One power alone makes a poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision.
—WILLIAM BLAKE
It’s April 30, 2001—Monday night at Fluid, where a voracious crowd of two hundred packs the small South Fourth Street hot spot to see MF DOOM’s first throwdown in the gritty city that birthed another celebrated underdog, Rocky. Metal face gleaming under the lights, he’s ripping it up beside the small DJ booth where Rich Medina and Cosmo Baker, the night’s promoters, hold court. Big Benn Klingon, DOOM’s unofficial manager/hype man, hangs out as well. As DOOM delivers a hype performance, the crowd responds in kind, parroting his rhymes like karaoke. But the show’s flow is marred by a gaggle of hecklers at the back, who start taunting him after the second song. Yo! That shit sucks! Fuck you! Probably just some rabble rousers from neighboring Camden, New Jersey, DOOM ignores them and skates through his set. But the jeering persists. Finally, after about the seventh or eighth song, the Villain has had enough.
“Yo! Stop the music!” he commands in a booming voice of thunder. Turning to Klingon, he points at the hecklers, yelling, “Get ’em!” The former gridiron giant bounds off stage with a quickness that belies his size, beelining toward the offending party as the crowd parts like the Red Sea. An arm the girth of a Burmese python wraps around one of the hecklers’ necks as Klingon wrangles him out of the club. Stunned, the guy’s friends follow, as does OP Miller, Sub Verse’s label manager, who has accompanied DOOM on this road trip. Even DOOM jumps offstage and makes his way outside, but not before stashing the mask in its metal attaché case.
“It’s a mess,” observes Miller. “I get outside. Ben has this dude still yoked up in a headlock, and the dude looks like he’s about to die—like he was basically kinda gasping for air. His boys are starting to come after Ben to try to get him off, and as they come out, DOOM comes outside, and he has the metal attaché case in his hand.” One of the guys instantly runs up on the Villain. “And as he comes,” Miller continues, “DOOM swings up, hits the guy; comes back down, hits him again; and hits him a third time and knocks him out. All the dudes are now just like shook ’cause the one guy’s in the headlock; one guy’s knocked out. They’re all kind of like, ‘What do we do?’ And then finally security kind of comes and starts breaking stuff up.” DOOM and Klingon, meanwhile, hop into the Enterprise rental vehicle and disappear into the night.
“The way creativity works for me, it comes to you like it’s an energy stream or it comes in waves kinda,” DOOM once explained. “So, you just gotta be ready for the wave when it come. And when it subsides and go back, that’s when you step back for a second.”1 Between 2001 and 2005, he was pretty much riding a tsunami of creativity, juggling no less than four albums simultaneously. “I’m constantly working,” he said during that period. “It’s a never-ending battle goin’ on and on and on, unfolding.”2 Yet his well of creativity ran deep, and the fruits of his hustle produced such memorable characters as King Geedorah and, of course, Viktor Vaughn, who were not your average MCs.
“Viktor’s a young cat, maybe he’s 19 or 20 years old,” DOOM explained of his new alias, a sort of prequel to DOOM. “He’s full of spunk type thing and real witty with his. Music is his thing, too. Hip-hop, of course. That’s the one thing all the characters have in common is their love for hip-hop music. So, Viktor he’s more of an MC guy—no real political agenda. In a lot of ways, he’s coming from the same direction as the average cat on the street who rhyme.”3 The character he was describing could have easily been a younger version of himself, with a twist. “How he differs from the average MC, or the average soloist is in the fact that he’s from another dimension totally—like an alternative universe,” DOOM explained quite seriously. “It’s more like, you know, Superman he’s on Earth, but then Bizarro is like Superman’s equivalent in another twisted universe type thing. So, Vik is like from that other twisted universe which is similar to Earth but not quite.”4
Playing off his Marvel alter ego’s origin story, Viktor Vaughn was nothing more than a corruption of Victor Von Doom, who transformed into Doctor Doom when his scientific experiments went awry, scarring his face and forcing him to don the metal suit and mask. In the comic books, the good doctor also invented a time machine, which DOOM incorporated into Viktor’s story, saying he was temporarily Earth-bound due to the machine’s malfunction. To pass the time, he hooked up with some Earthlings and ended up releasing an album—because, what else would a stranded time traveler who was into hip-hop do? Other than such nuances of character, DOOM described Viktor as being a normal fellow, “Into the girls, he’s into just b-boying around. His album is in that field. He drop [lyrics] about high school or, you know, just hanging out.”5 In this regard, he sounded suspiciously like the hedonistic, trouble-prone Bobby Digital alter ego that RZA created in 1998 to channel his younger self’s preoccupation with partying and bullshit.
