You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
—RAY BRADBURY
By the end of 2005, DOOM had surpassed even himself—orchestrating not only his reinvention as an MC, but affecting a full-scale transformation. Like his larger-than-life namesake, he no longer seemed mortal. Following a near exile from the rap game, he had rebuilt himself like the Six Million Dollar Man, returning better, stronger, and more popular than ever, thanks to an incredible run of releases in the early aughts. But after attaining a level of peak exposure, he also felt like he had earned a break. Reflecting on this juncture of his career, he told the Red Bull Music Academy:
I just kinda took some time off, really for family, and like just to get away from it for a second. It started being where, yunno, I don’t necessarily want to be doing one thing for too long. It gets to where it gets boring and overwhelming. You want to take a step back and just reflect, so it was really like that kind of thing. I didn’t think it was noticeable from the outside, though. I figured there was enough work out there for people to still absorb, yunno, and it comes to a point where I need to get more information to study. To give out information, I need information, so I would do things like leave it alone for a second and just observe the world, so I have more things to say. I think a lot of times people expect us to be constantly talking and I’m the kind of cat, I’ll lay back, you know what I mean? And the conversation ain’t always about what I gotta say. Sometimes it’s time to listen. So that was more like the listening time.1
Though he may have taken a step back from writing and production, this period of self-imposed obsolescence did not apply to getting money, a perpetual driving force—especially as his family was expanding with a new son and daughter. Once again, Danger Mouse came through for him.
In the wake of his unprecedented success co-producing the second Gorillaz album, the label Lex, to which he was signed as a solo artist, suddenly lost their deal with parent company Warp. In an additional twist, EMI, who had initially gone after the creator of The Grey Album, ended up releasing Gorillaz in the UK, and was now trying to sign Gnarls Barkley, his collaboration with CeeLo. Lex boss Tom Brown, who was doing his best to make sure his label didn’t get lost in the shuffle, was understandably vexed that a major was trying to poach one of his artists. He immediately got on the phone to set up a meeting with the head of EMI, Keith Wozencroft, the man responsible for signing Radiohead.
“He was like, ‘Look, we are gonna help market the Gnarls Barkley record for you and we’ll pay your overhead. And in return, we’re the first label that you come to when you’ve got a big record,’ ” recalls Brown. “So, what they’re trying to do was like, you know, ‘This guy, Tom Brown, found one Danger Mouse, if he finds another one, we’re all gonna be rich kinda thing.’ And, so yeah, I was like, cool, you can pay my overhead. And I didn’t really have any intention to licensing much stuff to anyone anyway.” At the very least, he had saved his label.
Though Gnarls Barkley eventually got picked up by Warner Bros., Burton, who had caught wind of Lex’s new arrangement with EMI, phoned up Brown to see about getting a deal on behalf of DOOM. It made perfect sense to Brown, who went back to Wozencroft and made his pitch, citing the banner sales of The Mouse and the Mask and DOOM’s involvement with Gorillaz. “I was like, ‘Look, I really wanna sign this guy DOOM. He’s got the potential to be a really huge artist if EMI gets behind him,’ ” he says. “And they’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ Back then, you know, I mean, I dunno what their finances were like, but obviously not great ’cause they got bought and sold and flipped and shut down and torn to pieces at the end. But they certainly were acting like they had shitloads of money.”
Negotiations proceeded between lawyers for both parties. According to Brown, “So, you know, we’d get a message back from DOOM’s lawyer going, ‘Yeah, that’s not gonna cut it we need more money,’ and then I’d go, ‘Oh, they need more money.’ And then they’d [EMI] go, ‘Okay, we’ll beat that.’ And they just kept on going until it was a really substantial deal.” While not quoting a precise number, he says the deal ended up in the “large six figures.” DOOM, who officially joined the Lex roster in early 2006, was finally pulling in the kind of money he deserved.
