Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
—KHALIL GIBRAN
“He definitely had some demons that he was fighting, but it seemed that they were beginning to tame over the time that I knew him and was seeing him in New York during that era of 2000–2003,” says Peter Lupoff of Sub Verse. “I think he was in a good relationship and was with somebody very supportive, and I think that gave him a really good foundation. And eventually I think that helped with DOOM’s persistence and continued successes after Sub Verse, and he matured into recognizing that.”
Lupoff is, of course, referring to DOOM’s wife Jasmine Thomas, a truly silent partner and even fiercer advocate of his privacy, who helped him get his life and business in order. She was the reason he went to Georgia in the first place, trading the nonstop hustle of New York for the small-town comfort of Kennesaw (population 33,036), where the pace of life flowed slower than molasses. As a guy living on the edge and trying to raise a young son, he was lucky to have found her. In early 2002, Jasmine was responsible for setting up Metal Face Records LLC, as an outlet to release or reissue his music. After years of friends or random fans filling the role, she eventually became his manager, establishing Dogfoot Management LLC in 2006 and DOOM’s official Gas Drawls website later in 2011. More recently, of course, she maintained his social media presence on Twitter and Instagram, from which DOOM’s passing was subsequently announced.
But beyond handling his business concerns, she offered a stabilizing influence, making a comfortable home for DOOM and his son, where he could focus on his creativity without all the other distractions that came with basic survival. He had certainly earned as much. Here, he could lay down the mask and just be himself—balding, bespectacled, and now boasting a prominent beer belly. The last place you’d expect to find the Villain was chilling in a two-bedroom suburban townhouse under sunny Georgia skies. In the large, unfinished basement, beneath harsh fluorescent lights, DOOM set up his lab on an OfficeMax desk.
Cocooned from the concerns and demands of the outside world, he remained fully engaged in his craft, staying busy on a variety of projects. Hustle and good fortune had put a lot on his plate, including Grimm’s The Downfall of Ibliys album, the Monsta Island Czars project, and Special Herbs. Additionally, he was doing one-offs and guest spots—for fellow Atlanta rapper Count Bass D (Dwight Farrell), the High Times compilation, and making an appearance on Prefuse 73’s debut for the well-respected UK label Warp. Prefuse 73’s “Black List,” featuring DOOM and Aesop Rock, appeared on Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives (2001), an album that veered more toward electronic music than hip-hop, but helped introduce DOOM to a whole new audience overseas. Capitalizing on any opportunity that came his way, he expanded his influence organically.
While producing Grimm’s album, he most often worked at Bigg Jus’s studio, which he found preferable to his own. Jus, at the time, was using an Ensoniq Paris pro system, a digital audio workstation on par with his former Roland VS-1880. It combined software and hardware into an all-inclusive unit that allowed recording, editing, and mixing. “Since I worked with him more in the capacity of an engineer when he recorded on my system, that’s the part I probably honor the most,” says Jus. “He was very straightforward in what he wanted to do. He was very B-boy about what he wanted, and he was just on point—wasn’t nothing odd or out the ordinary. And that’s the thing that I honor the most, we was just regular, straight up B-boys working on shit together, not having to get too bent or anything like that.” At the same time, he adds, “Now I have seen him, doing shows together, drink a half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, straight to the head at six in the morning.” Those closest to DOOM, who were privy to his drinking, tended not to make an issue about it. But when pressed, many have classified him as a functional alcoholic based on his dependence—despite the fact he remained productive. Drinking was a problem lurking in plain sight that would eventually catch up to him.
DOOM’s shortcomings in other areas became plainly apparent as well. “He didn’t have a grasp on his business affairs, and he let a lot of fuckin’ fans do a lot of the legwork for him,” says Jus. “He always had people working to push projects, someone who was like an unofficial manager, like a super fan who was doing work for him. I’ll just leave it at that. It’s the brilliance of his villainy.” Pressed to elaborate, he only says, “If you think about it, he literally was thinking like a villain, like a comic-book villain. The way sometimes he had people do things and the way he organized what he needed to be done, it was kind of like a comic-book villain. And I want to acknowledge the brilliance of that.” Certainly, lingering behind the affable image he projected, DOOM’s powers of manipulation were persuasive as he sometimes resembled a puppet master, pulling the strings.
