This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged in what you are doing.…
And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
—ALAN WATTS
DOOM wasn’t the only underground artist to enjoy a breakout year in 2004. In March, the same month Madvillainy dropped, a little-known DJ by the name of Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse) was already whipping up quite a frenzy in the music world with a totally illegal, unlicensed project that almost broke the internet. The Grey Album, his mash-up of Jay Z’s The Black Album (Def Jam/Rocafella, 2003) and the Beatles’ classic White Album (Apple, 1968)—so nicknamed for its plain cover—could be considered the first viral sensation of the millennium. In an era that saw computers beginning to reshape the consumption of music, hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the album for free, in flagrant violation of copyright and intellectual property laws. While Jay-Z may have been flattered to hear the Fab Four backing him, EMI, owner of the Beatles catalog, took the issue a bit more seriously, sending Burton a cease-and-desist letter. Though the naïve and unassuming deejay had never foreseen this donnybrook, his provocative actions nevertheless amounted to a straight-up gangsta move, bound to make any villain blush. It also transformed “Danger Mouse” into a household name overnight.
Prior to his entry on the world stage, the current six-time Grammy winner, who is spoken of in the same breath as the likes of Phil Spector and Brian Eno, seemed an unlikely candidate for super-producer status. Burton had only started dabbling in production while a telecommunications major at the University of Georgia in Athens. Though he had grown up listening to rap, his big revelation in college was sixties rock—bands like the Beatles and Pink Floyd, who had somehow eluded his youth. “Hip-hop was what I knew really well, but it’s not what inspired me to make music,” says Burton. “It was really the older rock stuff I started to hear.”1
A serendipitous encounter with CeeLo Green (Thomas DeCarlo Calloway) at a concert at the university led to his first big break. After passing the Goodie Mob rapper a tape of his beats, which veered more toward trip-hop than rap, they, surprisingly, bonded over a mutual love of Portishead. In fact, Green, who had diverse tastes when it came to music, was at a point in his career where he was branching out beyond rap and contemplating a solo move. He saw something in the untested kid worth taking a chance on, offering him the opportunity to produce his forthcoming album.
What would have been a coup for most unknown artists proved just the beginning for Burton, who agreed to work on Green’s solo project as the rapper’s schedule permitted. In the meantime, however, he made the bold decision to relocate to the UK, since so much of the music he loved originated there. To help support himself, he spent his days bartending at a pub near London Bridge, while working on music at night. Before leaving Georgia, he had started a relationship with the Atlanta-based Cartoon Network, who licensed some of his beats as incidental music between shows. To help supplement his meager income, he maintained this side hustle. While living abroad, the ambitious Burton took full advantage of the opportunity to network, dropping his demos off at different British labels. One eventually bit.
Lex Records was then operating as an offshoot of Warp, the British independent known for its futuristic techno and electronic releases by such boundary-breaking acts as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Squarepusher. The sub-imprint was the brainchild of Tom Brown, a Warp employee and hip-hop head, who initially ran the label’s mail-order and online store, Bleep.com. He had been instrumental in getting New York alterna-rappers Antipop Consortium signed to Warp in 2000, before his bosses gave him the go-ahead to do a series of twelve-inches that they would finance in exchange for half ownership of his start-up. Burton dropped off a bunch of his CDs at Lex. A mash-up that paired the rapping of Brooklyn’s Audio Two with the music of French electronic duo Air was enough to get his foot in the door.
Offered a twelve-inch release, the young deejay originally proposed doing a collaboration with underground Brooklyn MC Jemini the Gifted One (Thomas Smith), of whom he was a fan. A mutual friend, New York rapper J-Zone (Jarret A. Mumford), promised to connect them. Using his small advance, Burton flew to New York to record Jemini, making three tracks together. Released in 2002, the twelve-inch was fairly-well received, leading to an entire album called Ghetto Pop Life the following year. Produced entirely by Burton, it featured cameos by Tha Alkaholiks, J-Zone, the Pharcyde, and Prince Po of Organized Konfusion.
