No man is an island
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of a continent
A part of the main.
—JOHN DONNE
Friends, how many of us have them? Friends, ones we can depend on.
—WHODINI
Battered by the vicissitudes of life, like a ship tossed around in a storm, DOOM’s disappearance during the so-called “lost years” proved essential to his rebirth. Another casualty of the music industry, he could just as easily have called it quits, opting instead for the steady paycheck of hourly wage labor. But he kept largely to himself and, taking the time to process his grief, did nothing. Only while adrift in the calm waters of solitude did he even begin to heal and regain a sense of purpose and direction in life. But once resolved on a path forward, and committed to a course of action, the universe conspired to help. Executing his master plan required the cooperation and support of practically everyone he had known up to that point, as well as new allies and enablers, and, in most instances, the stars aligned to make that possible. Though DOOM eventually wrote a song railing on fake friends, he obviously knew the ones he could count on, too.
Alfred Morgan II (aka Big Benn Klingon) didn’t rap, write graffiti, breakdance, or deejay, but by virtue of growing up at Ninety-Seventh and Columbus, he inevitably hung out at nearby Rock Steady Park, and became a junior affiliate of the CM Fam. “The vibe of the park was snapping,” he recalls. “We was always the funniest cats—playing ball, telling jokes, getting drunk and talking shit.”1 In the immediate aftermath of Sub’s death, DOOM gravitated to that environment, where he could count on the unconditional support of his CM brothers, and his friendship with Morgan started blossoming. In August 1993, however, Morgan had to leave for DC, where he was recruited to play football at Howard University. Though it took some time and convincing, the burly athlete, who majored in education and early childhood development, eventually persuaded his grieving friend to come down and spend some time with him.
Initially, DOOM crashed in Morgan’s dorm room as he familiarized himself with the DC scene. Despite its starched, white-collar reputation as the seat of government, the nation’s capital also happened to be a lively college town humming with the energy of youth, boasting hip bars and clubs, and plenty of music. Morgan liked to show off his friend’s skills, so DOOM vanquished many wannabe MCs on campus. He also met Deanna, a redhead who was already friends with Morgan, Kurious, Kadi, and other members of CM. When they started seeing each other, he often stayed at her place. DOOM’s excursions below the Mason-Dixon Line became more frequent when he realized that this town was far more than simply a pleasant distraction. There was money to be made here.
In addition to forging new friendships, DOOM unexpectedly ran into some former acquaintances. Jason Fragala (aka Optical), a local MC/producer, and his deejay, Dialtone, were shocked when they stumbled into him and Deanna outside a club in DC. The two men along with partner, Zechariah Wise (aka Mister Wise), were part of a group called Team Demolition, which they had started back in high school. One night, after attending a solo Pete Nice show in the area, they had connected with his dancers, Ahmed and Otis, also formerly of 3rd Bass, and gave them their demo tape. The two Long Beach residents, who were down with GYP (DOOM’s Long Beach crew), saw some potential and expressed an interest in managing the group. They invited Team Demolition up to New York for a visit, which was their first occasion hanging out with DOOM—then Zev Love X—who they knew through KMD.
In the aftermath of Sub’s death, however, they found a damaged and devastated person, not quite whom they expected. They were huge fans of the conscious lyricist of the Mr. Hood album, but this former teetotaler was now drinking heavily and chain-smoking. He also appeared subdued, often staring off in the distance, lost in his own thoughts. After hearing a sneak preview of Black Bastards, which hadn’t even been completed yet, the Team Demolition crew were even more surprised by KMD’s drastic change in direction—from happy-go-lucky to angst-ridden. Although they hung out in New York a few more times, when the proposed business arrangement with Ahmed and Otis didn’t pan out—since Pete lost his label deal with Columbia—both parties eventually fell out of contact.
In the meantime, Team Demolition had evolved into a production company as Mr. Wise opened Depth Charge Studios in the basement of his home in Burke, Virginia. Following their fortuitous reunion, Fragala invited DOOM to check out the space, picking him up a few days later from Deanna’s place, where he was accompanied by Kurious. Never wasting an opportunity in the studio, DOOM brought a bagful of DATs (Digital Audio Tapes) and wanted to know if they could dub them onto cassette for him to listen to. “And the first beat that came on was the beat that’s the interlude that runs throughout the first DOOM album. And this is ’96 you know,” Wise recalls. “So, he’s playing us all the beats off of the first DOOM album. Like there was very little cutting room floor with DOOM. Everything that he did got used.”