For Jus, however, “He was more like my badass brother.” He says he bonded with DOOM over the fact that they were both former graf writers, whom he describes as being “advanced motherfuckers” because they took risks while always staying ahead of the curve. “There’s a lot of shit I can’t really say,” Jus admits. “He was just an advanced dude, but he was into shit that I couldn’t get into. I was busy trying to run a label and shit like that. I couldn’t, you know, deal with most of the stuff that the artists were doing ’cause I had to kind of keep a straight focus. Other than that, he was a completely genuine, nice, down to earth, humble dude, who, you know, was much wilder in his earlier years than he was kind of later.” Jus’s evasiveness when it comes to sharing certain information about his friend reveals as much about the loyalty DOOM inspired—especially among his inner circle, who were uber-protective of his cherished privacy. But it’s not difficult to read between the lines. “Did he do regular other shit that entertainers do when they get famous?” Jus poses rhetorically, “Yes, he did all of that. I don’t consider that villainous either. I don’t know what you call that.”
Another artist, who had a chance to get up close and personal with DOOM in Atlanta, was John Robinson (aka Lil’ Sci) of Scienz of Life. After leaving the Newnan loft and looking for new digs, he was invited to stay at DOOM’s place, where he remained for almost two months. “It was epic because, you know, I got to really see a lot of the creative process that normally I wouldn’t,” he recalls. “For real, there’s a method to the madness.” Something that struck Robinson, for example, were the shingles of sticky notes covering DOOM’s studio walls, containing couplets like “Chinese slippers / Guyanese strippers,” or sometimes longer parts. He wasn’t sure of their purpose until they collaborated on the song “Yikes” from Scienz’s second album for Sub Verse, Project Overground: The Scienz Experiment (2002).
“We almost didn’t do it,” says Robinson of the collaboration. “We were headed to New York touring, and he was like, ‘Yo, I’ll just do it when y’all get back.’ And we was like, ‘No, we can’t. We’re going to master the album while we’re in New York.’ And he’s like, ‘All right.’ And then I just decided, you know what, let’s take a ride.” While the group took a trip to the store, DOOM vibed out with the track. Robinson says, “By the time we got back, he had some new part of a verse written. He started taking things off the wall of sticky notes and, boom, the verse was ready to go. And [he] spit it. Maybe one or two takes. And we were like, ‘Yep, this is it.’ Let’s go.” Having recorded DOOM’s verse directly into their Roland VS-1880, they headed off to New York, and “Yikes” became one of the standout cuts on the album.
“DOOM jokingly said to me one time, you know, when Special Herbs was moving and just all this music was coming out and everyone’s like, ah, man DOOM is crazy prolific,” Robinson recalls, “He said to me like, ‘Yo Sci, I’m lazy as hell with this shit. I just had a lot of music stacked. Not for nothing, I do this all the time, you know?’ And he’s just laughing, but I loved his work ethic because it was intentional, you know? His process was literally like, yo, make a little bit of the beat and just let that play and walk away from it.”
DOOM told him: I might go play a video game. I might go cook some food. I might sweep or mop the floor. You know, I might read while that shit is playing, or I might turn it off and go do something else and then come back to it and add to it.
“It was this nice, consistent, slow bake where it was like, oh shit, I see the build. And I like the fact that there’s no rush. I’m not rushing. I’m letting the vibe carry the creation, you know?” says Robinson. “He said, ‘This is kind of how I do it. Like for real, you know,’ And that was dope to see. And it made sense to me.”