That record marked Danger Mouse’s signing to Lex as a solo artist, for an exclusive five-album deal. It was only fitting that he had borrowed his alias from a popular British animated TV series that ran from 1981 to 1992. Following a two-year stint in England, Burton eventually moved to California, where, serious about pursuing a career in music, he was able to secure the services of a manager. Lex subsequently used Burton’s connections to build up their catalog. They signed Prince Po to do a whole album called The Slickness (2004) on which the deejay acted as executive producer and contributed three tracks. One of those tracks, “Social Distortion,” marked his first collaboration with DOOM. J-Zone, once again, provided the introduction.
“He was like, ‘DOOM’s amazing. You should get DOOM on a track.’ And, you know, we were like, ‘Yeah, but how do we get hold of him?’ He was like, ‘Gimme the money,’ you know, this kinda thing,” says Brown. DOOM had been on the radar of Lex’s head honcho since Operation: Doomsday, and he was eager to work with the mysterious MC. So, the label coughed up their usual fee of $2,000 to $3,000 for his cameo on the album. Burton subsequently tapped DOOM for a verse on a remix of “Somersault” that he did for British trip-hop duo Zero 7.
Meanwhile, Danger Mouse and Jemini’s Ghetto Pop Life, released in September 2003, was moving slowly. “We came up with a kind of plan to keep it going, to kind of try and blow it up,” according to Brown. “And there were like a few points on the plan. And one of them was get a kind of A-list rapper to do a guest verse. And then another was go on tour with a big band. And then another was do a mixtape, and the mixtape we used for an example was NastraDOOMas.” That unofficial release, a mash-up of Nas acapellas over DOOM Special Herbs beats, had been released via HipHopSite.com, run by DJ Mike Pizzo.
Burton, in fact, had already been in touch with Pizzo, who provided him with acapellas from what was billed as Jay-Z’s retirement album, The Black Album. In December 2003, while cleaning his room he came across a copy of The Beatles (aka The White Album), when sudden inspiration struck. For his entire life, the racially ambiguous Burton, both light-skinned and sporting a reddish afro, felt plagued by a nagging dilemma: Black kids weren’t supposed to listen to rock (even though Black artists originally created the music). Yet he knew in his heart that music was colorless, possessing the transcendent power to bring people together. What if he were to combine these two popular albums—made by totally unique artists, eras apart, and aimed at different audiences—to create something that everyone could relate to and enjoy? He considered it both an art project and a personal challenge, but certainly not something he could sell due to the obvious copyright issues. Therefore, he planned to work quickly and not devote too much time to it, though, in the end, The Grey Album took him about two weeks of serious toiling. In February 2004, Lex paid for a pressing of three thousand promo CDs, circulating them among press and media to help jump-start interest in Danger Mouse’s official release. The music was also posted online for free, where it didn’t take long to register a reaction.
“I remember flying to New York to go and see people, probably to go and see Prince Po,” says Brown. “And I had flu, and I was in the Grammercy Park Hotel before they’d done it up. It was still like a big scruffy old shithole. I got to the hotel, and I was feeling really ill, so I stopped to get some flu medicine. I had never had American flu medicine. So, when I sat there like shivering and watching TV, on the news ticker on the bottom of the screen, it was like, ‘DJ Danger Mouse takes Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album,’ you know, it was on CNN somehow. And, like, I thought I was tripping on the flu medicine ’cause it was so strong.” That Danger Mouse had just become the beneficiary of the best viral marketing campaign on the planet, however, proved to be no hallucination.
The caricature of a Jazz Age flapper, Betty Boop may have broken the seal on adult-oriented animation in the thirties. But it took Fox TV’s The Simpsons, first airing in 1989, to create a viable audience for it. Since that time, no other entity has done more to nurture the crucial teen/young adult demographic than Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, a late-night block of original programming for insomniacs. In 1994, Space Ghost Coast to Coast debuted as their first original show, featuring the Hanna-Barbera superhero from the sixties as host of his own late-night comedy/talk show. Then, in late 2000, the network’s head programmer, Mike Lazzo, premiered an entire slate of late-night original shows that could only be described as irreverent, sarcastic, surrealist, and just plain weird. These not-ready-for-prime-time cartoons, including Sealab 2021; Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law; Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and The Brak Show, started winning over a cult audience of dedicated fans.