But coming on the heels of King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn represented the extended rollout of DOOM’s own multiverse. Inspired by the Marvel model where various characters across different stories sometimes interacted with each other, he hatched an ambitious plan to do the same. He signaled as much, as early as the second Fondle ’Em twelve-inch, on which King Ghidra featured on the A-side, “Operation Greenbacks,” while the B-side’s “Go with the Flow” was credited to MF DOOM. He even admitted, “To me, everything just flows better when I got multiple characters portraying the story.”6 Aside from introducing a new persona, the Vaudeville Villain album represented a real departure for DOOM, as the first project that he did not produce. “It was a breath of fresh air to just really be the MC and not the producer this particular time,” he said. “I could concentrate strictly on the rhymes and concepts.”7 As the first fully collaborative project that DOOM ever worked on, it also provided a template for his future output.
The cultural mecca of New York has long been a magnet for art school graduates, but for Max Lawrence and his friends from the Rhode Island School of Design, Philadelphia seemed like the better option. With gentrification gobbling up affordable housing in the late nineties, where else could you rent five thousand square feet for only $1,000 a month? Lawrence and crew established their very own slacker’s paradise on the second and third floors of an old industrial building in Philly’s Chinatown, which they dubbed Space 1026. “We built a gallery and a halfpipe and all kind of lived there. There was just a bunch of us, like straight nerds, you know, and all of our records. And we did monthly shows of people’s artwork and music events and stuff like that,” he fondly recalls. Embodying a staunchly anti-corporate, punk-rock, DIY aesthetic, he credits a similar organization in Providence called Fort Thunder, several of whose members went on to prominence in the art world, for providing the inspiration.
“So, in our DJ crew, we just, like, were super record nerds, like typical DJs, you know, just geeking out on record hunting and that kind of thing,” Lawrence elaborates. It wasn’t long before a friend introduced him to DOOM’s music through the Fondle ’Em singles. Initially, he thought they sounded sloppy and haphazard, but DOOM grew on him—especially after hearing Operation: Doomsday, which he describes as having something earthy, organic, and honest about it.
A painter by trade, Lawrence also dabbled in production on his MPC3000. His musical tastes ran the gamut from hip-hop to punk rock, house, and electronic music, which was experiencing a breakout moment at the turn of the millennium. In 2000, he and several like-minded friends in New York decided to start their own independent record label, Sound-Ink, as an outlet for releasing their own music. Taking a page from progressive UK labels like Warp, they combined hip-hop, electronic, and more avant-garde sounds to create a unique brand of fusion. Two of the label partners, Nat Gosman and Matt McDonald, also produced music, while the third, Alex Threadgold, was about to enter law school. Pooling what limited resources they had, they started putting together a compilation that reflected their cutting-edge, eclectic tastes.
Working as a short-order cook to support himself, Lawrence caught a huge break when fellow RISD grad Shepard Fairey, of OBEY fame, introduced him to street promotions. Fairey had shot to notoriety as a street artist, making former pro wrestler Andre the Giant a cult figure by plastering his image everywhere. Street promotions involved wheat-pasting, a nineties grassroots style of marketing, as well as distributing posters, stickers, and flyers to advertise new albums or club nights. The new gig put Lawrence in contact with many record labels, and he soon worked his way up to becoming a main rep for Philly.