Brown didn’t even meet his new signing until sometime in 2008 during a trip to Georgia, when DOOM’s first record for Lex, Born Like This (2009), was almost done. He had also come to see Khujo from Goodie Mob, who was working on another project for Lex with producer Jneiro Jarel. Both meetings, coincidentally, took place at sports bars, only a day apart, but they could not have been more different. When Brown showed up for the first, he found Khujo, his large frame covered in tattoos, with a braided head and mouthful of gold fronts, holding court among a crowd of twenty to thirty patrons, looking every bit the local superstar and relishing all the attention.
“And then the next day I went to another sports bar to meet DOOM,” says Brown. “And I walked in and him and Jasmine were sitting like eating shrimp with just rows of vodka shots—I think it was vodka—like some of them drunk, some of them not, and watching sports on TV, you know, like one o’clock in the afternoon or something.” Despite selling hundreds of thousands of records and appearing on Adult Swim and magazine covers, none of the other patrons were the wiser, and the Villain clearly appreciated the anonymity. Brown only knew he had found his man by DOOM’s shit-eating grin, which he said reminded him of another popular villain, Tony Soprano.
“DOOM was like an incredibly intelligent, really charming, funny, super talented guy, and he also had other qualities that were, um, less appealing,” says Brown, who managed to develop a good rapport with the rapper over the years. “I think he would justify things in ways that were often, you know, seemingly hard to understand. But I sometimes think some of those things were like post rationalizations. I think the ‘robots’ as he called them, you know, like sending out imposters at shows, that was not designed as part of an elaborate art project that he was masterminding that would all fall into place for his audience eventually. That was DOOM not wanting to do live shows, but still get paid for them.”
Prince Paul, who had always maintained a close relationship with DOOM, fulfilling the role of mentor/confidante, adds confirmation. “When he did the DOOMposter thing, he called me up,” he recalls. “He’s like, ‘Yo, Unc, I can’t do these gigs, but there’s all this money out there. So, I’m thinking about, you know, putting out like somebody in the mask so I could get paid.’ I’m like, Yo, you buggin’. He was like, ‘Yo, yo, yo! But, you know what I’m saying? ’Cause I can’t be at these places.’ I was like, good luck. And then next thing you know, it became a thing.”
As doing live shows became more lucrative, the Villain was looking for ways to exploit the many offers that came his way. But to even dare sending out imposters was a totally unprecedented and next-level scheme. As he told Rolling Stone later on, in his defense, “Everything that we do is villain style. Everybody has the right to get it or not. Once I throw it out it’s open for interpretation. It might’ve seemed like it didn’t go well, but how do you know that wasn’t just pre-orchestrated so that we’re talking about it now? I’ll tell you one thing: People are asking more now for live shows and I’m charging more, so it must’ve worked somehow.”2 After all, he had always maintained that Anybody in here could wear the mask and be the Villain.3 But as DOOM obsessively cultivated a mystique around his assumed persona, in many ways, he morphed into that character, often blurring the distinction between truth and propaganda.
“I think that my understanding is that DOOM was quite ill when he first did it and had committed to a bunch of shows,” says Brown. “But I think that was quite a big problem and it defined a lot of the later years of his career where, you know, he’d kind of burned a lot of fans and turned a lot of people off him and kinda squandered a lot of goodwill.”
Whether art project or shameless money grab, DOOM can’t assume full credit for the infamous DOOMbots, which initially started proliferating concert stages around 2006 to 2007. According to the website Comic Book Resources:
First introduced in 1962’s Fantastic Four #5 (by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby), the Doombot is the standard in terms of henchmen for Doctor Doom. While his first prototype was more akin to a Life Model Decoy than anything else, various iterations over the years have culminated in the quintessential killer robot. Doombots are also more than just super strong steel cans—they are also capable of fooling most telepaths into believing they are genuine human beings at first glance. This coupled with their ability to disguise themselves as needed makes them the perfect choice for almost any scenario Doctor Doom might find himself in.4
Since only a dedicated Marvel fan would be familiar with the arcane Doombots, DOOM had stumbled upon another brilliant conceit. Even when the issue became a lightning rod of controversy, he didn’t try to shirk responsibility, but owned it, doubling down on his position in defiance of critics and upset fans. His willingness to do so was totally consistent with his desire to always define the narrative when it came to himself as an artist.