Once, while he quickly needle-skipped through an album looking for possible samples, DOOM started laughing at him. Bro, you sampling 20 seconds into the record, like play the record. How you know it ain’t something dope in the middle. How you know it ain’t a bridge at the end that you could flip. Yo, just play the song, light something up, and just chill and listen to that shit. It’s the least you could do. Once again, Robinson took such advice to heart.
DOOM also offered him some tips on rhyming: No ad-libs. I’m rhyming to the whole world in a room sitting in the chair right across from one person at a time, basically. So, when the people are hearing it, they’re hearing me. People don’t speak with ad-libs. You don’t have two voices and all these crazy effects. That’s cool for live performance and club shit. But it’s like, yo, when people are listening and taking in this experience, I like to keep it conversational—no ad-libs.
The man of many aliases eventually convinced Robinson to do a project under his government name called Who Is This Man? (High Water Music, 2008). “Just to create another lane,” he says. Yo, you’re doing business already under that name. People know the Scienz of Life and Sci. It just creates a different mystique. You know, it won’t take away. It’ll only grow.
During Robinson’s stay with the Villain, they made the song “Next Levels,” featuring himself; his brother, ID 4 Windz; and Atlanta-based Stahhr the Femcee. DOOM used to watch and tape all kinds of late-night cable, including a BET show that aired in the 90s called Jazz Impressions. The show’s smooth-jazz title theme—a mellow horn-piano-and-upright-bass riff—was just the kind of sonic source he loved. Besides its slight cheese factor, the theme’s origins were opaque and its composers unknown—criteria that made it hard to trace by the sample police. Many years later, however, a fan from the Netherlands successfully tracked down its source, which DOOM also used as the basis for “Arrow Root” on Special Herbs, Volumes 1&2.
“One of DOOM’s favorite quotes was, ‘It’s all about the rec,’ ” says Robinson. “And what that means is like, ‘Yo, it don’t matter what I look like or what I got on, if I got a big chain on or not. Is that shit [the music] dope, period? It’s all about the rec[ognition].’ And you know, that was one of the things that was the standard.” He also adds, “And another thing, how he moved, period, was on a need-to-know basis.” Obsessively private, DOOM avoided signaling his moves in advance or even letting anyone know what he was up to at any given time. As the advent of social media coaxed everyone—including celebrities—to constantly share the minutiae of their lives, DOOM went in the opposite direction, thereby enhancing his mystique.
“Paid in Full” (4th & B’way/Island, 1987), the fifth single off Eric B. & Rakim’s game-changing debut of the same name, became one of the first rap singles to cross over to the clubs, laying the blueprint for a fusion that has grown even stronger today. The runaway success of that song started in Europe thanks to the “Seven Minutes of Madness” remix by a young, up and coming British duo known as Coldcut. Matt Black, an ex-computer programmer and Oxford-educated biochemist, and his partner, Jonathan More, a former art teacher and silversmith, had met while deejaying on pirate radio. They were quickly thrust into the ranks of hot producers thanks to their audio collage/cut-up technique that blended vocal snippets from TV and film along with scratching and additional samples, like the sublime hook by Israeli singer Ofra Haza.
Taking full advantage of the newfound attention to produce pop artists like Yazz and Lisa Stansfield, the duo really fancied themselves as funk renegades, who didn’t have much respect for the mainstream music industry. To show their commitment to more underground and left field sounds that they and their friends were producing, they started their own independent label, Ninja Tune, in 1990. No doubt, their early beat experiments—for example, the five volumes of DJ Food’s Jazz Brakes series that included some of the first instrumental hip-hop—made them mavericks in the trip-hop scene that emerged in the UK in the early part of the decade. Their ambitious creative vision and consistency have also made the label one of the most successful and longest-enduring independents.