“So Sub Verse was sending us street team stuff,” Lawrence says. “We’re hitting up the old-fashioned record stores, postering, doing sniping, that whole kind of thing. And then I was like, Hey, why don’t you guys have DOOM come up, do a couple in-stores and I’ll set up a show for him.” Through deejaying, he already knew Cosmo Baker, who along with Rich Medina, promoted a popular night at the club, Fluid. Medina had previously partnered with Bobbito Garcia in setting up a short-lived Footworks boutique in Philly. Since both he and Baker were fans of DOOM, they offered to pay him a $1,000 fee to perform.
DOOM’s introduction to Philly was Space 1026, where he met Lawrence on the day of the show. “Everybody who I was associated with, we were just obsessed with him, you know what I mean?” he says. “So, he comes to our art co-op, and everybody was just kind of, like, dumbfounded.” Being in a new environment around people he didn’t know, DOOM acted a bit standoffish at first. His initial reaction was, Like, dude, this shit is weird. But it didn’t take long for him to come around.
“I just think that like, everything was so goofy that was going on, and everybody was such a weirdo that I think he kind of felt like, oh, OK,” says Lawrence, suggesting that the oddball MC probably felt right at home. In fact, he liked it so much he ended up coming back several more times. “I think in Philly he was able to see that it wasn’t just hip hop and indie hip-hop culture that had fallen in love with him,” Lawrence observes, “It was punk rock, it was DIY, it was rock ’n’ roll. Everybody had, you know.” DOOM’s ever-widening exposure was apparently turning him into something of a freak magnet.
After checking out the space, they convened upstairs in Lawrence’s studio, where DOOM’s interest was instantly piqued by the sight of an MPC. “He’s like, ‘You make music?’ And I was like, Yeah, but it’s not good, dude, like, I was just very honest,” says Lawrence. “But I played him this beat and he’s like, ‘Dude, that’s dope!’ This is what DOOM said to me, he’s like, ‘If you keep making beats like this, let’s do an album together.’ And I was like, OK, funny that you should mention this. I’m involved with a record label up in New York.” But they didn’t get too deeply into the subject as the Villain had to go and get ready for his show.
The day after his memorable Monday night performance at Fluid, DOOM and his crew returned to Space 1026 to pick up his fee. Lawrence ended up chipping in an extra $500 of his own money for the Villain to drop some lyrics on that beat he was feeling. But, first, the MC needed a little more inspiration. Though he had demolished his host’s liquor stash the previous night, Lawrence went out and bought him a fifth of Grey Goose vodka and orange juice. Properly lubricated, DOOM started writing:
You need to be careful.
Safety first.
The streets ain’t no joke like that.
You might see him with a small attaché case.
Come out cha neck,
Get caught like … Klaow! Well then, there now.
Blaow, outta nowhere, the dunce couldn’t prepare for how.
Using the previous night’s events as a jump-off, he and Lawrence (aka King Honey) began their first collaboration. A couple of weeks later, DOOM returned with Kurious to add a guest verse, while recording another verse as King Ghidra to complete the track, appropriately titled “Monday Night at Fluid.”
Meanwhile, a skeptical but excited Lawrence couldn’t wait to drop DOOM’s random proposal on his partners at Sound Ink. “I can’t produce enough good stuff,” he told them. “So, I’m like, we need to pull in other producers.” Childhood friend and label partner Nat Gosman, who taught audio engineering at Manhattan’s Institute of Audio Research, was already involved in the production duo known as Heat Sensor (with partner Matt Schmitz). “I mean, basically, when we heard he was interested in doing an album we jumped on it because we loved him,” says Gosman. “But I think at that point he was just looking for as much work as possible. And he knew that the people who loved him were like, you know, underground heads and we were making those kinds of beats and were tied into that community. So, I think it was like a smart business choice from his perspective, ’cause he saw it as a way to kind of build out his listenership.”