Jason DeMarco, who had created a block of action cartoons and Japanese anime called Toonami, was senior vice president of Adult Swim on-air when he first met Burton, then a university student. “We were buying songs from people to use in our commercials and promos and packaging. We didn’t have a lot of money, so we were trying to find up and coming beat-makers,” he says. “He would make mixtapes as DJ Danger Mouse, but he also released instrumental hip-hop albums under the title Pelican City that were very Portishead-inspired. And I found one of those CDs at a local record store. And, so, when I was trying to find people to make beats for us, I reached out to him. So, from that point on, he became somebody we worked with a lot,” says DeMarco.
After returning from England, Burton stopped by the Williams Street offices in Atlanta, where Adult Swim was produced, to catch up and discuss some projects. Having just completed The Grey Album, which was not out yet, he was excited to preview it for DeMarco and his boss, Lazzo. “We were blown away,” DeMarco recalls. Burton, then, broached the topic of doing an album with DOOM, using the cartoons from Toonami as a sample source. “And I said, OK, well I don’t know that a Toonami record would make sense, but maybe an Adult Swim one since we have so many Hanna-Barbera characters we’ve repurposed and I know DOOM loves to sample those old Hanna-Barbera, Fantastic Four cartoons,” says DeMarco. “And, so, they were like, ‘How do we do it?’ I said, well, first tell me how much money you need and then let me go to my boss and see if I can somehow convince him this is good marketing for us to be associated with this.”
The idea wasn’t so much of a stretch considering Adult Swim, since its inception, had always featured rap in its shows and commercials. Philly legend Schoolly D had even created the opening theme for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which revolved around a talking hamburger patty named Meatwad, and his sidekicks, Frylock, an order of fries, and Master Shake, who joined forces to solve various asinine capers. A fan of both DOOM and Danger Mouse, Lazzo gave the green light. But releasing an album proved to be an entirely novel proposition for a TV production company.
“Danger Mouse’s manager, Jeff Antebi, said, ‘Well, I think I can set it up with Epitaph. They seem really excited about what an unusual project this is. They’ll promote it. And if you guys will promote it, too, this could be something,’ ” says DeMarco, referring to the punk/post-punk label out of LA. “So that’s kind of how it happened, was really Lazzo being a fan and allowing me the space to say, OK, let’s spend this money and we don’t know what the return is gonna be other than a cool thing. And then Epitaph saying, ‘Okay, yeah, we’ll put it out.’ And they gave us the shittiest record deal ever. We didn’t know any better, and they made tons of money and we didn’t make a dime because we didn’t make a good deal.” DOOM and Danger Mouse made out like villains, however, scoring a $150,000 advance as well as the unique opportunity to collaborate with a popular, rap-friendly cable network.
While the artists had to deduct studio expenses from that fee, the network covered all clearances for cartoons, paying the voice actors, designing the original artwork, and funding the production of two music videos—not to mention free TV advertising. Epitaph handled the manufacture of CDs and LPs and paid for all the regular promotion, including radio. They eventually had to cede world rights (outside of the US) to Lex, who had signed Burton to an exclusive deal. Considering the huge underground buzz behind DOOM and Danger Mouse, the release had strong potential, but, at the same time, nobody knew for sure what the reception would be.
Both artists came to the DangerDOOM project with their own motivation and agendas. “I kind of had the idea of taking like the coolest most underground kind of MC that’s basically kind of out right now—credibility-wise—and just kinda seeing what would happen if we did the most silly pop thing that we could do,” says Burton. “And we got mixed reactions out of the whole thing and never really told people we were approaching it that way.”2 DOOM, on the other hand, admitted, “The one thing that really made me do that project was basically because of the bread. It had nothing to do with the music really. I know [Danger Mouse] is a good dude, everybody got beats and shit, but what about the bread? He had a good strategy for getting bread and we made bread, so it was a good thing.”3
But DeMarco, who acted as a kind of A&R on the project, had broader concerns. “The whole question was, can we do this album and not have it be corny because, essentially, it’s a commercial for a TV network, you know? It could be looked at that way,” he says. “And I knew that DOOM was a real cartoon fan and so was Brian so that it came from a place of actual appreciation. And, so, it wasn’t a money thing, although DOOM, in later years, did talk shit that it was for money. But I think he was just bitter ’cause we weren’t talking.”