Even before the controversy erupted, DOOM had flirted with such hijinks as sending a masked Big Benn Klingon in his stead for photoshoots, such as the infamous 2005 cover shoot for Elemental Magazine. In that same issue, he taunted readers with a letter to the editor: “Question: Is that the real MF DOOM on the cover photo? Answer: Yes. The part of DOOM was played by Big Benn Klingon, Don King. Still confused? Well you needn’t be. It’s rather simple, actually the legendary MC MetalFace DOOM, The SUPERVILLAIN, is one of many characters invented by myself, Daniel Dumile, author. If you will, think of each record as a book with different chapters often made for words expressed for a whole host of characters.”5 He drew a fitting analogy to the Batman film franchise in which various actors had portrayed the Caped Crusader over the years. But sending in a proxy for a photoshoot was a far cry from trying to fool a live audience of paying customers, which for a DOOM show, usually numbered in the thousands by then.
The DOOMbots seemed to show up with increasing frequency during the summer of 2007 at shows that DOOM performed as part of the Rock the Bells festival. Some attendees of his July 29 performance at Randall’s Island in New York accused him of lip-synching, though he clearly wasn’t (with the mic pressed up to his mask, it’s near impossible to see his mouth moving, but the sound confirmed that the mic was live). This criticism, however, followed him to the West Coast when he performed in San Bernadino on August 11, LA on August 12, and San Francisco on August 15. The lip-synching claims persisted, but, at this last date, at a club called the Independent, fans claimed that the person who showed up onstage wearing the mask was thirty to forty pounds lighter than DOOM, recognizable by his distended belly. Apparently, he performed only a handful of songs before abruptly ending his set, exiting to boos and bottles of water flung after him. Though booked for the following night, as well, that show was canceled along with the rest of the dates of his tour. The Independent’s owner, Allen Scott, later said that DOOM’s booking agent had told him that “it was some sort of circulatory problem where his feet were swollen.”6 Such symptoms would be consistent with gout, diabetes, or heart or kidney disease, and if that were the case, it proved to be the first indication of DOOM’s mounting health issues, also confirming Brown’s explanation for the rise of the DOOMbots.
There were other occasions, however, where DOOM seemed to be testing the limits of what he could get away with. Later that year, at a December 13 show in Atlanta’s MJQ Concourse, a club where he had previously performed, a masked figure took the stage with his entourage and proceeded to lip-synch through a twenty-minute set. The crowd, who had paid the thirty-dollar admission fee, could instantly see through the obvious charade, and booed him offstage. But not before the imposter and his crew absconded with all the door receipts. Promoter Randy Castello was so incensed that he posted DOOM’s phone number and address in a MySpace bulletin, encouraging people to contact the rapper directly if they wanted a refund of their money. He also posted pictures of local DJ WESU next to photos of the masked pretender, and the identical birthmark they had on their hands seemed to confirm that the suspicions were true. Despite the lost income and his frustration at having been hoodwinked, Castello could not help but be somewhat impressed by the caper, saying, “I think it’s brilliant that he’s going so far as to send out impersonators to do his dirty work. I just don’t like being on the receiving end of a joke.”7 Many fans would concur, and have continued the debate on YouTube and Reddit, thus contributing to the Villain’s legend.
The DOOMbot scandal, as anyone who paid to see a DOOM show would frame it, came to a head during his tour with Mos Def, years later. At a show at Chicago’s Congress Theater on February 13, 2010, documented by several videos on YouTube, it was clearly apparent that whoever was wearing the mask was lip-synching to a CD (since the sound, including DOOM’s voice, had a very canned quality). While the controversy clearly downgraded the rapper’s soaring stock, DOOM, in a weird way, seemed not to care—even deriving some bizarre thrill out of it. Perhaps it was his way of rebelling against the newfound attention coming his way. Ever since the KMD days, he had never felt comfortable with fame, so hiding his face offered a solution. But, in an ironic twist, the mask had taken on an identity of its own. In this respect, DOOM obviously felt justified deploying his bots—especially since he never left money on the table.