But it wasn’t all about strategic thinking, as Gosman adds, “There was like an artistic thing to it, too. I think he sensed that we were kind of doing something a little different and with Viktor Vaughn he could take some risks and get out of the kind of more traditional scope of hip-hop that he had been in. Having said that, I mean, he’s always been really experimental, but he knew that he was gonna get some weird shit from us and we threw a lot of weird shit at him.” With the rest of the Sound Ink team on board—Alex Threadgold, the business guy, and Matt McDonald, who produced under the alias Max Bill—they quickly came to terms with DOOM.
“I just remember him saying like, you know, for this amount, I’ll do an album for you. And we were like, all right, let’s see if we can get that,” says Gosman. “And then we came back to him. We were like, we can do it. We paid him what he asked, and I will say that at the time it seemed reasonable. But like, in retrospect when I look at what a master he was, it was nothing.” DOOM probably understood exactly who he was dealing with and adjusted his expectations accordingly. In any case, the album was never meant to be a proper MF DOOM release, since he produced and rhymed over his own beats and was already working on the follow-up to Operation: Doomsday.
“We really established from the beginning, what was this album, and what was he not willing to give up,” says Lawrence. “And we worked within those confines. There was a clear delineation—DOOM has hooks, Viktor Vaughn does not.” Up front, they also established that the record was to be fully collaborative. “And it was clear to DOOM that everybody who was involved was very much invested in him and we’re not going to just let him sit at home with his Roland VS-880 and send us verses,” Lawrence adds. “It was important that we were all together on these recording sessions.” The fact that he wasn’t toiling alone but had a whole support structure in place—unlike the Geedorah album—obviously appealed to DOOM, who sometimes found it challenging to bring projects over the finish line by himself.
Early on, Threadgold, who was tasked with securing financing for the album, had a chance to see DOOM in action at Lawrence’s studio. “It was DOOM, Benn [Klingon], me, and King Honey,” he says, “and Max was just playing him beats out of the MPC. And he [DOOM] said, ‘I like that one. I like that one. I like that one.’ And he was writing in his notebook. And, so, you can hear like studio banter in there. That whole thing happened in like a four or five-hour window.”
Lawrence spliced together four different instrumentals, including one that sounded like a double-time polka beat, as DOOM worked his lyrical magic: “Rappers be on some you, you, you / Forgot who they talking to, too much pork stew / They need to not come out with nothing new / Blew the whole shit up on some, ‘What this button do?’ ” According to Threadgold, “I just remember being in the studio with them being like, oh my God, this track is amazing, you know? And like literally watching them put it together organically.” Eventually titled “Change the Beat,” it became a bonus track on the Viktor Vaughn album. Meanwhile, their previous collabo, “Monday Night at Fluid,” became a last-minute addition to the inaugural Sound Ink compilation, Colapsus, released in the summer of 2001.
“We just went into mad beat-making mode. I don’t think I’ve ever made as many beats in [such] a short period of time,” says Gosman. “We were just all so inspired by the prospect of making an album with him.” According to Threadgold, “We would compile beats from Max Bill, King Honey, and Heat Sensor, and we would mail CDs to Georgia to DOOM’s place. And he would pick the ones he liked and write to them. And then we would schedule him to come [to NYC]. It was not long after 9/11, so DOOM was too spooked to fly. He wouldn’t fly. So, we would book him on the train, and we would pay for a rental car and Ben would drive him around.
“He had the Viktor Vaughn concept in mind already, but the way it developed, especially the science and science fiction part, was because our guys’ beats were more electronic,” says Threadgold. “He was like, ‘Oh this is some crazy shit.’ This isn’t your nineties hip hop vibe, right, so that lent itself style-wise to this high concept sci-fi stuff. He was like, ‘All right, this fits’ because this is the sound, you know.”