The Adult Swim exec recalls his first encounter with DOOM—soon after the deal was completed—when the rapper was singing a different tune. The meeting took place at an apartment DOOM rented in the U-Haul Lofts in Midtown Atlanta—incidentally, the same building where DeMarco’s boss lived, but two floors below. Apparently, the Villain, whose main residence was in Kennesaw, only stayed there when he had business in town, as evidenced by the ratty, secondhand couch that comprised the apartment’s sole piece of furniture. Curiously, the only thing adorning the walls was a periodic table of elements, while DOOM’s preferred reading material—Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Allusions, The Dictionary of Clichés, and Depraved and Insulting English—lay stacked on the floor.
“We sat down, and he just talked about how excited he was about the project,” says DeMarco. “But really beyond that, he just wanted to talk about cartoons. He talked mostly about Scooby-Doo, Fantastic Four. He talked about his favorite Adult Swim shows. He wasn’t really like let’s sit down and I’ll tell you all my ideas about the album. It was literally just like wanting to talk about cartoons as a fellow person who loves cartoons. He just was very sweet. And you could tell, he was genuinely a person who was madly in love with cartoons and that they had meant a lot to him, his whole life.” They also shared a bonding moment over a mutual love of Pink Panther cartoons.
While DOOM may have been conducting a charm offensive for the guy writing the checks, he also ended up putting in his fair share of work for this album. “Usually, I wasn’t up all-night watching cartoons and shit until that project came into view,” he said later. “I had to really watch the shows and get the Adult Swim thing and get current references and see what the viewers of the show liked, get a feel for it. A lot of research was done.”4
The next time they met, it was so DeMarco could take him to the studio for his first recording session with Danger Mouse and another voice actor. Arriving at nine in the morning, he had been instructed to bring along a six-pack of Heineken. But DOOM, on rap time, only bothered answering the door an hour later. Then they headed over to an audio-post facility called BAIR Tracks. “When you hung out with him, you felt weirdly like both, you didn’t know him, but you also knew him for twenty years at the same time—it’s hard to explain,” says DeMarco. “When he felt comfortable with a group of people, when he felt understood, and was doing something he was interested in, he was relaxed. He was just drinking his beer, making jokes, telling stories about growing up in New York, you know, whatever wild stories, and laughing with Danger Mouse. It was, like, very relaxing. And then he was only there for like four hours, ’cause you could never keep him anywhere for very long.” During that first session he laid down vocals for two or three songs.
The two artists completed their initial push on the album after only three weeks before going their separate ways. Burton continued to work on it back in California, while DOOM returned to whatever was on his plat du jour. “Then the longest part was actually like five months because we had to get Talib Kweli, we had to get CeeLo. Like, all those guest verses were not planned out,” according to DeMarco. “And then DOOM needed to come back in and tweak his verse based on what the other person did. So, it was kind of a decent amount of back and forth. Everything else, the sampling, the clearing of the samples, the deals with all the guests, recording them, Brian was in charge of all that. DOOM was gone once he did his [vocal] part.”
Talib Kweli, with whom DOOM had just completed a US tour, appeared on “Old School,” an up-tempo track driven by the horn fanfare from Keith Mansfield’s “Funky Fanfare” (KPM, 1968). Keeping with the album’s cartoon theme, he raps, “Maybe I’m trippin’ and it’s just a cartoon to you / But I got chills when I heard how DOOM flipped the Scooby-Doo / And I might be buggin’ but it seem to me / That cartoons be realer than reality TV.”