Impressed by his execution of the daring ploy, Prince Paul called DOOM up to offer his congratulations. “They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, which I think there is in some ways,” he says. “But in his case, even though you had some people complaining, it made other people want to go out to see if it would ever be him.” DOOM’s calculated risk actually paid off, then, as attendance to his shows thrived during this period. It’s as if the Metal Face was made of Teflon.
His first major release in four years, Born Like This represents a real departure from DOOM’s previous solo efforts, while tracking his growth and maturity as an artist. Flush with funds and no other competing projects on his plate (aside from, maybe, his ongoing collaboration with Ghostface and the almost mythical Madvillainy sequel), he was able to really dive in and devote his full attention to it like no other project before or since. At the same time, he had attained a level where he could draw on all kinds of assistance from collaborators old and new. On production, for example, he gets help from Dilla, who provides two tracks (arranged via Stones Throw); newcomer Jake One, who contributes four (arranged via Rhymesayers); as well as another one from Madlib. Unlike DOOM’s usual gritty fare, these songs sound polished and radio friendly, signaling a definite upgrade in his overall aesthetic. To get around paying for samples, several songs are also supplemented by live instrumentation courtesy of G Koop (Robert Mandell) and Mr. Chop (Coz Littler), who gets several co-production credits.
But DOOM doesn’t abandon the old playbook entirely. He recycles three previously released beats from the Special Herbs series, leaving the total number of new songs at just seven. Of these, “Bumpy’s Message” is not even a track, but an answering machine message from rapper Bumpy Knuckles (aka Freddie Foxxx) backed by a live bassline—a recurring motif, played by Mr. Chop. “Thank Yah,” the album sign-off, also reprises the same “Coca Leaf” beat (from Special Herbs 9&0) as the “Supervillain Intro,” based on an uplifting gospel loop from Bishop Eric McDaniel and The Lord’s Church Cathedral Choir.
Lyrically, too, DOOM features more cameos on this album, tapping some big names, including Wu-Tang’s Ghostface and Raekwon. “Angelz,” his duet with Ghost, had previously appeared on the Nature Sounds compilation Natural Selection (2006), but he adds a drum track to it for the album version. DOOM had traded beats for verses with Ghost. Then in February 2006, he announced on MySpace that an entire project with Ghost, tentatively titled Swift & Changeable, was in the works, though the project’s release date kept being pushed back.
Raekwon gets a solo feature on “Yessir!,” based on the old-school break from ESG’s “U.F.O.” (99 Records, 1981). So does longtime DOOM contributor Empress Stahhr, on “Still Dope,” a vocal treatment of the “Passion Flower” instrumental (from Special Herbs 9&0), which is based on elements from Arthur Verocai’s “Seriado” (Continental, 1972). The posse cut, “Supervillainz,” reunites DOOM with his old buddy Kurious, featuring as well Slug from the Rhymesayers crew; Mobonix, a member of DOOM’s Metal Face Akademy, a short-lived side project involving several Atlanta-area MCs; and a special appearance by Posdnuos of De La, credited as P-Pain, since he ad-libs his lines through the auto-tune function popularized by singer T-Pain. Popular British singer Paloma Faith makes a cameo as Cat Girl on several tracks, but probably the album’s biggest surprise guest is the late writer Charles Bukowski, who appears at the beginning of “Cellz.” The recitation of his apocalyptic poem, “Dinosaura, We,” taken from the documentary Bukowski: Born into This (Redolent, 2004), not only serves as the album’s centerpiece, but provides its title as well:
We are born like this, into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much, it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
“Born Like This, that’s why I chose that as the title,” DOOM explained. “Writers are born and we’re not doing it like, ‘Yeah, I think I’ll be a writer today.’ We can’t help it. If I had another job, if I was a gardener or a city worker, I would still be writing rhymes and doing my little thing. I’m just blessed to be able to do it for a living.”8 He found a kindred spirit in the iconoclastic scribe, known for documenting the lives of the down and out, as well as being an unapologetic lush. Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s literary alter ego, a lover of art, women, alcohol, solitude, and nihilistic behavior—though not necessarily in that order—could not have provided a better doppelganger for the eccentric MC.
