?“Sometimes I’m in Camden, I don’t know if that’s South London though.” Nah that’s North.“So London’s kinda small…”Compared to NYC it feels smaller I guess. The difference between what would be the equivalent of New York’s five boroughs isn’t as obvious at first as it is in NYC when you travel between them. It takes time to clock it.“Right, right. It’s little more busy and touristy. Short cab ride I’m there, you know? I travel around for sure, it just depends where I need to go.”You’ve got quite a lot of personas by now. How much of it is DOOM and how much of it is you playing on a repertoire of characters? I’m thinking that with this JJ DOOM album I heard hints of Vaughn, hints of what you did in Madvillain… do you have different suits you put on when you rhyme?“Well I flip it a little bit in a style that might be similar to Vik’s style for example. But you know…”There’s a track on the album, I can’t remember which exactly right now as I had to rush here to do this but when I heard it, it made me think of Vik Vaughn straight away.“I might have taken a cheap shot at Vik.”Do you find yourself doing that often?“I try to keep it straight forward to where each character is its own distinct character. JJ DOOM is just DOOM, unless it specifies, like Vik is on this song. But their styles tend to be similar, people might say ‘damn Vik you sound like DOOM’ and Vik don’t like that so he’s like ‘fuck DOOM!’ you know? DOOM is getting more attention or whatever. But that’s something I’m also playing on, they got little rivalries going on. It’s going to come out later on a little more. I try to keep them pretty much straight forward, this way each album, each character, is its own experience.”Do you find that all these characters allow you to be more creative in a sense? With lyrics, with flow, with the pictures you paint?“Yeah it’s just open. Everything is open. It’s not pigeonholed where I’m this guy and I gotta be the tough guy everyday, you know? Like some of these cats are pigeonholed into characters, like they have to be that dude everyday. No matter if they’re happy that morning or they sad, or they might lose or gain weight, but they have to be that character. You might change your mind, change your view about things but you can’t do that and it so limits it. Unless they come out with a new character that allows them to express something different, or just totally change their mind and decide to rename themselves and be like ‘I’m coming like this now’, which is the same thing as changing characters, so you might as well have a variety of avenues.”The characters allow you to not reinvent yourself all the time. You can still be DOOM but do it differently through a different character.“Exactly.”What about the artwork on this new album? Did you have a hand in it, or was it a case of Steve Powers doing his thing and you approving it?“Well I was sending him music and he’ll come up with a sketch. I’d be like ‘oh that’s pretty ill, can you change that though?’ or suggest a change and he’ll do it. I let him do his thing, his art, and his perception of how the music sounded. I was watching the video that went up recently about how your mask was designed, with KEO telling the story…“Word they got a video? Interview?”Yeah it’s a short interview where he explains how the idea for the mask came up.“Word that’s my man. He had a lot to do with that shit. Cos I was like ‘damn I don’t know’ and he was telling me ‘no trust me, trust me yo, I gots the ill mask, watch, tomorrow’ and he went and got it. I went to his crib, I seen that shit and it was…

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“i’d like to encourage cHildren to read more books. real paper, not a kindle.”

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“i’d like to encourage cHildren to read more books. real paper, not a kindle.”