Burton brought in his other collaborator, CeeLo Green, to sing the hook on “Benzie Box,” a straight up pop rap, in which he name-drops DOOM again. Trading some of his instrumental beats for verses, DOOM was able to wrangle a guest appearance from Ghostface on the track “The Mask.” This initial collaboration would not be their last, fueling feverish anticipation of a DOOMStarks project that, unfortunately, would never materialize during DOOM’s lifetime (and has yet to be released).
While originally dangling access to the Hanna-Barbera catalog before the artists, Cartoon Network had to walk that back since they were not authorized to do so. They ended up focusing on Adult Swim shows instead. “Mostly, they used a lot of existing samples, but then they said, ‘We’d love Brak to do an intro to the album. We have an idea about Master Shake being mad—he wasn’t called to be on the album,’ but they didn’t tell them what to say,” says DeMarco. “And, so, the actors would go in and I directed them, and they would just ad-lib, you know, they would just riff and see what would come up. And then we gave all of that to Brian and let him figure out what he wanted to use.”
While many Adult Swim characters showed up on the album’s interstitial skits, three songs in particular—“Perfect Hair,” “A.T.H.F.” (Aqua Teen Hunger Force), and “Space Ho’s”—were dedicated to actual shows. In fact, DOOM subsequently scored a recurring voice-actor role as Sherman the giraffe on the show Perfect Hair Forever, about a young boy on a quest to address his premature balding (incidentally, a perfect match for DOOM, who constantly made light of his own hair loss). “Space Ho’s” was a riff on Adult Swim’s first superhero star, Space Ghost, whom DOOM tried to displace as the host of his show Coast to Coast. The hilarious crime-fighting trio from Aqua Teen Hunger Force—Meatwad, Frylock, and Master Shake—probably made the most appearances, but unless one was a regular viewer of these shows, which aired during the wee hours, a lot of the puerile humor felt like in-jokes. A perfect example was the song “Sofa King,” based on a gag from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, where the characters instruct the listener to say “I am Sofa King, We Todd Ed,” really fast. As novel an idea as the record may have been, it still seemed like its appeal might be limited to a very niche audience.
Meanwhile, back in London, Tom Brown was managing the tremendous response to The Grey Album. He sent a copy to Damon Albarn, the former lead singer of Britpop superstars Blur, who had recently struck gold with his new outfit, Gorillaz. This virtual band, made up of characters drawn by cartoonist Jamie Hewlett of Tank Girl fame, sold a staggering seven million copies of their self-titled debut in 2001. Using a revolving cast of real musicians, Albarn co-produced the album with Dan “the Automator” Nakamura of Dr. Octagon fame, combining dub, trip-hop, Latin, alternative rock, and pop into the perfect cocktail for mass appeal.
Immediately impressed by Burton’s unlikely mash-up of rap and vintage rock, Albarn wasted no time drafting him to help him write and produce seven tracks for the upcoming Gorillaz record, Demon Days (Parlophone, 2005). The former rocker’s influence also helped defuse the situation with EMI, who had originally disapproved of his new collaborator. Though Burton already had his hands full with DangerDOOM and CeeLo’s project, he could not turn down such an amazing opportunity. He, in turn, brought DOOM in to do a guest verse on the track “November Has Come.” Upon its May release, Demon Days cracked the top ten in twenty-two countries on its way to selling eight million copies worldwide.
“Danger Mouse by 2005 was easily one of the hottest artists in the world, in terms of everybody wanted to work with him,” says Brown. “He did The Grey Album and got a huge amount of profile from that, you know, GQ Man of the Year and all sorts of stuff, and then he produced the Gorillaz album, which is still the biggest Gorillaz album. I think 2005, his manager also leaked the demo for ‘Crazy,’ and the demos got picked up on UK radio and got a bunch of plays and, you know, it all became exceedingly hot.”
The aforementioned track, from his pending release with CeeLo, did not officially see light until March 2006, but it became the first song in the UK to go number one based solely on downloads, according to the BBC. Since Burton had blown up in the interim, the proposed solo CeeLo project morphed into a collaboration called Gnarls Barkley. Their album, St. Elsewhere (Downtown/Atlantic/Warner Bros., 2006), three years in the making, became a worldwide smash thanks to the hit “Crazy” and was quickly certified platinum following its release.