“I’m totally inspired by that dude. Him as a writer blows me away,” said DOOM of Bukowski. “His writing style would always catch me off guard. I’d be reading and think I know where he’s going, and he’ll just pull a left and spin everything up. Time after time, each story was so different in its own right. Even now, when I feel stuck and wanna relax, I’ll pick up Bukowski and read a short story. His stuff can be so weird it makes me feel normal. I can’t be weirder than this guy, which is cool because once you realize what the extremes are, you can do anything.”9 Whereas most rappers typically glorified crime figures, real-life or otherwise, it’s quite telling that DOOM lavishes the same attention on a fellow writer.
He also matches Bukowski’s incendiary verses with some of his hardest and most technically challenging wordplay, highlighting his command of language:
Rancid rants having rambling savages scavenging
For scraps, perhaps roadkill, if that
Gift of gab, and he flowed ill, chrome stiff hat
Known for writing lightning tight lines, chiefin’
Beefin’, being off deep ends, divine bright shines even
Dimes quiet as mimes by design mighty fine
Slightly rewind, tightly bind, blind lead blind.
By now, DOOM fans have surrendered hopes for a linear narrative, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t given up on imposing some kind of order by attempting to parse these lyrical abstractions, which ends up being a futile task. One might get the gist of it, but only DOOM truly knows what he’s really talking about. He chides his listeners, later, “Metal face Finster, playin’ with the dirty money / Sinister, don’t know what he sayin’ but the words be funny.” Sometimes, as in “More Rhyming,” it’s better to just sit back, relax, and enjoy the euphonic wordplay, “More rhymin’ / Pure diamond / Tore hymen / Poor timin’ / Paul Simon tourin.’ ”
On this album, gone are the long interstitial audio collages for which DOOM is famous, along with the ubiquitous cartoon dialogue. But he does sample a fair amount of cartoon soundtracks—particularly Hanna-Barbera’s animated Super Friends series from the seventies and eighties, as well as some obscure Japanese anime. Who would have guessed, for example, that the chilling music behind “Cellz,” one of the album’s darker turns, would have come from a popular Saturday morning children’s cartoon? But DOOM was already hip to such sources way back on “Hey!” from the first album, which samples the Scooby-Doo soundtrack.
Following his experience working with actual voice actors on The Mouse and the Mask, he is also inspired to use custom dialogue this time around, tapping Prince Paul’s acting chops. “He gave me this thing that he wanted to use as an intro, but it was just too obvious,” says Paul. “So, he’s like, ‘Yeah, you’re good at doing voices, can you record this for me. This is the sentiment of what I need.’ And, so, I just sat in my studio and recorded a bunch of things, and I sent it to him, and he’s like, ‘Oh, this is perfect.’ But I didn’t know what he really was gonna use it for. I thought it was like a song. I didn’t realize it would be the introduction to the album.” In addition to the intro, Paul’s faux tough-guy voice peppers the record, dropping silly phrases like “Time to get the feta” and “Murderizing Sucker MCs.”
While DOOM made several deliberate changes on this album, one element that remains consistent is his ridiculous flow, which, like wine, only seems to improve with age. Though his deep baritone sounds a little raspier for the wear, his ability to daisy-chain internal rhymes into denser verses that pack more syllables per measure seems supercharged. Take “Gazzillion Ear,” which begins with: “Villain man never ran with krills in his hand and / Won’t stop rockin’ til he clocked a gazillion grand / Tillin’ the wasteland sands / Raps on backs of treasure maps, stacks to the ceiling fan.” In the same song the erudite MC crams together a lifetime’s worth of Gen-X references, mentioning Worf (from Star Trek), pro wrestler Chief Jay Strongbow, the unknown comic from the Gong Show, and J.J. from Good Times. And out of the blue, he also throws in the Hadron Collider for good measure. Those scrambling to keep track on lyric websites like Genius.com know that listening to DOOM has been proven to make you smarter.