it’s when we first got this one (grabs side of his mask and points it towards me). The idea was crazy and we hooked it up in time for the show and we came out with this shit which was legendary.”How many copies of the mask exist?“Yo no se.JJ DOOM is what, your fourth collaborative album? There was Madvillain, Dangerdoom, Vik Vaughn – though that was with a bunch of producers – and there was the short-lived Ghostface collabo too. Is that even still happening?“Yeah definitely. I was speaking to Starks the other day, we working on that. It’s gonna be out.”You’ve had this process for a while now of working with other producers on an entire project, or mixing the idea up with producers and MCs. Do you find it gets easier? What’s the most enjoyable about it?“It just makes it fun cos there’s another person there with another artistic point of view. If it’s a producer it makes my job easier, I don’t have to think about the beat and the rhyme which is kinda tricky. I can let them have their vision with the beat and then do my rhyme. Let them mix the song, see it how they see it and maybe change one or two things, but it makes it good. I love collaborating, I’m a team player. I love it when I’m working with other artists and see how they get down and exchanging ideas, it’s fun.”Who has been the most bugged out to work with?“Me… I’m sure everybody would agree too trust me. I wouldn’t say, I’d point the finger at myself, they all would agree, so. [laughs]”You’ve lasted across different eras of rap. You were there in the 90s, there in the 2000s, you’re still here. How do you see rap nowadays with this perspective of the last 20+ years.“It’s very interesting. I don’t really listen to the shit though.”OK, but you’re still almost like an elder in the game now…“It’s interesting how it’s evolved, it’s cool. I wouldn’t say good or bad, it is what it is. I just try to add on where I feel like it might need something. Like ‘oh everybody forgot about rhyming and catching real wreck? Well ok I’ll do that while they do the bullshit’. I wouldn’t necessarily say bullshit, but you know. They doing that, so Imma keep the other part up while they make the new one. It’s like a big conversation, everybody adds to it.”Is there anybody that catches your ears these days?“Well not really cos I don’t really listen to rap these days. If I listen to shit it’s Ultramagnetic. The first album, Critical Beatdown. Or Criminal Minded. Or Just Ice’s Back to the Old School. When I really need to hear something real quick, I put on the headphones and that’s what I listen to, walking down the street or whatever. Everything else… there’s other stuff from that time, I was young at that time, I was growing up so it’s memories connected to nostalgia, there’s a feeling to those songs, it reminds me of a time. So anything from that time, that’s what I would listen to. Erik B and Rakim, EPMD shit, you know?”What would be considered the classic shit today?“Yeah but I can listen to it anytime and I still get… I still get ideas from it, it’s still amazing to me. The way you bring bangin’ stuff today is different, it has to be new but it’s linked.” You have to evolve it…“You can’t always be like an old man trying to bring back the past, you got to keep it fresh.”So in 1998 when you spoke to Ego Trip you said ‘it’s music we’re selling, not my face’. Is that still the case?“Yeah of course. You can’t see my face can you? [laughs]”Ha ha true in the way you’re not all over the internet, all over social media, or trying to push shit onto people.

“I mean they got the Facebook site, but it’s more like a fan site. I never looked at this shit. I’m not on Twitter. I’m trying to get an old beeper matter of fact, a sky pager. I’m trying to go back to that, do the upside down texting. I’m old school, so I keep it to the way it was. I like to stay… it keeps me focused. I think a lot of that stuff over sensitises everything. You get lost. It’s noise, like ‘ka ka ka ka ka’. I would never even know if a motherfucker was talking shit until the damn internet. We had to go through the grapevine, ‘yo what’s his face cousin’s said…’, you’d hear about that shit later. It’s not instant. Now you’re reading about yourself, but it’s kinda weird. People get caught up in what other people think about them, so much. But what do you think about yourself? Do you think about yourself as much as what you think other people are thinking about you? So… that’s something that should be. “I wanna make a point here. Back when we was growing up, we were able to inflect more. There was more thinking about what you wanted to do. You got your local friends, that’s cool. Maybe go to summer camp or see your cousins. But mainly you were able to grow up and know yourself first. These kids now. This whole Facebook shit, it’s cool but I think it’s over sensitising a lot of these children and they don’t have a sense of theyselves. They looking for theyselves all day long on Facebook, or on Twitter. They looking on YouTube for role models, the identity gets lost nah’m sayin? So you know, I’d like to encourage children to read more books.”Word.“Real paper, not a Kindle.”Wrapping things up then. What are some of your favourite masks in the history of super villains?[Pauses]What about the Bane one from the new Batman?“I ain’t seen that one yet. I’m sure it’s ill. To me the Phantom of the Opera is always the one, the old one though. That shit looked crazy, it was scary. Then there is… of course… Anonymous, the one with the moustache.”Oh the V for Vendetta mask?“Yeah, it’s spooky but friendly. What does he mean, what’s his intention? It has a certain feel to it.”Dr. Doom’s has been perhaps the most classic in terms of US Comics, in a way.“Yeah Doom, he had the illest mask always. That was his whole shit, the mask. His face being deformed.”The mask became an icon for Marvel.“Yeah and for the record I didn’t get the idea from that [laughs]. I been Doom ever since I was born, my momma call me Doom so…”It’s the same thing as Roc Raida and his crew calling themselves the X-Men back when they started.“Right! We were all influenced by that shit, but we still kept it where we were our individual selves.”You were using it as a way to catch attention almost…“Yeah for sure, like ‘this reminds you of anything? He’s back!’ It’s almost like manifesting what we got from the influence of comics. Manifesting it in our own way.”So I guess the last question would be: what does great googly moogly mean to you?“Oh… that’s like… to me… (pauses) It’s like ‘holy motherfuckin shit did you see…’ but without cursing though. It’s something you’d say if the children were around. You know? You wanna keep it censored a little bit. It’s a funny word though. If it is a word? I guess it is a word…”It is now.“It’s official.”