About a year after Ninja Tune was up and running in London, recent Oxford grad Will Ashon was finding his legs while on the dole (the UK’s version of unemployment) in Brighton. Into music and books, he began reviewing the latter for a local publication. But his editor let him in on a little secret that has launched many a journalism career: If you ring up record labels, they’ll give you free records to review. A jazz aficionado by default of his father’s collection, Ashon also gravitated toward the hip-hop of the day—groups like Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest, and Freestyle Fellowship. He listened to UK rap, too, which he viewed as underground rap with an English accent. Serendipitously, one of the first labels he hit up for free records was Ninja Tune. With his work appearing in such UK magazines as Hip-Hop Connection, Muzik, and True (later Trace, where he served as music editor), Ashon started building a reputation as a writer.
“So, what I tended to do was I’d get an interview for Muzik where someone would fly me to New York and then I’d hang out and stay in New York for a bit longer and try and write something else for Trace,” he says. “And I was really obsessed with underground hip-hop as it was called. I used to come to New York, and I’d go to Bobbito’s store at the time and admire all the T-shirts and buy the twelve-inches.” On one such trip he was introduced to the music of DOOM, who he was surprised to discover was Zev Love X from KMD, with whom he was already familiar.
At one point, Ashon realized that some of the music he would pick up on his travels and write about was not available in the UK. He came across plenty of homegrown artists bubbling beneath the surface who deserved exposure as well. “So, that was why I went to Ninja Tune and asked them if they’d be interested in doing something,” he says. Peter Quicke, who still runs the label, agreed to start off by releasing a few singles. Between 1997 and 1998, the first twelve-inch releases by English rappers Alpha Prhyme (aka Juice Aleem) and Gemini Twins, followed by American artists Abstract Rude and Saul Williams, dropped on the newly formed Big Dada Recordings, a subsidiary of Ninja Tune.
“To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to make any money on it,” says Ashon. “I was doing it because I wanted to put out records. I wanted to be involved. There was all this exciting music. So, I’m not even sure we had a proper deal at first, but I think once we moved to albums, the deal was, we’ll give you a split of the profits because all Ninja’s deals with their artists were profit split deals.”
By the time Ashon released Big Dada’s first album—the rap ragga dub classic Brand New Second Hand (1999) by Roots Manuva—he was still a freelance writer, doing the label thing on the side. Then two things happened to change his status: he lost his main gig as music editor when Trace relocated to New York, and his first daughter was born. Meanwhile, the Roots Manuva album kept selling until it reached an astonishing sixty thousand copies in the UK alone, garnering stellar reviews along the way. Its success propelled Big Dada into becoming a recognized name in the indie rap game. Banking on his good ear and instincts, Ashon finally asked Ninja Tune to put him on the payroll.
Around the end of 2000 or beginning of 2001, he received a random call from the states from someone he didn’t know—most likely Big Benn Klingon. “He said he was managing DOOM, and would I be interested in doing a record? I said, ‘Fuck, yeah, I’d love to do a record. Absolutely,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘This is how much money we’ve got.’ ” Ashon offered an advance of $20,000, the going rate for projects released on the label. “They came back and said, ‘Look, DOOM says he can’t do it for that. It’s not enough money, but he could do a King Geedorah record for that amount of money,’ ” he says. “Throughout the whole time I ran Big Dada, it was a problem that American artists obviously came from a bigger market and a market where hip hop was more established, and they wanted more money.” Though he really had no idea who this King Geedorah geezer was, Ashon agreed to sign him.
“Geedorah is an interesting character, you know. I mean the whole direction of Geedorah is like, OK, he’s not even from Earth, he’s from outer space. And he channels the information to DOOM in order for DOOM to produce or what not,” DOOM told an audience at the Red Bull Music Academy in Barcelona in 2011. “He just straight reptilian. Like he would be like a three-hundred-foot, three-headed dragon, like golden. He’s actually from the Godzilla films, so, again, it’s like the villain theme—the bad guy. Geedorah’s like the classic bad guy.”1
While rappers like Kool Keith popularized the use of multiple aliases, DOOM took it to a whole new level of surrealism. If a Black Elvis wasn’t high concept enough, how about a giant reptilian creature from outer space? It all seemed like a bit much—even though everyone did fall for the mask. But at least DOOM did his research, not only assuming the name, but fully inhabiting the character by creating a revisionist narrative of the celluloid version. Though he doesn’t take it at all seriously, he lays the bait for us to—another measure of his villainy—as we scramble to fathom what Geedorah is all about.