“As I’m writing it, I’m also thinking of it from a listener point of view. So, I try to make it to where I can catch myself off-guard,” he explained. “You want to keep the story interesting, like, soon as somebody thinks they know what you gonna say—that’s part of the essence of rhyming is to kinda keep everybody off-guard a little—so I take that, and I stretch it with these different things. Leave one word blank, yunno, knowing that the listener is following along and will fill in that blank. But always put the word that you would least expect. It keeps the story interesting like where you can match wits with the listener.”10
DOOM often employs this technique to delete obvious curse words or foul language, which he rarely uses. A perfect example appears on the song “Batty Boyz,” where he raps, “Hit him with a kryptonite brick / Children come and prick his body with a dead stick / Wrote this lyric in bed with a chick / She had the tightest grip on the head of my …” before an abstract break interrupts, in a completely different time signature than the rest of the song. Resuming with the second verse, he fills in that blank with “Bic,” not the word you were expecting. It’s one of DOOM’s patented head fakes that works time and time again.
Incidentally, this song’s homophobic lyrics and subject matter—about Batman and Robin being gay—ended up fueling some controversy that DOOM summarily dismissed. “It’s not about homos. It’s about Batman and them. They just happen to be homos,” he said. “The character DOOM is just in the realm of cartoons and comics, so his competition is Batman and these guys.”11 The ultimate value of his alter egos seems to be that he can always claim to be in character and talking shit—even in a most politically incorrect manner. Underscoring the point, he defiantly added, “I don’t give a shit. I’m a writer. I touch on all topics. DOOM happens to talk shit about everyone—regular street niggas, punks, fat niggas, queens, and kings. I talk shit about every facet of life.”12 The real story behind that song, however, makes DOOM’s intentions appear fairly innocuous. Apparently, his younger son made him buy him a Batman outfit and then taunted his dad, saying, Batman is better than you! DOOM’s response was “Word? Batman’s better than me? I’m spending $24 at the store and Batman’s better than me? All right I got some shit for Batman.”13
As he told journalist David Ma, “This record is DOOM’s most personal record. This is where you get to the center of his character, so I decided to drop the MF for this album only. I didn’t think it was a big deal or nothing. Then everyone’s asking me why I changed the name.”14 But, of course, anything related to DOOM gained oversized import among his fans.
Putting this album into context with his other records, he explained, “Operation: Doomsday, the way I presented it was an introduction to the character from an outside point of view—way outside, OK. There’s this guy that everybody’s calling the Supervillain. You hardly know anything about him, so you’re hearing things, and you gradually get introduced to him through what he puts out as propaganda.”15 Regarding Mm . . Food, he added, “Then you get the ‘Oh, he’s not such a bad guy.’ They call him the Villain, but now we get to know him, and he seems cool. What’s so villainous about this guy? Right? So with this record, the third installment in the trilogy, there’s even a closer, more [candid] look.”16
After a couple false starts, Born Like This (Lex), one of his boldest statements to date, finally hit stores on March 24, 2009. A year represents an eternity in the fast-paced music industry, which was in the process of collapsing due to declining sales of physical product and the incursion of digital downloading. Out of the spotlight for several years, DOOM might as well have been Rip Van Winkle to the fans who eagerly followed him in the early part of the decade. He had spoiled them with multiple releases at a time when hip-hop desperately needed an intervention, but also gaslit them with his DOOMbots and other villainous behavior. As the main arbiter of taste, Pitchfork begrudgingly gave him his props, saying, “I don’t know if Born Like This arose from disillusionment or fatigue or something else, but whatever caused DOOM to scale back his output and go off the grid, he’s only come back from it sharper, stronger, and more powerful than before. Villains don’t really die; they just emerge from the rubble even more determined to make the world see their way.”17
“Born Like This was a big deal,” recalls the former graffiti writer and visual artist Vaseem Bhatti (aka EHQuestionmark). “It was a long-awaited [DOOM] solo album and Lex Records were super excited to have bagged such a project.” While an inordinate amount of praise has been lavished on the cover of Madvillainy, a simple black-and-white photo of the Villain, snapped in haste, picturing his world-weary gaze barely visible from behind the mask, his latest record strikes a much more compelling and mysterious look that merits further attention. As if out of a museum catalog, the cover features a golden effigy of the mask, rendered in stone, beside a rustic slate tablet carved with characters resembling Sumerian cuneiform. Inside, three versions of the mask—in stone, chrome, and what resembles fur—are photographed against a black background. There is also a sonogram of a baby in utero wearing a mask, a literal translation of the album title. Designed by Bhatti, who, at that point, had been defining Lex’s elaborate visual aesthetic for the last eight years, he describes it as, “Something archaic, ephemeral and harking from a long-lost civilization, something spanning different civilizations so as to merge and blur time and context, something timeless, mythological and vague, something geology based as a metaphor for our blip of an existence in geological terms.”