Despite its futuristic beats and sci-fi motifs, the album’s title, Vaudeville Villain, had a nostalgic ring to it—apropos as a prequel to MF DOOM. Though the popular form of entertainment known as vaudeville originated in nineteenth century France, where it connoted musical farce or comedy, on export to America, it gained an association with burlesque and minstrelsy. Any performer from that era was referred to as a “vaudevillian,” a term DOOM obviously corrupted to suit his own needs. Explaining his new alter ego to NPR, DOOM said, “His whole thing is tearing up the MC circuit. Where’s the open mics at? Where’s the little, like, down-low hip-hop clubs. That way, yunno, it ties into the whole title of the album, the Vaudeville Villain, similar to the vaudeville era with burlesque acts, and I kind of made it to where like it’s similar to hip-hop now.”8
As the sole member of Sound Ink who didn’t produce beats, Threadgold settled into the role of helping enable DOOM’s vision. “For Alex, it was like directing a movie,” says Lawrence. “It was DOOM’s plot, you know what I’m saying, but Alex knew how to assist. And the thing that Alex and DOOM had together was comics.”
One of the first things Threadgold did was buy everyone a 1999 Marvel collection called The Villainy of Doctor DOOM, which compiled DOOM’s origin story and his first encounters with the Fantastic Four into graphic novel form. “He builds a suit of armor, but then the last thing, that made no sense that I was dying when I read, was he used special herbs to finish the armor,” says Threadgold. “And, like, a special blend of herbs and armor—that doesn’t make any sense, right? All in this one panel. And I scanned it, and I sent it to everybody. I said, this is amazing. And then that became the Special Herbs concept.” DOOM, in fact, used several panels from the Villainy of Doctor DOOM as covers for the Special Herbs series.
But Threadgold is quick to add, “DOOM brought in all these like comic book, TV show samples that bled into the comic book stuff, you know, he came up with as much comic stuff as we did.” He is referring to old episodes of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four that DOOM compiled on VHS, from which many vocal snippets from the album were sourced.
After the initial sessions in Philly, the focus shifted to Gosman’s Inkonkeysta Studios, located in his Bergen Street apartment in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens. He worked with a simple setup, running the computer-based Cubase program through a digital board, and recording directly onto hard drive. Though he owned some decent microphones, he improvised a vocal booth, hanging heavy army surplus blankets around a small nook in his spare room to create isolation. Over the course of six or seven trips to New York, DOOM would stay for several days at a stretch, allowing him to work on multiple songs while taking care of other business he had in the city.
They usually started sessions in the early afternoon and worked late into the night. “There was a combination of him coming in prepared and then writing rhymes on the spot, too,” recalls Gosman. “Like he was just a prolific writer.” Though DOOM mostly showed up solo, sometimes Benn Klingon or another friend would accompany him. He even brought his son once. “Occasionally, it would just make sense for them to stay over at my place ’cause like, it was big enough that there was space in our living room,” Gosman adds. “We would record, party a little bit, and then record the next day. But I will say that he was like, all business.”
The Sound Ink crew matched DOOM’s commitment to the project every step of the way. Gosman and Schmitz, for example, went to the trouble of recording ambient sounds on the subway for songs like “Lickupon,” to represent Viktor moving through the city. “I felt like we dedicated our lives to that record while we were making it, ’cause we felt we had something special there,” says Threadgold.
Unlike DOOM’s other projects up until then, a real flow of information and ideas characterized this collaboration. “We would like be passing around comic books and like Scientific American magazine,” says Threadgold. “And, like, the way he would sponge ideas out of just our conversations and shit that was lying around was so inspiring. ’Cause there was so many references that were like, you would only get if you were in this space.”
One day, they came across an article about a hypothetical Doomsday scenario involving “grey goo,” a term that referred to self-replicating molecular nanotechnology that could eat everything on Earth if it ever escaped from its holding container and went rogue. DOOM couldn’t resist using it as a double entendre for his preferred brand of vodka. “Keep a liter of vodka inside my locker / Use it like a book on the Grey Goo Scenario,” he says on “Never Dead,” turning an allusion to teen drinking into a heady scientific concept—provided you caught it. Such was the brilliance of DOOM’s wordplay as he stacked levels of deeper meaning into the most innocuous lines, while dropping references that often sailed over everyone’s heads.