For DOOM, it’s all purely metaphorical. “If you really look at it,” he observed, “Geedorah is really stronger than all of them, but he’s still that oddball, you know what I’m sayin’?”2 It’s a telling quote in that the qualities that attracted him to the character in the first place—strength and weirdness—could apply to DOOM himself. Monsta Island connection aside, his whole purpose in developing a new character was to offer a fresh perspective, which he probably did as much for his own entertainment as for everybody else’s.
“Coming from one particular character all the time makes the story, to me, boring,” DOOM explained. “I get that mainly from novels and that style of writing, or movies, you know, where there’s multiple characters to carry the storyline. This way I could come from one point of view, [then] another point of view, and they might even disagree on certain things.”3 This schizophrenic approach put him in a class of his own among MCs since not even Kool Keith rapped in the third person. Now DOOM had the gall to channel a fictional monster. Though a huge departure, to say the least, it was probably only something he could pull off.
DOOM, of course, did nothing for the hell of it, so there were practical considerations behind his decision. Releasing this project under a different alias freed him up from the expectation of carrying most of the lyrical duties, so he could focus more on production. Indeed, of the album’s thirteen tracks, he only raps on five of them—two as MF DOOM—much to fans’ dismay. Following, as it did, on the heels of the Monsta Island release, he showcased group members Jet Jaguar, Gigan, Biolante (Kurious), and Rodan, but also featured several newcomers—including Trunks, who makes a cameo on “Lockjaw,” and Hassan Chop, another New York transplant living in Atlanta, who made his debut on the poignant “I Wonder.” While juggling other projects such as Viktor Vaughn and Mm . . Food, the follow-up to Operation: Doomsday, DOOM proceeded at his own unharried pace. If there was a deadline to turn in the album, someone forgot to give him the memo.
“So, I found a string of emails of me going, ‘Hey man, how’s it going? How are you getting on?’ And then I’d get a one-line email back saying ‘I’m on the road, man, you know? Yeah, I’ll get back to you when I’m back in New York. It’s all coming along great.’ And that was the process—this long gap of me chasing [him],” according to Ashon. “But basically, what then happened was that I would occasionally get a CD-R through the post, just with King Geedorah written on it, in, like, Sharpie, spelled differently every time. Nothing else in the envelope.” The CD-Rs were the cheap kind that cracked easily, and each contained only two or three tracks. Ashon recalls receiving at least three or four of these over the course of about a year and a half.
“I mean it was a short album anyway because I think he kind of ran out of steam on it,” says Ashon, who believes DOOM put the minimum effort into making this album happen. “But the beauty of the Geedorah record was that we put everything that we had on there ’cause that was everything that he gave us.” The final running time clocked in at a spare forty-two minutes, which also meant it fit onto a single vinyl. “To me that felt like the perfect length for an album. That’s the length at which you leave it, and you leave it wanting more,” says Ashon. But it came at a time when most of the artists he dealt with liked to max out their releases, using the full seventy-four minutes that fit onto a CD. DOOM, of course, had to be different.
“I think he just sent me the tracks. I got it mastered. I put it in an order that I thought worked. I sent it over to him and he said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ ” according to Ashon. “I don’t know what he’s been like on other projects, but it never felt like he was completely engaged. And I always felt that was because I was always slightly paranoid that we hadn’t paid him much money and it was just some silly label in England that he wasn’t that invested in it. But maybe he was like this with all the records he made.” The fact that both parties had an ocean physically separating them probably made it feel that way.