Obviously, a lot of thought went into the artwork, but equal amounts of time, trouble, expense, and cajoling as well. Underwritten by Warp and later EMI, Lex had a reputation for plowing big budgets into packaging that really popped. But, this time, apparently, DOOM came prepared with an illustration of his own in mind. Bhatti describes it as, “A colorful self-portrait drawn in pencil crayon, rendered in a naïve, child-like, subversive, and kitsch style of himself as a chimpanzee in a green room, [sitting] in front of a big light-bulb-framed mirror with a mic and a banana. Something modest, low fi, and very anti-design.” As this was such a hugely anticipated release, however, the artist responsible for Lex’s Rorschach-inspired version of The Mouse and the Mask was given the unenviable task of convincing DOOM to forgo using his own illustration. “I knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” he admits. “I set to work and presented ten or so written concepts, which were all initially rejected. He was adamant his artwork was to be used.” Finally, however, DOOM relented and came around to what Bhatti describes as the “antiquated museum object vibe.” Though his own artwork was not used, he remained very involved every step of the way, offering tons of feedback.
“ ‘Cellz’ was a massive influence on the artwork,” says Bhatti. “I always got an apocalyptic and prophetic vibe from DOOM’s various projects. Even in its more jovial moments, it always came from a dark place.” After obtaining a mask from DOOM, he set about replicating it using different materials. “DOOM had a relationship to food so I thought of making a mask using bread, an ancient foodstuff that has helped us evolve, allowed us to exponentially grow as a species, and could be seen as one of the possible reasons for our eventual apocalyptic downfall,” he says. Not only do grain shortages contribute to starvation in many underdeveloped nations, but the overconsumption of grains (and complex carbohydrates in general) has also contributed to skyrocketing rates of diabetes in the developed world. Using the ancient grain spelt to fashion a mask out of dough, Bhatti popped it in the oven, but didn’t like what came out, calling it “globular and bulbous—there was nothing armor-like about it at all.” He says, “It sat in the studio and began to rot into a beautiful green hairy mold-covered mask.”
Next, he cast another replica of the mask, pouring plaster into a sand mold to create a faux relic from some fallen empire of antiquity. According to Bhatti, the sandstone mask felt “solid and powerful, a sacred artifact of a divine omnipotent superhuman, and photographed with harsh chiaroscuro lighting in the blackness of a museum space it felt ominous and mysterious.” Indeed, its golden hue and rough-hewn features make it appear like the head of some ancient statue unearthed in modern times. Taking inspiration from Bukowski, who talks about the poisoning of our food system, Bhatti threw his rotting bread mask in a blender, added water, and liquified it to create a spore paint, which he ingeniously applied to another sand cast mask. After placing it overnight in a box next to the heater, the smell was overpowering, but he had achieved the desired effect: “A DOOM mask blooming with hairy green mold, which was then photographed for the inner sleeve images.”
