MF Doom, magician of memory

“By candlelight, my hand will write these rhymes till I’m exhausted,” rapped MF Doom at the start of “?”, The last song before the epilogue to his 1999 debut album, “Operation: Doomsday “.

In his video, Doom is indeed at the end of his wick. He staggers in a park, holding a machete in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. He is wandering, unstable. You feel for him.

The song ends with a fond memory of his brother, Subroc, who was killed in a car crash in 1993. “My twin brother, we did it all together / From a hundred rakat salahs to butter-copping leathers,” Doom raps , then concludes the verse with a portrayal of heartbreak and resilience: “Truly the most illegal dynamic duo on the whole block / I keep a hit with you with the sword machete in hand / Everything is going according to plan, man. “

Towards the end of the video, Doom is sprawled out on a park bench as he raps this part, and this photo sparkles on the screen; Doom had insisted that it be included in the final clip. Her boots are off, resting on the sides of her feet, and her signature mask rests on the floor. His hand is stretched out over his face, both mantle and shield. The sadness in his eyes is practically wet.

Sometimes on “Operation: Doomsday,” Doom struck straight and hard on death. But, even when he didn’t, the clouds still hung over him. Listening to the album was like standing outside in a summer storm. You felt soaked, drained, tense, out of breath. The album served as a memorial on many levels – an act of heartbreak for a lost loved one, a grim tribute to an endangered approach to music, and an unassuming but imposing act of artistic recalcitance.

On “Operation: Doomsday,” Doom – whose death in October was announced on New Years Eve – shaped a memory-steeped approach to rap and production. Her voices were scrambled, almost dreamlike. He could appear wandering, which belied his rather astonishing sense of craftsmanship. In a time when hip-hop was tweaking its hard spots to be accepted by mainstream audiences, Doom was almost completely interior – he seemed to be rapping. The music was intimately, almost quichotically, personal.

Most importantly, Doom produced almost all of the music for “Operation: Doomsday”; he was a bedroom writer before it became the norm. His sound choices were radical – both wireless and elegant, rich in story and emotion. He used familiar sappy songs as a reference and base – “One Hundred Ways” by Quincy Jones and James Ingram on “Rhymes Like Dimes”, “The Finest” by the group SOS on his track of the same title – and built beats around it. of them that looked like they were woven into the sample material itself. Sometimes he had older songs with slightly changed lyrics – Sade’s “Kiss of Life” on “Doomsday,” Atlantic Starr’s “Always” on “Dead Bent” – in a way that felt fully inhabited.

This approach was a conceptual innovation beyond a simple sample or interpolation. It suggested that you could not so much reinterpret or borrow from the story as you could become one with it, the experience and the memory fusing together into something that was not quite present or past, but something of another ineffable.

This made “Operation: Doomsday” one of the most idiosyncratic hip-hop albums of the 1990s and one of the defining documents in the independent hip-hop explosion of that decade. It was seismic in the truest sense of the word – a change of terrain that revealed a fault line that had been developing for some time and that revealed a whole different realm of creative possibilities, an opportunity for an alternate story.

Not that Doom – who first achieved success in the dawn of the 1990s as Zev Love X as part of the KMD group adjacent to the Native Tongues – was working from a book by game radically different from those of the general public, many of which were their own. generational peers. They too were making new music based on old-fashioned hits. But theirs was glazed; Doom was done. As mainstream hip-hop tuned in for an impending pop takeover, there was someone who had stepped back, a combination of refusenik and mourning.

All of this made him a heartbroken hero. Central to the tale and myth of “Operation: Doomsday” – which was released on founding indie label Fondle ‘Em after a series of 12-inch singles – was the creation of the supervillain character, MF Doom. Naturally, this supervillain, like all the others, had a tragic origin story: the death of his brother, the subversion of the genre he loved, the overriding urge to continue making music outside the system. who had supported it and then spit it out. . (In 1993, a few months after Subroc’s death, KMD was removed from Elektra Records prior to the release of their second album, “Black Bastards,” due to a cover controversy.)

Hence the mask. In the early Doom years, he tried out different versions – the one worn by WWE wrestler Kane, a Mexican wrestling, a ripped stocking around his face – before landing on the one that became his signature.

However, they all served the same purpose. “I wanted to go on stage and speak, without people thinking about the normal things people think about,” he told The New Yorker in 2009. “A visual always makes a first impression. But if there’s a first impression, I might as well use it to control the story. The mask was the lie that protected the truth.

Doom has also become a prankster, or at least an extremely reluctant famous person. He would send other people in his place from time to time to concerts or photo shoots, wearing the Metal Face mask in his place. It was a way of continuing to deemphasize the commodified ego, of withdrawing even more into sound. This allowed him to exist in the world as a memory, long before he left it.