MF Doom has influenced dozens of musicians. Listen to 11 of them.

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Daniel Dumile, the reclusive musician who played the role of masked villain MF Doom, died on October 31 at the age of 49, although the news was not revealed until New Year’s Eve. Dumile has spent more than two decades as one of the most recognizable and beloved artists in underground hip-hop, a rapper known for his unexpected word choices and intricate rhyme piles.

However, Dumile’s impact went far beyond his formidable microphone skills. Hiding his face behind a metal mask during public appearances – if he did present himself to them – he separated his words from his person, rare in a genre steeped in self-magnification and diaristic writing. His loyalty to independent labels like Stones Throw, Rhymesayers, Lex, Nature Sounds and Epitaph paved the way through the established machines of the music industry. His beatmaking was idiosyncratic, sampling 80s Silent Storm records instead of 70s hard funk, and he played the MPC sampler in a way that revealed the seams. “Madvillainy,” his groundbreaking 2004 collaboration with producer Madlib as Madvillain, eschewed traditional song for a whirlwind of psychedelic, dreamlike ideas.

His influence is evident in the production of musicians working simultaneously over the past two decades – rappers, singers, and producers both in the hip-hop world and beyond. Here are 11 examples of how Doom’s aesthetic choices have infiltrated the artistic impulses of generations.

With three 12-inch singles released on Fondle ‘Em Records by radio personality Bobbito Garcia in the late 90s, MF Doom was part of a first wave of underground hip-hop musicians, purists focused on rhythms and rhythms. rhymes. independent labels between 1997 and 2004. At the time, Dumile was already a victim of the big labels. Playing the role of Zev Love X in the early ’90s band KMD, he was fired from Elektra amid a controversy over the cover of the trio’s incendiary album. Reinventing himself as MF Doom, his early songs helped show that there was an enduring path outside the system. Rapper Aesop Rock was raised on KMD, and his music similarly navigates maze-like patterns, pop culture rubbish, and SAT vocabulary words. He went on to become one of the signature numbers for two labels that were the standard bearers of mid-2000s underground rap, El-P’s Definitive Jux and Atmosphere’s Rhymesayers. In a verse about a recent MF Doom tribute, Aesop claims to have sold his 1999 demo outside of a Doom show at East Village Brownie’s closed club.

Back in the days when the boundaries between underground and mainstream hip-hop were much thicker, it was unheard of for a platinum Def Jam artist like Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah to capture the lo-fi, gritty, underground sound of beatmakers. like MF Doom and J Dilla. Picking a few beats from Doom’s 10-volume “Special Herbs” series for his fifth album, “Fishscale,” Ghostface not only amplified Doom’s unbalanced rhythmic genius, but earned himself a critical re-appreciation in the process. “He’s a great artist,” Ghostface told Mass Appeal in 2005. “He’s like me in a way, very creative.”

“At the end of the day, to me, it’s not rap at all, it’s poetry,” Radiohead’s Thom Yorke told Dazed of his favorite rapper. “The way he freely forms his verses and puts it all together, I don’t think anyone does it like that. In 2007, between the release of his acclaimed, amorphous, beatwise debut solo “The Eraser” and Radiohead’s seventh amorphous beatwise album, “In Rainbows,” Yorke released a playlist of 10 currently favorite songs. Two of them featured Doom rhymes.

“I didn’t know you could make an entire album without brackets and make it sound that good,” Danny Brown told Complex of one of his favorite albums, “Madvillainy.” “This album showed me that music has no rules. Before that, I thought it takes 16 bars and brackets to make a good song. Brown has grown into one of the most successful underground rappers of the past 10 years thanks to his own uncompromising vision. His breakthrough, “XXX” of 2011, had fleshed out songs and spiraling bursts like “Adderall Admiral,” a A 103 second track built on a particularly noisy sample from post-punk band This Heat.