11

FACT MEETS DOOM: The Undergrounds Greatest Masked Man

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an exclusiVe interView w

itH underground Hip-Hop’s most elusiVe producer.

Madlib is nowhere to be found. Peanut Butter Wolf, the head of his label, Stones Throw, doesn’t know where he is. Despite repeated phone calls, Eothen (Egon) Alapatt,

the imprint’s general manager, hasn’t heard back in 48 hours. J. Rocc, one of his best friends, is baffled too. They were supposed to have gone record shopping yesterday, but “shit came up.” Currently, Madlib is missing the rare interview appointment, but the unexpected is expected. So long as he turns up around Memorial Day, a few hours before his flight to Copenhagen for a potential collaboration four days from now, no one’s about to put out an Amber Alert.

After all, it might not be clear who to look for. There’s Otis Jackson Jr., the government name of the Oxnard-born “Beat Konducta,” a man so enigmatic and elusive his own brother gave him the alias “Hollow Man.” You could check for one of the members of his fictional jazz ensemble, Yesterdays New Quintet: Ahmad Miller, Monk Hughes, Malik Flavors or Joe McDuphrey. Or maybe you’d inquire about Quasimoto, his helium-voiced, psilocybin-propelled alter ego. Of course, Lord Quas couldn’t keep clandestine long he’s loud, prone to branding himself “America’s Most Blunted,” and the only person Madlib claims he doesn’t get along with. But they do share one thing like Quasimoto’s debut-album title, they are “the unseen.”

Speculating on Madlib’s whereabouts is futile. Forget Twitter he doesn’t even use e-mail. The interstellar infinity of his music indicates liberation from the limitations of gravity and time. Granted, he exists as blood and marrow: two children, lives in a real home in Eagle Rock, and the Gregorian Calendar claims that he’s 36. However, he is best understood as myth. In a society with a vampiric lust for information, our primitive neuroprocessors still compute in archetypes. Madlib is the man who wears masks, the witch doctor, star of the medicine show.

It’s possible that the absence is due to personal business, or to something wholly pedestrian. But it’s unwise to rule out the possibility that he’s been abducted and is currently circling the constellations like his jazz analogue Sun Ra, or washing dishes in the same speakeasy where Malcolm X waited tables (if you’re to believe his official Stones Throw bio). Most likely, he’ll emerge from this fugue with several finished albums, several more finished blunts and without an explanation for his adventures. But no explanation is needed. We’re dealing with Madlib and when you’re dealing with Madlib, you quickly realize that you’re going to have to fill in the blanks.

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Madlib emerges on Memorial Day. No excuse is given for the absence. It’s 24 hours before his scheduled trip to Copenhagen, where he’s supposed to discuss possible collaborations with German Krautrock legends Embryo. A final interview time is set for the following afternoon, one hour before he leaves for the airport. This becomes a promise of a phone interview on the way to LAX, which evolves into a call between security check-in and boarding. Soon, it’s revealed that he’s missed his flight, left the airport and gone dark again. Only he and the surveillance cameras know the answer.

But answers aren’t the point. Like Banksy and Burial, the cloak of partial anonymity only feeds the fervor. There’s no sense of contrivance nor any hint of put-on. In an environment where shameless self-promotion, technology and a surfeit of media sources have created a false air of omniscience, Madlib has retained a sense of mystique. He’s a regular dude with irregular gifts, a skull hermetically sealed by sound, so much that the outside world has no bearing. Not only does he refuse to court commercial and critical tastes, but he ignores their very existence, exchanging modernity’s jittery zeitgeist with an analog romanticism for the days of crates of wax and weed.

Madlib doesn’t need any of the trappings of success. He’s content to loom in the background and create alternate cosmologies aware that it’s always better to be heard than to be seen. After all, he may be the last person left whom we allow to disappear.