As they caught up on old times, Wise and Fragala were thrilled to have the former KMD rapper in their presence. Slightly balding, the twenty-five-year-old appeared much older than his years, as his scrawny frame had filled out, but that wasn’t the only change they noticed in him. “We wanted to push him to come to the studio more, but he was really on some drug shit at first, which kind of took us aback ’cause this was Zev Love X,” says Fragala. “He wanted to give me a rack of drugs to sell, but it worked out because we started doing both, and once we got ’em to the studio they didn’t want to leave, you know what I’m sayin’? They loved it down there.”
At the time, Wise was working with a fairly basic setup consisting of a Mackie 24×4 mixing board, an eight-track ADAT, an ASR-10 keyboard workstation, and turntables. But compared to what DOOM was using at home, it may as well have been the Hit Factory. As a result of their prior history and mutual connections, Wise wouldn’t dream of charging for studio time, thereby giving his old acquaintance further incentive to come down more often. But DOOM’s movements, like his behavior, were erratic. “He tried to live the personas he was developing—he was an enigma on purpose,” says Wise. “Like, he’d just disappear. You wouldn’t see him for a couple months. ‘I was in Atlanta. I was back in New York. I was over here. I was doing this.’ And again, a lot of it was centered around dope, you know, hustling. But some of it was music related.”
The longest stretch that DOOM spent in Virginia occurred during the summer of 1996, soon after they first reconnected, as he split time between Wise and Fragala’s basements. “I was selling a lot of drugs in the street at the time. I was young and dumb,” Fragala admits. “So it was a good connection, you know? We started making a lot of money real quick.” Beginning with an inventory of acid, ecstasy, and magic mushrooms, all drugs which appealed to the college crowd, the pair soon expanded to cocaine.
According to Wise, “I would get a knock on my door, and it’s a package from DHL addressed to Depth Charge Studios, care of my boy. And I’d open it up and it’d be like an ADAT tape and Jason, my boy, would be like, ‘Okay, look inside’ and you’d crack open the ADAT tape and it’d be stuffed with cocaine. And he’s [DOOM] not telling me this.” Identical to a VHS tape, an ADAT could fit about a half ounce of the drug. The return address might say from “Viktor Vaughn” or “Monster Island,” according to Wise, who notes, “He had all that nomenclature developed already. Like he was developing all the King Ghidorah and all the Monster Island/Godzilla shit already, you know, in his mind. But it was weird for us.”
Once DOOM even sent them a peanut butter sandwich via overnight courier. “I opened it up and inside was a sandwich bag full of ecstasy pills,” Wise recalls. “It was wild man. Like, this dude is sending me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich stuffed with like thirty ecstasy pills. And like, again, that was not my thing back then. I’d hand it to my boy, like, ‘Clearly this is something for you,’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ ” After Fragala sold the product, he would send DOOM the money via Western Union and wait for the next re-up via mail. Eventually, DOOM taught him the Five Percenters’ Supreme Mathematics to use as code when speaking on the phone. The number five, which stood for “power,” meant cocaine.
DOOM’s studio sessions at Depth Charge proved to be equally insane. “When we’d be working on stuff together, he’d get really fucked up,” says Wise. But a typical session always started with dinner. DOOM would order the Dragon and Phoenix (lobster with chicken) from the Chinese restaurant in the strip mall across the street. He’d wash that down with a gallon jug of Riunite wine from the local Giant supermarket that would be killed over the course of the night. Plenty of blunts were smoked, too, but DOOM’s high of choice was mescaline, which would keep him up all night, sometimes speaking to unseen entities. One night, while particularly out of his skull, he appeared to address the air, blurting out “devils” to his hosts, but he just as soon snapped out of it. Then he turned to Wise, telling him how much he reminded him of his brother since they were both so technically adept with the equipment. “And like, we didn’t know what to say, ’cause this was still like us kind of getting to know him, you know,” says Fragala. Regardless, there was a method to his madness.