Says Ashon, “It was probably one of the most long-distance releases I’ve ever done in terms of the amount of contact I had with DOOM, because he was hard to get a hold of, but that kind of added to the romance for me because it played into the whole kind of the mystery of MF DOOM, you know, the mask and everything.” At the same time, he concedes, “I was always worried throughout the whole time that he was never gonna deliver the record because I always felt like I didn’t really know him. I’d never met him. I don’t think at that point he had a manager, or the manager had changed.” But DOOM wasn’t the type to leave money on the table.
“My favorite story is there’s the line where he says—it’s the end of one of the tracks—but he said something like ‘no homo,’ and I remember being really worried about this, really uncomfortable,” says Ashon. He’s referring to an audio collage at the end of “The Fine Print,” where a voice says, “Are you a homo … we help thousands of homos every month.” DOOM snagged it from a late-night infomercial that actually says “homeowner,” but the last part drops out. “So, I rang DOOM up and said, I’m a bit worried about this,” says Ashon. “And he said, ‘But, Will, it’s a giant three-headed lizard. He’s talking about Homo sapiens. (Cue the laugh track.)’
“And I was like, ‘Oh shit, yeah.’ And that was the moment where I thought, okay, DOOM’s really got into character as a three-headed giant lizard. And when he says this, he means no Homo sapiens. And even if it wasn’t true, just to say this off the bat just seemed so clever and so brilliant to me. I was just like, oh, okay. Yeah, I can live with that.”
“Long story short, the King Geedorah album is from television,” says John Robinson, who was around during its making and saw it all come together. “All the samples are from TV. And creating it was a slow bake.” Sure enough, eight of the album’s thirteen tracks were built on loops from obscure TV themes or movie soundtracks. The cheesy strings from the opener, “Fazers,” for example, came from a porn movie. “An old ass porno with some skinny dude in cowboy boots, like ’79,” according to DOOM, who added, “But right there is that loop with the violins. I’m like, ‘Ooh, that shit is sweet.’ ”4 It was just the kind of syrup that he liked to douse his tracks with. DOOM was gracious enough to give his friend E. Mason the only co-production credit on the album for finding that sample and helping him program the drums beneath it. But lyrically, he owned the track, breaking in his new persona like a pair of sneakers fresh out the box.
King Geedorah, Take me to your leader,
Quick to claim that he not no snake, like “me neither,”
They need to take a breather,
He been rhyming longer than Sigmund the sea creature
Been on Saturday feature,
Pleased to meet ya.
Channeling Geedorah with an arcane reference to a children’s series from the seventies, DOOM’s internal rhyming and alliteration game was just getting started. With deadpan wit and tongue planted firmly in cheek, he offers his revisionist take on Godzilla’s arch nemesis as, “His own biggest fan / And got a fan base as big as Japan.” Despite the big conceit we’re all supposed to swallow, DOOM sometimes blurs the line between personalities, declaring, “Half up front, half upon mastering / Would you like that in cash? / Last thing you should ask the King,” a mantra that he lived by. Regardless, Geedorah bangs harder than some skinny dude with cowboy boots could.
Unfortunately, after such a promising start, the reptilian star of the show returns only twice more—on “No Snakes Alive” and “The Fine Print.” The former track, featuring Jet Jaguar and Rodan, originally appeared on the MF EP (Brick Records, 2000). But DOOM, no doubt, felt that the song’s warped groove that sped up halfway through—lifted directly from a scene from Godzilla vs. Megalon (English dub, 1973)—justified a revisit. All three MCs slay the track with distinctly different styles and flow, but DOOM’s effortless humor always wins the day. He says, “Sort of mellow type fellow / Who sometimes spaz on wife like Othello / Hell no, he won’t use words like Illuminati / Or Gotti or shotty, he might use karate,” slipping out of character again to demonstrate the contradictions in his own personality with a Shakespeare allusion, before declaring that he would never use the clichés that most rappers do.