Where did all of this leave the DangerDOOM project, which was still in production while all of the above was happening? Obviously, both artists were exceedingly entrenched in building illustrious solo careers, with hardly a timeout to catch some air. But when The Mouse and the Mask dropped on October 11, 2005, it charted at number forty-one on Billboard’s Top 200 albums. Sales-wise, it upstaged Madvillainy, DOOM’s previous top-seller, moving 350,000 units. The Villain had finally broken into the mainstream, but in the strangest of ways. Clinging to the coattails of a previous unknown, he was suddenly catapulted into being the flavor of the moment.
Cartoon Network could not have been happier with their beginner’s luck. “When I heard it, I was like, oh my God, I think they’ve actually done it,” says DeMarco. “This feels like Adult Swim, but it feels like DOOM. It feels like a synthesis of those two things, and it works, like, it makes sense. It’s DOOM, stretching himself to fit what we do. And it’s us coming to meet him where he is. And it doesn’t feel like any other DOOM record. And it also doesn’t necessarily feel just like Adult Swim. It was a synthesis of the two things. So, I was shocked that they pulled it off.”
Yet, despite the encouraging numbers, the record didn’t remotely approach the response to The Grey Album or Gorillaz, and reviews for it were mixed. Mainstream outlets like Entertainment Weekly, which had never reviewed a DOOM record, and, therefore, had no context for it, were wowed by the novelty and humor, calling it a “hip-hop tour de farce.”5 Usually a bit more critical, Pitchfork gave it the benefit of the doubt, saying, “DOOM and Danger go all out, calling in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force to help craft the best funhouse hip-hop since De La Soul Is Dead. It may not move the critical masses like Madvillainy, but if nothing else, DangerDOOM will get Comic-Con going nuts.”6 Spin, most likely, captured how many hardcore DOOM fans felt about the record: “If expectations are just disappointments waiting to happen, DangerDOOM is a white-hot flame of anticipation fated to sizzle your rap lovin’ heart to a bitter char.”7 An “ouch” moment, to say the least.
In fact, it’s fair to say that all three publications were in the ballpark. The Mouse and the Mask might not be considered a bad album by any stretch, but coming on the heels of records like Madvillainy and Mm . . Food, it sounded more like hip-hop lite. Staying close to its cartoony concept, the music was much more whimsical, with much of DOOM’s inner darkness excised. After all, Burton had no pretensions of being a Miles, but rather more mainstream like Kenny G. As he told filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, “I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn’t interest me as much.”8 His collection of Grammys attests to that assertion.
DOOM, on the other hand, couldn’t be mainstream if he wanted to. But as reigning champ of the underground, he had no place left to go but up. This collaboration gave him the boost he needed to finally break the surface and garner recognition that was long overdue. Yet he seemed to somehow resent the attention this record, and Danger Mouse, received, privately complaining to friends about why and how it had been so successful compared to his other material. His response was to step back for a minute and not release another album until 2009. Though one might have expected a follow-up, he and Danger Mouse did collect outtakes from the project, along with a Madlib remix, to release an EP called Occult Hymn (Adult Swim, 2006).
The Villain received more than just mainstream recognition from the DangerDOOM project. An unforeseen windfall turned out to be the rapper’s continued association with Cartoon Network, who approached him with further opportunities over the next several years. “So, then we came back to DOOM and said, ‘Yeah, we want to do another record with you,’ ” says DeMarco. “Because Brian was at that point, he was working with CeeLo on Gnarls Barkley and Broken Bells and he was already starting to blow up. So, we knew that Brian couldn’t be involved, but I said, DOOM makes his own beats. So, we made a deal with him for another album.” DeMarco’s plan was to legally acquire access to the Hanna-Barbera catalog. This time, however, the network only coughed up a $45,000 advance.