“So, like he would come in, and basically I would sit there at the ASR-10 and he’d be like, let’s loop this up,” says Wise. The first track they worked on, “Dead Bent,” featured a prominent string sample from Isaac Hayes’s “Walk on By” (Stax, 1969), married to the programmed beat and part of the hook of BDP’s “Super Hoe” (B-Boy Records, 1987). “He was like, ‘I wanna loop up the Isaac Hayes shit. Let’s do this. And you have the “Super Hoe” drum track?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I got the “Super Hoe” drum track.’ Like he had all the ideas and then I would just facilitate it,” says Wise. Using recognizable samples didn’t really cut it in that era of obscure crate-digging, due to high clearance fees and simply out of creative concerns. But according to Wise, “He was kind of going against the grain of what was happening in the current hip-hop that was being made at those times. He didn’t care about any of that. He was breaking rules.”
Though he kept his productions relatively simple and stripped down, not spending much time on them, DOOM was a perfectionist when it came to recording vocals. He often made multiple passes on the same track before redoing them all. “It was almost like he was figuring out how he wanted MF DOOM to sound, you know what I mean?” says Wise. “Like the vocals on the ones that he did with me, he’s fuckin’ out of his mind. He’s inebriated, he’s wild. It’s a totally different voice, like way more flamboyant.” But on the final version of “Dead Bent” that eventually saw release, DOOM rapped in monotone with a laid-back delivery that would become his signature style.
As they continued working with him, Team Demolition witnessed the metamorphosis of Zev Love X into MF DOOM. In addition, they got a sneak preview of what was to come, although they didn’t always know what to make of it. DOOM would constantly toss out different ideas, such as doing a whole album whose concept revolved around food. “He seemed to know, like, exactly what he wanted to do. Like he had everything laid out,” says Wise. “And he had all the backstory of all the characters laid out as well, like very early on.” Without going into specifics, he even let them in on what was to be the defining feature of his main persona. “He would talk about the mask and say, ‘When I come out with this shit, no one’s ever gonna see my face,’ ” says Wise. “Like he preconceived all of that. He knew what he was gonna do. He didn’t even like being photographed. I have maybe three or four photographs with him.”
According to Fragala, “Everybody was kind of biting off Wu[-Tang] a little bit, but all DOOM would talk about was Wu at this time. I mean that was his inspiration in a lot of ways to do his music. He always talked about the RZA and how they got kung fu shit with their music, and he wanted [to use] Godzilla, for the same shit, pretty much.” As Wu-Tang based their whole concept around martial arts movies, DOOM told them he wanted to use the Godzilla franchise in a similar manner with his Monsta Island collaboration with MF Grimm.
Of all the Clan members, he particularly liked how Ghostface Killah wore a stocking cap to conceal his face during the early days of Wu-Tang. But, at the same time, he didn’t want to bite his style. Once Ghost started showing his face in videos and public appearances, however, the mask became fair game. Dimbaza offers confirmation, saying, “He respected that Ghostface wearing a mask first thing so much and he definitely did need confirmation that Ghost wasn’t gonna keep rocking with it before he could say, ‘Aiight, yo, I’m gonna do that then.’ He was honoring that. That’s a true story.”
Only three months older than DOOM, Michelle Mitchell enjoyed a close relationship with her cousin growing up. Both a friend and confidant, she could be counted on for many things—not least of which was introducing him to girls. “It was just like every girl he’d meet was somehow through me in some kind of unofficial way,” she says. “Like, he just would tell everybody, ‘Yeah. I date all her friends.’ It’s not something that was intentional in any kind of way or form, but it just ended up that way.”
Michelle had played matchmaker when Kinetta Powell, who was two years her junior and attended the same high school, expressed an interest in meeting her cousin. She remembers introducing them at the Macy’s at Roosevelt Field mall, where Powell was working, and says that in no time the two became a couple. In 1993, they became parents of a baby boy, Daniel Joshua Dumile III, known as DJ. In the turbulent period that saw Sub’s death and the termination of their record deal, Michelle says, “I think maybe the blessing to him was his child. It helped him hold on.” Unfortunately, a casualty of those times was DOOM’s relationship with his baby’s mother. When she became a flight attendant, often traveling out of town for long stretches, he assumed full responsibility for his son as a single parent. “And I always gave him props for that,” says Michelle.