In “A Dead Mouse,” he says, “V catch the beat too ridiculously / People think he study levitation’s true mystery / Had a pal named Ed Leedskalin, until he got him for his sweet 16.” The friend in question was a real-life Latvian immigrant (with Latvia probably the basis for Viktor’s fictional homeland of Latveria), who built a castle out of coral in Florida in the 1920s, dedicating it to his lost love, whom he referred to as his “Sweet Sixteen.” When asked how he was able to single-handedly lift and move thousands of tons of material, Leedskalin claimed to be privy to the secrets of the pyramid builders. In just a few lines, then, DOOM was able to give us a peek inside the mind of Vik Vaughn, whose preoccupation with esoteric knowledge mirrored his own interest in the topic.
In addition to giving nerds endless hours of debating the meaning behind his lyrics, and geek out on his obscure references, DOOM’s off-beat flow sounded just as inscrutable. His warped cadence modulated slightly ahead of or just behind the beat in a conversational, almost confessional tone executed with perfect elocution. As if riding a mechanical bull, however, this rhinestone cowboy always managed to maintain control.
“DOOM had this crazy way of recording tracks,” says Threadgold. “He would punch in, like sometimes up to seventeen times in one verse. He didn’t spit the whole verse in a row. He would spit like a couple of bars. And I don’t know if it was like a breath control thing or what, but the thing that was crazy was that it didn’t sound like [he was doing] it. You can’t hear that. It’s very hard to make your voice sound the same when you’re punching in that many times.” DOOM’s monotone may have helped mask the punch-in points, but his real skill was hitting certain pockets that married his vocal to the beat. Unfortunately, this technique also made remixing his stuff very difficult, as the label eventually found out.
“We tried to get some remixes made of the tracks and almost all of them came back and they sounded like shit. And we were like, what’s going on? Why can’t we get a good remix? Everything just sounded off,” says Threadgold. “And my theory was from punching [in] so much, each of those little punches would hit a different pocket on the beat. So even if you were like in the same BPM and theoretically you could take the acapella and line it up, it just didn’t work because he was catching a different pocket every time in the beat.” So, not only was the content of his lyrics unique, but his whole flow sounded incredibly distinctive.
What originally started out as a lark gelled into a powerful piece of conceptual art that bucked convention. Though an excuse for DOOM to revisit his youth and spit the usual shit that other rappers were spouting—albeit with his own eccentric twist—the album probably exceeded his own expectations, thanks, in part, to production that kept him on his toes. Lawrence, as King Honey, produced the more hip-hop-oriented tracks such as “Vaudeville Villain,” “Mr. Clean,” and the bonus track, “Change the Beat.” Gosman and Schmitz, otherwise known as Heat Sensor, were responsible for introducing more electronic elements, as on tracks like “Raedawn” and one of the album’s bangers, “Modern Day Mugging.” Meanwhile, Matt McDonald (aka Max Bill) was credited with some of the more experimental jams like “Popsnot” and “G.M.C.” that proved that DOOM could rhyme over just about anything. In addition, they reached out to RJD2 (Ramble Jon Krohn), a friend of some residents of Space 1026, who was fast making a name for himself in indie hip-hop. He supplied the most conventional beat for the horn-fanfare-driven “Saliva,” which was released as a promo seven-inch on HipHopSite.com. All in all, however, Vaudeville Villain proved an impressive outing for these first-time producers.