DOOM also approached them for other work. According to DeMarco, “He always said, ‘If you ever need a voiceover, don’t hesitate to call me.’ So, when Perfect Hair Forever was like, ‘We need a rapper, we need a character. Who’s a rapper? Who’s got a great voice?’ I said, Well, we should try calling DOOM. He might be into it. And I gave them DOOM’s number. They got him in, and he was a recurring character.” For someone so obsessed with cartoons since his youth, it was undoubtedly a benchmark of his creative career when he made his TV debut as Sherman the giraffe.
Pretty soon, DOOM started cropping up all over the network. When The Boondocks, a show about a black family living in the burbs, premiered on Adult Swim at the end of 2005, they licensed four tracks from Madvillainy. Then, when the network was looking for someone to host its Christmas programming block in 2006, DeMarco recommended DOOM as well, since he knew the rapper needed money. “DOOM said, ‘I’m down,’ because we had to shoot it at night,” says DeMarco. “He said, ‘That works great for me. I stay up all night, anyway.’ He’s like, ‘As long as there’s beer, I’ll come down and do whatever you want.’ So, we had a bunch of beer, filmed it at Williams Street [studios] and he got paid for that and he had a blast. We just basically let the camera roll and shot him for six hours.
“And then I think the only other thing we had DOOM do was ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” DeMarco adds. “We had him do a version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ that we signed off the network with every night. That was Lazzo’s idea. He was like, ‘We should get DOOM to do the Star-Spangled Banner.’ And I was like, I’ll ask him. And he said, ‘Yeah, gimme ten grand and I’ll do it.’ So, we paid him and got a version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ that we ran for about a year.”
When it came time for the 2006 upfronts, the annual preview party of new network shows staged for advertisers, DeMarco thought it made sense to have DangerDOOM perform, since their well-received album had only been released the previous year. Both artists agreed to do it. “And then Danger Mouse called me and said, ‘Well, DOOM’s got this idea. It’s kind of crazy, but he wants us to give him money to make like a DangerDOOM outfit and he’s gonna wear the actual outfit to perform in.’ ” Though an odd request, for sure, DeMarco signed off on it, and DOOM worked on the design with a costume maker in New York. After a fitting, he sent photos to DeMarco, who described him as looking like a “team mascot”—basically a giant mouse with his own version of the metal mask.
The day before the event, which was held in New York, DOOM didn’t show for rehearsal. “Brian’s like, ‘He never shows for rehearsal, he’ll be here,’ ” says DeMarco. “And then a couple hours before the show, the day of, Brian’s like DOOM has some idea that he wants to have his friend—he didn’t say who his friend is gonna be—in the costume, but he knows all the songs and DOOM’s gonna be backstage rapping live and his friend is gonna be pantomiming. It’s gonna look like it’s DangerDOOM.” As if to underscore that this last-minute plan was not up for negotiation, he also mentioned that DOOM was feeling a little under the weather and didn’t want to be jumping around onstage in a hot, furry suit. “I remember them saying, ‘When we get there, he needs to have orange juice and aspirin.’ Probably he was just hung over,” says DeMarco. “So, he gets there, and they did a song or two before everyone got there, just to see. And I remember thinking, like, maybe it’ll work. I remember I was trying to be hopeful, like, maybe they’ll pull it off. It’s a cool, weird idea, you know? It’s a little bit of a performance-art type approach, but maybe he’ll pull it off.”
That evening the place was packed with twenty-something ad buyers, who were getting loose at the open bar, and enjoying themselves. Familiar with the popular album, they were excited to be privy to what would be the first-ever performance by DangerDOOM. “And then he comes out, or his friend comes out, and it goes off the way he wanted it to. But literally the show ends, and I remember thinking, well, that wasn’t so bad. That was kind of cool,” says DeMarco. “But right next to me was a guy who was like, ‘That wasn’t fuckin’ DOOM.’ And, like, I knew right then and there.… I was just telling myself it was okay. And then all my bosses were like, ‘What the fuck was that? All the ad buyers are talking about that wasn’t DOOM. What the hell was that?’ And, so, I got in trouble, a decent amount of trouble.” But it wasn’t the last time DeMarco would stick his neck out for DOOM, and it was only the beginning of the notorious DOOMbot saga.