The Loop Digga’s Hideaway is located on the top floor of what used to be the Highland Park Masonic temple a neo-Renaissance revival façade with weathered red-brick walls and a faded gray frieze studded with pentagrams and the Masonic square and compass. A Mexican bakery occupies the ground floor and the sweet smell of pan de leche and pastel del queso colors the air as you ascend the dimly lit stairwell leading to the top floor. Midway through, the scent abruptly shifts, blossoming into a danker, pungent aroma, offering a different indulgence.

At the top floor, you discover Madlib, the Loop Digga himself, wearing a black skully hat, baggy blue jeans and a pinball-sized silver ring surrounded by samplers, CDs, cassette decks, 4- and 8-track recorders, keyboards and drum kits. No computers. Instead there are records stacked so high they seem like obelisks. A collection described by J. Rocc as filled with the most “dirty and dusty LPs imaginable.” Not just hip-hop, jazz and soul. Everything from witchcraft records and Detroit techno to obscure German Krautrock. Calling Madlib a crate-digger is like describing Albert Ayler as a saxophone player barely accurate. Madlib doesn’t just collect records, he revolutionizes them. And the thousands of albums crammed into the three-room space aren’t some completist fetish, they’re functional tools.

Everyone can listen to music, but Madlib’s ears detect alternate frequencies. He’s a ghost-whisperer summoning analog ancestors a ferocious Bootsy Collins bass line, a Mario Van Peebles film clip, a half-bar Hugh Masekela horn blast, an extemporaneous Redman ad-lib, a funky-but-forgotten Mantronix drum break. A mad scientist breaking beats down to their molecular level, seamlessly stitching loops and reshaping them into something with preternatural groove.

“He has records from almost every nation,” says his frequent collaborator, hard-boiled Detroit rapper Guilty Simpson. “He doesn’t just buy them to sample. He wants to understand each song. He doesn’t need to know the language to realize musicality.”

The only constant is that he’s constantly working. Some days, he’ll make a single beat, others he’ll fill up an entire CD-R. In 2010, there are plans to release 16 albums, but that’s a conservative estimate. There are 12 volumes of Madlib’s Medicine Show: half original music, half mixtapes (Brazilian Tropicalia, African-psych reggae, prog-rock, jazz, soul). Additionally, he has produced entire albums for Guilty Simpson and Strong Arm Steady, plus two jazz records one under the guise Young Jazz Rebels.

So it’s understandable that Earl Grey and scones aren’t rolled out to any iPad hack with a blog. “Interviews are my least favorite thing to do,” he says politely, constantly rifling through records, while resisting reductive analysis. This is his first American interview since 2006, because he has better things to do engulfed in a ceaseless surge of creativity, sleeping only two or three hours a night and fueled by coffee and Lucas Valley OG, the strain of medical marijuana he’s currently incinerating. Should the fumes become too tantalizing, he will offer both weed and Swisher Sweets for you to roll your own.

“How are you going to be around me and not smoke? That’s like being around George Clinton and not smoking the rock,” he jokes, producing the sequoia-colored pot, the kind of cosmic chronic that will have you visualizing Ewoks and light sabers, and composing blunted beat orchestras in your head. Or not. Since technology made it possible to acquire production software FruityLoops and an omnivore’s musical library in 24 hours, everyone’s been chopping samples. But Madlib has proven that it isn’t about collection or studio tools.

“The equipment doesn’t matter, it’s the vibe you put into it. If music sounds good, music sounds good,” he says, so secure in his gifts that there is only objectivity. There is no formula, and attempting to divine causal relationships is futile. You can connect the dots to his immediate lineage, Pete Rock, DJ Premier and Marley Marl. Or you can plumb deeper to the protean prolificacy of Frank Zappa, David Axelrod, Miles Davis or any of the canonized jazzmen. But they were all intensely collaborative, while Madlib prefers studio solitude. You can even note the inspiration and influences inherited from his close friend and collaborator, J Dilla. But like the ODB, there is no father to his style.

There was once the young Otis Jackson Jr., who grew up in Oxnard in an absurdly musical household. Otis Sr. is a bandleader and session musician who worked with Tina Turner and Bobby “Blue” Bland, and his mother, Sinesca, is a songwriter and guitarist. His uncle Jon Faddis is a world-renowned trumpet player and academic, mentored by Dizzy Gillespie.

“Everyone in our family makes music, so he’s always been doing it,” says his younger brother Michael Jackson, better known as the rapper/producer Oh No. “We’d always stay with our uncle in Oakland. We were supposed to share a room, but he’d constantly be in the room with the records, listening to Count Basie.”