Inspired by their futuristic beats, DOOM could focus on his writing, stepping up his pen game. “Viktor the director, flip a script like Rob Reiner,” he says on the title track, capping it with the punchline, “The way a lot of dudes rhyme, their name should be knob shiner.” On that same track he flexed similes like “Hit him straight to the head like Reggie Denny,” referencing the unfortunate white trucker who was dragged from his vehicle and badly beaten up during the 1992 LA riots. But most of the time, DOOM was making hay out of the mundane like Larry David. On “Saliva,” he delivered laugh-out-loud one-liners like “Leave him hangin’, like I ain’t know where his hand’s been.” He also expanded his vocabulary, co-opting one of Joe Biden’s favorites—“malarkey”—and even throwing in a little Spanish at one point, exclaiming, “Ay, caramba.”
But, for a solo outing, Vaudeville Villain also featured no shortage of guests. “We were sitting around and talking about, like, how funny it was when you go [to these open mic events] and MCs are battling,” says Lawrence of a conversation that inspired the album’s two biggest skits. “Open Mic Nite, Parts 1 & 2,” nods at the Nuyorican, where DOOM reintroduced himself to the public, offered a medley of beats and humor—an underground version of the Def Comedy Jams of the nineties. The first part featured host Lord Sear, a regular from Stretch and Bobbito’s radio show, introducing such acts as a fictional, Last Poets–style, conga-playing bard by the name of Brother Sambuca, hilariously played by Benn Klingon. He was followed by real MCs Louis Logic and Rodan (as Dr. Moreau), who ripped the mic over two different King Honey beats.
In “Pt. 2,” Lawrence’s buddy Andrew Jeffrey Wright, a fellow resident at Space 1026, played a stoner poet for comic effect. Underground rapper Creature added some freestyle flavor before DOOM killed it over a soaring Iron Butterfly loop (from “In the Time of Our Lives”). “Local bartenders called him barfly V / He used they CDs as coasters / Harassed their street team and graffitied up their posters,” he says with a nod to his producer’s previous gig. He even evoked legendary Philly rapper Schoolly D (of “Gucci Time” fame), saying, “Lookin’ at my Seiko, it’s about to be Waco / And it won’t be televised, you can make sure.” Both live-action skits—complete with crowd noise and applause—contrasted with DOOM’s usual audio collages that were constructed over months, and in solitude, using found sources. But to illustrate Viktor’s back story, he obviously couldn’t resist mining his VHS archives for snippets from Spider-Man cartoons from the early eighties—specifically the episodes “Cannon of DOOM” and the “Origins of DOOM.”
In addition to these skits, two other tracks featured collaborations. The first, “Let Me Watch,” featuring Queens MC Apani B. (Apani Smith), provided one of the album’s more memorable moments. The poignant piano and guitar loop, sampled from the breakdown in “Sara Lee” (MGM, 1971), by an obscure southern rock band called 6680 Lexington, lent itself perfectly to this relatable tale of love gone sour. Unlike some of DOOM’s more challenging rhymes, it was also possible to follow in real time. What starts off as a promising relationship deteriorates after Viktor disrespects the object of his desire. It’s also an example of DOOM’s self-deprecation at its best, proving he dared go where most rappers wouldn’t.
“We knew he wanted to do a kind of vocal pair up with a female MC,” says Gosman. “And so we made the suggestion, and he was into it.” Lawrence reached out to Apani through Louis Logic, and she was good to go. Though the track played like an intimate conversation between her and Viktor, the two were never actually in the same room during its making, and, in fact, recorded their verses weeks apart.
“It would basically work verse by verse,” says Lawrence, who produced the track. “And then what we ended up doing is, we would leave like 16 bars. We’d be like, all right. So, here’s 16 bars, 16 bars. So, he would record two verses. Then she would record two verses. Then he came back and was like, ‘Oh, hell no!’ You could tell by each verse that got written and then recorded, [that] they keep one upping each other and it took multiple recordings.” All that effort paid off, however, as the song provided not only a clear insight into Vik Vaughn’s motivations, but a unique perspective on the male/female dynamic, not often expressed in the boys’ club of rap.