Halftime Super Bowl superstar The Weeknd is an avowed MF Doom fan, posting about him on Instagram and recently paying tribute with a few songs on his Apple Music radio show. While The Weeknd makes R&B more hedonistic and retro, it’s hard not to imagine that born artist Abel Tesfaye hasn’t taken lessons in building the mystique of the metallic-faced rapper. Tesfaye first broke through after releasing songs like “Loft Music” in 2010 with complete anonymity. He recently started playing with his face covered in bandages and prosthetics.

When then-teenage rapper Earl Sweatshirt went viral in 2010, his lyrics were absolutely overflowing with wacky assonance and goofy imagery: “Twisted, sicker than mad cattle, in fact I’m out of six different liquors.” with a prince’s wig stuck on it. It’s no surprise that he studied Doom, ultimately helping to build a small rap empire with the Odd Future collective. Songs like “Chum” aren’t just spiraling with Doom’s elaborate word-making, but also with his giddy, woozy moods. “I based a lot of the ways I was trying to rap her [expletive] when I was learning to do it, ”Earl told guerrilla interviewer Nardwuar in 2014.

A small industry of “chillhop” artists has created atmospheric downtempo, fuzzed-out beats, better known through the internet popularity of “hip-hop lofi radio – beats for chilling out / studying”. While the “lo-fi hip-hop” subgenre is primarily inspired by Detroit sample innovator J Dilla and the speckled jazz Nujabes of Japan, it also owes a debt to the “Special” instrument series. Herbs ”by Dumile registered as Metal Fingers. As a producer, he often paints with nostalgic and dreamlike tools, borrowing from Quiet Storm R&B, jazz-funk, soft rock and Sade. Although California beatmaker Jinsang is relatively unknown, this song has over 61 million streams on Spotify,

Los Angeles Open rapper Mike Eagle loved Doom’s ability to succeed doing the things he loved most about rap: “the freedom to sample and rhyme on any loop you like,” Eagle said. to Vice. “Be motivated to go as crazy as possible with the pun.” Eagle is renowned for his tricky punchlines – he briefly had a Comedy Central show where Doom provided a rap on Episode 2. And like Doom, Eagle isn’t afraid to deal with big concepts or come out of. himself. On his critically acclaimed album “Brick Body Kids Still Daydream,” he raps truths and fictions about Chicago’s notoriously mismanaged housing project, Robert Taylor Homes.

Perhaps no modern rapper embodies Doom’s penchant for confused references and architectural rhyme schemes better than Your Old Droog from Brooklyn, a man who once boasted, “While I made sure every bar either hard / You Herbs was playing Pokémon, chasing Charizard. ” When his career began, Droog took Doom’s loneliness to heart, leading to an internet conspiracy theory that he was in fact Nas in disguise. “I don’t want to walk around all the time like I’m that rapper,” he told Spin of his early decision to remain anonymous. “I learned that from my favorite rapper, MF Doom – how he approached it, doing interviews. People get caught up in these characters, they start to believe it’s them.

“DOOM was my favorite MC and producer,” Chicago-based pre-R & B writer KeiyaA posted on twitter, adding that he “really showed me a new way of emotion, how to be honest in my expressions, how to build worlds.” Her debut, “Forever, Ya Girl !,” ​​took a bit of Doom’s courage in its lo-fi textures and examples of piles.

Contemporary underground rap explodes with rhymes that work in the same pattern as Doom towards “Madvillainy”: very technical bars, often delivered with effortless cool. Two of his peers from the late ’90s – Roc Marciano and Ka – rebooted a decade ago, and there hasn’t been a dearth of frozen precisionists in their wake. The most popular right now is the Griselda collective from Buffalo, which includes Conway the Machine, Benny the Butcher and Westside Gunn, who collaborated with Doom on a two 12-inch song in 2017. On “George Bondo,” Benny the Butcher raps, “I think it’s a game until I Patrick Kane someone, mate / It’s slippery with a stick, pulling one through the goalie.



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