Later, in the late nineties, she introduced DOOM to the woman who would not only become his business partner, but partner in life. She had known Jasmine Thomas since they both attended Nassau Community College and worked at the same bank branch. But they didn’t really become close until the Jones Beach Greek Fest when Jasmine got separated from her friends and Michelle ended up helping her find them. Afterward, Jasmine, a resident of nearby Freeport, became a frequent visitor to the Mitchell home in Long Beach, where she inevitably ran into DOOM. Starting out as friends, their relationship would grow organically. Since Jasmine owned her own car, DOOM would sometimes hit her up for a ride when he had an errand to run or someplace to be.
“So many years later I was living in Georgia and my mother was living here [in Long Beach] and I think my father was out of town at the time,” says Michelle. “And I said to DOOM, and I also said to her, ‘Hey, can you guys, every now and then, stop and check on my moms for me because I’m far away.’ So, it happens that one day they both stopped in at the same time. It’s like you know somebody, you grew up around them, be around them for a long, long time and you never saw them in that way, and then, all of a sudden, you see them in that way. So that’s basically what kind of happened with them, and they developed an actual strong relationship.”
At one point, Michelle enticed her friend to come down south for a visit. “I was like, ‘Girl, you know, people can get these mansions out here for like, what we paying in rent.’ It’s crazy,” she says. “And I think I told her, ‘Why don’t they come check it out.’ ” Jasmine and DOOM took her up on the offer and drove down to look after her house while Michelle returned to New York to see her ailing father. “And I remember her saying, ‘Oh yeah, I really like it. It’s dope,’ ” she says.
Michelle eventually moved back to New York and was living in Queens the next time she ran into them. The couple dropped by unexpectedly, spending the entire day with her, and it was only then that she found out that they had tied the knot. “They did like a Vegas number,” according to Michelle, who knows no other details about the nuptials. “They were super, super private,” she concedes. About a year later, on a trip to Georgia, Michelle discovered that Jasmine had made the big move to the Atlanta area and was living in the suburb of Kennesaw. DOOM would often visit from New York before permanently relocating there in mid-2000.
DOOM was hardly the only disgruntled artist in the music industry. When his album, A Constipated Monkey, dropped in January 1994, the debut release on Pete Nice’s Columbia-distributed Hoppoh imprint, Kurious was so unhappy and disillusioned by its lack of promotion and the resulting poor sales that he contemplated a break from rap. But that decision was eventually made for him. Not only was he dropped, but Hoppoh lost their label deal after 1995’s Pre-Life Crisis by Count Bass D tanked, making Pete and partner Bobbito Garcia redundant as well.
Swearing off the music industry entirely, Pete retreated upstate to focus on his other passion—baseball memorabilia. The enterprising young Garcia, an amateur baller and sneaker enthusiast, looked toward a fresh start as well. On a lark, he opened up Bobbito’s Footwork, a boutique located in the tiny basement of 323 East Ninth Street in the East Village, which specialized in sneakers and hip-hop vinyl. He also continued his popular underground rap radio show with Stretch Armstrong on WKCR, though that was strictly a labor of love.
Meanwhile, Kurious, who started binging on psychedelics to cope, gravitated toward the street life to make ends meet. In DOOM he found the perfect partner in crime, and they started bouncing out of town on money-getting missions to DC and Virginia. When not on the road, they were still spending a lot of time at Ninety-Seventh Street, one of the few spots where DOOM felt comfortable working on his music. One day, after having just copped a “loosey” at the corner store, they were outside on the street when DOOM started kicking a rhyme style that Kurious had never heard before. He described it as, “That delivery that’s more, you know, conversational. It’s like a little deeper; it’s not as animated, know what I’m sayin’? It’s kinda more inside like a host, like a comic book host.”2
Like his predecessors Rakim and G.U.R.U. Keithy E from Gangstarr, DOOM had discovered the power of the monotone. Nine out of ten rappers favored an animated, expressive delivery, electing to shout to project their voice. But by not modulating his pitch and taking the time to enunciate his words, DOOM stumbled upon a style that lent both gravity and a matter-of-factness to his delivery simultaneously. It also made it much easier to understand and appreciate what he was saying. Kurious admits, “Yo, it took me back for a second, but I was like, ‘Yo, that’s kinda ill, ’cause its DOOM. You gotta always know that there’s something to it—there’s always substance. So, I remember hearing that and getting the first taste of that, only to see that shit go crazy later.”3 Privy to the music DOOM was making at the time, Kurious suggested that he hit off Garcia with a demo to play on the radio.