The label was also working with M. Sayyid (Maurice Greene) of the left-field rap group Antipop Consortium and saw a dream pairing of him and DOOM. After getting the Villain’s go-ahead, Gosman, who produced “Never Dead,” says, “I think maybe DOOM recorded his verse and then I handed it over to Sayyid and then he wrote to it.” Vibing off the eerie strings, DOOM delved into some of his favorite subjects—science and mysticism—as he talked about time travel, weird spells, resurrection, and transfiguration. There’s hardly an album where he didn’t pay homage to his deceased brother, and here he said, “To your health, we rock Chinese slippers / Me and King Gilizwe and two Guyanese strippers” (utilizing the couplet that John Robinson had spied on a sticky note on his studio wall). The lines that follow, “I watched him freeze roaches and bring ’em straight back to life / He used a different approach than I ever read / The only thing he ever said was, ‘The roach is never dead,’ ” also referenced Subroc, who sometimes referred to himself as the Great Roach.
“DOOM was not just a brilliant artist, but like a really good person in my experience. Like I just enjoyed hanging out with him,” says Threadgold. “He was a genuine guy who you could be real with, you know. I wouldn’t say I became close with him, but there was something about him that to me was special. It was a special experience collaborating with him. ’Cause he was just a good guy who I think cared about people and you know, super observant and like had a heart, you know?”
Following more than two years in production, the Vaudeville Villain album was finally released in September 2003. Threadgold was able to strike a deal with Traffic distribution in Massachusetts to press it up and get it into stores. He also forged a relationship with Biz 3, a publicity firm in Chicago, to help promote the record. Since the King Geedorah album had only recently been released, Sound Ink and Big Dada ended up splitting the costs of the publicist—an unconventional partnership that in the long range worked for both projects and DOOM’s benefit. In his glowing Pitchfork review, Rollie Pemberton wrote, “Despite its admittedly slight flaws, Vaudeville Villain goes head-to-head with DOOM’s other 2003 project, King Geedorah’s Take Me to Your Leader, for what stands as the hip-hop album of the year thus far.”9 Forget the year’s chartbusters like 50 Cent, Dipset, or Chingy—the DOOMiverse had supplanted them all, ushering in a parallel dimension of hip-hop.
As an independent release with decent promotion, it sold a respectable twenty to thirty thousand copies, becoming the biggest seller on Sound Ink “by miles,” according to Threadgold. It earned enough to pay back the label’s debts and cover DOOM’s advance and even some additional royalties. The record might have done even better had it not been overshadowed by another one of DOOM’s releases shortly afterward.
Incidentally, unlike Geedorah, DOOM did reprise the Viktor Vaughn character again on VV:2 Venomous Villain (Insomniac, 2004), an album very different from the first. Insomniac, the brainchild of Israel Vasquetelle, a hip-hop deejay from the Bronx who relocated to Orlando, Florida, originally started off as a hip-hop magazine. In an effort to expand into music, Vasquetelle, an MC himself, was able to secure the financing to entice DOOM to do a record.
Produced largely by a crew of unknowns (though Diplo also contributes a track) that included the Analears, DiViNCi, DJ I.N.C., Dub-L, Session 31, Swamburger, and System D-128, the beats are solid head-nodders, featuring scratching by Kut Masta Kurt. DOOM doesn’t exactly phone it in, but only raps for a total of fifteen minutes—half the running time of this short release—giving the impression of an unapologetic money grab. The album’s second track, “Back End,” seems to support this notion as he warns, “Dub it off your man, don’t spend the ten bucks / I did it for the advance, the back end sucks.” Despite the record’s brevity and the fact that it’s hard to find, VV:2 is worth listening to if only to hear the collaboration between DOOM and his spiritual predecessor and doppelganger, Kool Keith, on “Doper Skiller.” This follow-up also put the original Viktor Vaughn album in perspective, highlighting how DOOM, leading a committed cast of misfits, could produce one of his best and most fully realized collaborations.