While he played drums in a band, Jackson Jr. gravitated to hip-hop, teaching himself to DJ and to use a sampler, gleaning production technique from watching his father in the studio. An instinctive autodidact, he was aware that it’s easier to defy the rules when you haven’t been officially instructed. After he scored a few production and rapping credits with tha Alkaholiks, a 1996 12-inch from his crew Lootpack (with Wildchild and DJ Romes) attracted the attention of Peanut Butter Wolf, then running Stones Throw from San Francisco.

Wolf moved the label to Los Angeles circa 2000, in part to be closer to a perennially hard-to-reach Madlib, and Lootpack’s debut LP helped Stones Throw gain stature in a then-flooded underground market. Shortly thereafter, the gnomish Quasimoto emerged from a monthlong mushroom binge, heralding Jackson’s mutant creativity and iconoclasm. Bored with hip-hop (“I grow tired of it every three or four years”), he rapidly taught himself the Fender Rhodes, the upright bass and the vibraphone, and formed Yesterdays New Quintet, which has released tribute albums to Stevie Wonder and Weldon Irvine, and splintered into an incalculable amount of side projects almost all of them exclusively Madlib.

“I’d start to throw a coffee cup away and he’d tell me to stop. When I looked closer, I’d realize that he had put pennies in them for percussion,” Peanut Butter Wolf says, reminiscing about the days when Madlib turned their collective home’s family room into a makeshift rehearsal space. “He’d make do with what he had. There was an upright bass with just one string and he’d still use it effectively. He was insane on the drums too. I’d wake up to the sound of him playing to jazz records for hours. He seemed to be doing it because he loved it, not because he necessarily wanted to improve.”

Out of this chameleonic chaos came sanctioned remix records of the Blue Note and Trojan Records catalogs, a broken beat homage under the moniker DJ Rels, a Brazilian jazz record with Ivan Conti, and Beat Konducta records plundering blaxploitation sound tracks and Bollywood. But behind the cartoonish alter egos and weed-worship lurked a serious scholasticism.

“He’s always reading music books and the liner notes of old records,” says Karriem Riggins, a jazz drummer and hip-hop producer, and part of Madlib’s fusion projects Yesterdays Universe and Supreme Team. “We took a trip through the Midwest to dig for records in people’s attics, and the entire time we were passing around his stack of old Down Beat magazines.”

This reverence for the past, coupled with his inscrutable originality, has led to work with Talib Kweli, De La Soul, Mos Def, Erykah Badu and Ghostface Killah. Thom Yorke and Four Tet have remixed him too. Not to discount his commercially and critically rewarded collaborations, Madvillain and Jaylib, done with “musical cousins” MF Doom and J Dilla.

Indeed, Dilla’s spirit still looms large, with Madlib dedicating a Beat Konducta record to him, and a portrait of the deceased legend hanging in the studio. Arguably the two best producers of their generation, the pair spurred each other to ascension, before complications from lupus felled Dilla in 2006.

“When Dilla was alive,” says Wolf, “he would always say that Madlib was the best. Neither was very talkative, so when they’d get together they’d sometimes just grunt to communicate. It was almost telepathic.”

But Madlib disagrees: “Dilla was a John Coltrane–type dude. He was always on a higher level than me. He inspired my music to become looser and more soulful. If you look at our beat tapes, you can see when I went in his direction, and when he went in mine.”

(THREE MONTHS PRIOR) There’s no such thing as a casual Madlib fan, with a rabid cult consuming anything he releases. It’s not all great, but it’s always interesting. And while he may not have as many fans as Kanye West, he has Kanye West for a fan, with the Chicago rapper/producer putting five Madlib beats on hold for his new album. Of course, he won’t reveal this unless you accidentally lean into his backless chair and nearly tumble to the floor. Then he will laugh, tell you that “Kanye West did the same thing,” and motion to zip his lips before you can ask for elaboration.

Which raises the specter that the compromise-averse leader of the Young Jazz Rebels may be a part of the biggest album of the year. Not like that would change anything. At a time when Eminem is writing 12-step odes to sobriety, Madlib is one of the few who truly does not give a fuck.

“I do it for myself and for like-minded people. Half the time I don’t know why I make what I do.” He flashes a Loki-like smirk. “I’d do this if no one was listening. I’m stuck. I’ve got the curse.”

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The Madlib Mystique

#25