If Geedorah’s appearances on the album were few and far between, the rapper made only two cameos as DOOM. The lead single, “Anti-Matter,” was the first of two collaborations that he did over his career with the enigmatic Mr. Fantastik. As fiercely private and guarded a person as DOOM, everything we know about this part-time MC comes directly from his rhymes. “I get the cash, take niggas out like trash / Known to stack a mean stash, they used to call me Pure Math / Back in the days, all I did was stay paid,” Fantastik raps over a guitar and bass-driven groove from the Whatnauts’ “Message from a Black Man” (Stang, 1970). Based on his own description—along with other lines like “Feds try to creep me, somehow always miss me”—he comes off like a drug dealer who’s trying to keep his identity a secret, while rapping for the fun of it. Whatever the case, he is obviously the same Pure Mathematics—a righteous Five Percenter name, incidentally—whom DOOM shouted out at the end of “Go with the Flow” and said he had met at an arms deal on “Deep Fried Frenz.” DOOM’s only other cameo is on “The Final Hour,” a forty-nine-second track that samples the soundtrack to Dark Shadows, a popular sixties show that dealt with the supernatural.
Not letting the eerie music go to waste, however, DOOM reprises it on “Take Me to Your Leader,” one of three skits featuring DOOM’s trademark aural collages, constructed of snippets from vintage Merrie Melodies cartoons and Fist of the North Star, a Japanese manga. On “Monster Zero,” he attempts to explain the origin story of King Geedorah via sampled dialogue from the films Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991), Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965), and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) as well assorted bits from The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and CNN. The final collage, “One Smart Nigger,” which reprises the Stone Killer theme (Cinephile, 1973) used on “Lockjaw,” is a darkly comic critique of racism that sounds like it could have been an outtake from KMD’s Black Bastards album.
“It was just ill, you know, where he’s painting these pictures with different vocal samples,” says Robinson. “If you really listen, it’s so meticulous and intentional down to every little word. Like it’s not just, ‘Oh, I just put this on ’cause it’s DOOM talking, and it sounds cool.’ It’s like, no, listen to what he’s saying. ’Cause he’s explaining the mission, you know.” This technique worked well on Operation: Doomsday to define the character of DOOM. In this case, however, those not previously acquainted with the Godzilla franchise might be scratching their heads as to what was going on conceptually with this album.
“It’s like an ongoing process,” said DOOM, discussing his audio collages. “Sometimes it’s months of gathering pieces, you know? Sometimes I leave it alone for a few months and I’ll come back to it and find that one last piece that it needed. I mean when it’s done, I’ll just know it’s done by—it’ll be full. But I could really work on it forever.”5
The label had to push back the release date a couple times because the album just wasn’t ready. When it was finally mastered by Big Dada, DOOM did not approve—twice—finally remastering it himself, which contributed to further delays. King Geedorah / Take Me to Your Leader finally arrived on June 17, 2003, almost two and a half years after its inception.
Though it may have seemed like forever for DOOM to deliver the album, for Ashon the wait was worth it. “It was just brilliant. If you were gonna go gritty, if you were gonna go underground, this was it. This was the real deal,” he says, grateful for the experience of working with DOOM. “It turned out to have been probably one of the most consistently selling records we ever put out. It just went and went. It’s another one of those things that without a huge amount of fanfare we put out and it just rolled and rolled and rolled, you know, which is kind of like the holy grail for any small label—a record that just keeps selling.”
The record did so well that Big Dada wanted to exercise their right, per contract, to option DOOM’s next release as King Geedorah. By that time, however, he had blown up, and wanted much more money, according to Ashon, so a follow-up was shelved. Perhaps that’s another reason why DOOM never again revisited the giant reptile from outer space, who was technically signed to Big Dada. It’s indicative of his mercenary nature to never be too firmly attached to the characters he created. But, at the same time, DOOM’s imagination seemed like a bottomless well at this point, with no shortage of other projects and personas to keep him busy.