For the front-cover text, Bhatti designed a wildstyle font based on cuneiform, the most ancient written language, developed by the Sumerians. “I used the negative space between letters to confuse the reader,” he says. “To create something obscure and mythological, referencing the notion of prophetically ‘reading between the lines.’ DOOM was a fellow Sumerian enthusiast, so he loved the idea, but then demanded it was carved in stone.” Obviously, this one task alone would have required a major effort, but they were running out of time. Bhatti solved the problem by photographing an old slate headstone at his local cemetery and carefully photoshopping in the custom-designed lettering to make it look hand-carved. Nonetheless, it still appears completely cryptic and strange—like a remnant of some lost civilization—and, unless you are accustomed to reading graffiti, illegible as well.
Other elements of the artwork include the stylized DOOM graffiti, inspired by crumbling pyramids and obelisks, as rendered by TORS (aka David Oates), and the clear, glossy hieroglyphics overprinted on the cover (and on the actual CD) that were hand-drawn by EKO (aka Matthew Moran). One last-minute detail that almost got scrapped was the sonogram image of a fetus, in utero, wearing the mask. Bhatti tried to recreate the image with an adult model wearing a mask, but says, “This was rejected as too effeminate, so this idea appeared as two versions, initially in adult form on a limited number of copies and the other as a sampled baby sonogram with a doctored mask.” Considering how much of a control freak DOOM was, it’s amazing that Bhatti was able to accommodate him in the end, delivering one of his most memorable album covers. In hindsight, he says, “The whole process reeked of time—living bread mold from an ancient wheat born in the Cradle of Civilization, the Fertile Crescent, morphing into an inanimate artifact carved from sedimentary Sumerian sandstone.”
In March 2010, DOOM, who traveled with a British passport, completed his first tour of Europe in support of the new album with dates in Paris, Amsterdam, London, Zurich, and Brussels. Returning to the US he was admitted back into the country under a tourist visa. Later that year, in October, he left again for a longer nineteen-date tour that would take him around the UK, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany and, finally, a swing through Scandinavia. After performing his last show at the Hornstull Strand Etablissement in Stockholm, Sweden, on Saturday, November 6, 2010, he and Big Benn Klingon stopped in London on their way back to the US. They spent the night at the posh four-star K West Hotel and Spa in Shepherd’s Bush, a popular spot for music-industry clientele.
When Tom Brown stopped by briefly to say hi, he found them near the mezzanine bar, where they were relaxing at a long banquet table, big enough to seat ten. With their nineteen-date tour concluded, the fellas, in celebratory mood, had splurged. The remnants of a lavish meal covered the table—empty champagne bottles bobbing, bottoms up, in ice buckets, and the rosy carcasses of several half-eaten lobsters. Content and satiated, they were looking forward to flying home.
“I think it was the morning, not the next morning, but the morning after that, I start getting text messages from Ben,” Brown recalls. “It was just like, ‘Yo, Tom, go meet D at K West.’ And I was like, OK, Ben, but DOOM flew back forty-eight hours ago kind of thing. And he was like, ‘No, he’s at K West now.’ ” When Brown arrived at the hotel this time, it was a different story. “It was kind of like a mirror image of what I’d just seen: DOOM sitting in the lobby during the daytime, downstairs at the K West Hotel, just looking totally dejected and shriveled,” he says. “He just gave me the kind of headlines that he’d been refused entry back into the States. It was weird.”
It was probably even weirder for DOOM, who had spent his entire life in the US, and never called any other place home. But born in London, his immigration status had never been properly sorted out—first by his mother and then later by himself, as an adult. Though he had been allowed back into the country in March, US Customs and Border Protection subsequently said they had made that decision in error. This time, when DOOM arrived with wads of cash from all the shows and a mysterious metal mask, they pulled the rapper aside. While questioning him, they discovered his arrest record, which led to further scrutiny of his immigration status. Determining that he was not eligible for entry into the country, they put him on the first flight back to the UK. Brown says, “And he’s like, ‘You know, I think I’m gonna be here for a while.’ ”