In the meantime, fed up with the politics of the major-label system, the part-time radio host had launched his own independent imprint, Fondle ’Em—partly out of frustration, partly as a joke. Since he was receiving a steady stream of demos through the radio show, his friend Rich King from Big Daddy Distribution had suggested releasing some of them. King subsequently went on to partner with Joseph Abajian, a deejay and owner of the record store Fat Beats, to start a distribution company under the same name dedicated to independent hip-hop. He offered Garcia a manufacturing and distribution deal, financing his first release by the Cenubites, a side project by Ultramagnetic’s Kool Keith and Godfather Don. Released in December 1995, the center label of the Cenubites’ EP read, “Fondle ’Em Records, A Division of Tickle ’Em which is a subsidiary of Squeeze ’Em Ent.” Along the bottom edge it proudly declared its no-frills credo, “No Video, No Sticker, No Promotion, No Marketing.” Even though CDs dominated the marketplace, the record was issued on vinyl only without artwork—essentially a “white label” geared toward deejays and true hip-hop heads.
Since the days of “Rapper’s Delight” and “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” rap had been primarily the purview of independent labels. Even in the eighties, labels like Def Jam, Cold Chillin’, and Tommy Boy essentially functioned as independents though distributed by majors. In keeping with hip-hop’s DIY tradition, Fondle ’Em was among a vanguard of independent labels that created another seismic shift in the rap landscape in the mid-nineties, providing an alternative to the mainstream that was becoming increasingly slick, glossy, and commercial.
“We have no interest in getting picked up by a major. This is straight indie,” says Garcia. “Like this is all we are, and DOOM fit into that ethos so well, because similar to the vision of the label, he was like, ‘Yo, I already went through the major-label thing. Like, I don’t wanna go through that again.’ ”4 After DOOM played him his only completed song, “Dead Bent,” Garcia suggested doing a white-label twelve-inch and throwing it out there to see what would happen. He offered DOOM his standard agreement: a fifty-fifty profit split once expenses were recouped, with the artist owning his masters and publishing. He asked for two more songs to justify a proper release, and they sealed the deal with a handshake.
In order to make the record happen, DOOM turned to another friend, Stretch Armstrong, who had a decent home studio and an expansive record collection at his apartment at 407 East Ninety-First Street. His setup consisted of both the SP-1200 and MPC60 drum machines, an Akai S-950 sampler, two ADATs, an eight-track reel-to-reel, and a Mackie sixteen-input mixer as well as some basic outboard processing units. “I don’t know how DOOM ended up in my apartment to do this,” Stretch concedes. “I don’t remember the conversation. I think what happened, however, was he got to my place. Once he understood the library of records and also got a feel for my place, there was something about DOOM where it just felt right to let him have access to that in any form that he wanted.”5
Toward the end of 1996, Stretch ended up giving DOOM the keys to his apartment for a period of two to three weeks so he could use the studio. The scrappy MC took full advantage of this opportunity. “DOOM barely slept. He’d sit on my couch and fall asleep for a little while when he got tired, then he’d get up and go back to work,” Stretch recalls. “I was super busy at the time—barely at home. So, when I’d come home, he’d be there. He was in the zone so I wouldn’t talk to him too much.”
Besides sampling a 1972 Scooby-Doo soundtrack that Stretch owned, DOOM’s choice of records bordered on the bizarre, favoring the eighties R&B of the SOS Band, Sade, and Atlantic Starr. He also used a snippet of Scott La Rock scratching from the BDP song “Poetry.” According to Stretch, “Back then, if you were like a hip-hop beat nerd and you sampled another rap record for the drums or for the scratches, you know, you’d be laughed out the room.”6 He adds, “DOOM is at my crib like breaking every rule and doing things that at the time, I gotta be honest, like it made no sense to me. And thank God he did because now when I hear those records, I’m like, wow, this is genius. If, you know, he was told to do something one way, he’d be like, ‘Nah, I’m doing it my way.’ ”7