The Supervillain got kicked out your country,
And said the Pledge of Allegiance six times monthly.
—MF DOOM, “BORIN CONVO”
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I’m frightened of the old ones.
—JOHN CAGE
In the middle of the song “Breathin,” from one of his early releases, Three Piece Puzzle (Ropeadope, 2005), Brooklyn-born producer Jneiro Jarel (Omar Jarel Gilyard) laments, “To me, in this modern-day music, everybody’s doing the same thing. It’s like, claustrophobic.… I need some space to breathe, man.” His desire to be different would ultimately guide a career characterized by genre-defying, boundary-breaking music that challenged the status quo while still garnering the respect of an ever-expanding, loyal following. Having spent time in New York, Philly, Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans, and LA, the nomadic army brat displayed a preternatural knack for absorbing the influences of his environment and synthesizing various styles into his music—from hip-hop, jazz, soul, funk, and rock, to drum and bass, electronica, and even Brazilian sounds. Refusing to be associated with any scene, he simultaneously embraced experimentation, forging a sound that lay beyond classification.
Beat Journey (2006), his first release on Lex, credited to Dr. Who Dat?, demonstrated his wide range and versatility as he fused laid-back jazz and loping funk over the bedrock of head-nodding beats. He pushed this eclecticism even further on the follow-up, Craft of the Lost Art (2007), assuming various alter egos to create a one-man band like Madlib’s fictional supergroup, Yesterdays New Quintet. Joining beat-master Dr. Who Dat? were his alter ego Rocque Wun, the psychedelic vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Jawaad, who composed the imaginary outfit, Shape of Broad Minds. But the album also featured contributions from the likes of Count Bass D, John Robinson, and Stacey Epps—all associates of DOOM—as well as an appearance by the Villain himself (on “Let’s Go”). Unlike DOOM’s many one-offs and cameos for other producers, this unorthodox track proved to be a primer for things to come.
As like-minded left-field artists, he and Jarel forged a friendship that eventually blossomed into a working relationship when DOOM drafted him as his tour deejay. Later, while working on Born Like This, Jarel invited the Villain to spend some time in LA, where he was renting a house in the Hollywood Hills next door to Dave Sitek. With his band on hiatus, the TV on the Radio guitarist was branching out and making a name for himself as a producer for hire. He tapped his neighbor to program drums on several remixes, and, in turn, Jarel began to involve Sitek on some of his own projects.
These sessions produced the Sitek remix of “Gazzillion Ear” from Born Like This, as well as an electro version of a track called “Rhymin Slang” that Jarel had done with DOOM. On December 16, 2011, that remix appeared on the Pitchfork site beneath a photo of DOOM, Jarel, and Sitek, presumably all in the studio together. It was the public’s first taste of DOOM’s recently announced collaboration with Jarel, known as JJ DOOM. Created well before the Villain’s deportation, the track had an eerily prescient hook, delivered by Jarel:
All the way to UK to BK,
Hear the echo of the bang
And the Cockney rhyming slang.
The celebrated, working-class dialect of London’s East End, cockney used rhyming words to connote an alternative meaning. For example, the expression “apples and pears” meant going up the stairs. Similarly, “frog and toad” meant up the road. It might have been pure coincidence that they referenced cockneys and the UK on this track, if not for the fact that DOOM didn’t believe in such things.
“Hey, why don’t you move into my house?” asked Will Skeaping, Lex’s label manager at the time. The question was addressed to DOOM, whom Tom Brown had just fetched from the K West Hotel, following his whole imbroglio with US Customs. “At least get yourself settled. Come for a few weeks, come for a month, see how you feel,” said Skeaping, who lived alone in a tiny flat in Camden equipped with a spare room. “And then DOOM turned up and it was like something out of a movie. I mean, he just turned up with like a couple of bags, the mask, you know. He came in, sat on the sofa, and DOOM was my housemate.”
Though hardly strangers, the young Brit and the displaced American didn’t know each other very well at that point. But Skeaping felt an almost familial obligation toward DOOM, saying, “He’s one of our artists, and I really respected him. I think he’s obviously a really smart, interesting guy. And we had an album coming [out] with him and I wanted to make sure that he was as comfy as possible and had someone that he could rely on.” In an act of pure selflessness, he even offered to vacate his own bedroom for his guest, making do with the couch in the spare room.
At first, DOOM couldn’t conceal his anger over his deportation. “He was really pissed off with the system. He was pissed off with the way that he’d been handled, the way that he’d been approached,” says Skeaping. But soon enough, his attitude morphed into one of acceptance as he became pragmatic about the whole situation. “He was really like, ‘Fine. Fuck it. Fuck the US,’ you know. ‘Like if they don’t want me, fuck the US, I don’t wanna go back there anyway, I’m bringing my family over,’ ” Skeaping says. “Looking back, I think he could have handled that situation very differently, and I’m really glad that he did end up in the UK as a result of various health issues he had later in which he was able to get absolute grade A healthcare. And I suspect we would’ve actually seen him probably die a lot earlier if he hadn’t had that.” Considering the sorry state of health care access in the US, he makes a valid point. “But there were certain times where he was stressed about not seeing his family and he was stressed about his situation, and we talked about it,” he adds.
Though a decade younger than DOOM, and thrust together by circumstances beyond their control, Skeaping and his new housemate got along marvelously during the ten-week period they lived together. “I felt very much that he was somebody who was looking to be exposed to new ideas and make the most of the kind of exchange of thinking and practices that were kind of available in London,” he says. “And that’s kind of what I could do as a friend is introduce him to new things that I’d seen, and thought were cool and interesting. And it turned out, we had a lot of stuff in common.”
A lover of painting and the fine arts, Skeaping introduced DOOM to galleries like White Cube and the Tate, where they checked out the latest in contemporary art. He fed his roommate books by Malian photographer Malick Sidibé and Rupert Sheldrake, a parapsychology researcher. They, in fact, bonded over Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance, which posited that all living things inherited a collective memory from members of their species that preceded them. The two went apartment hunting around London and on boat trips up the Thames. During this time, Skeaping witnessed a side of DOOM to which few others were privy, gaining some valuable insights into the Villain’s mysterious ways.
“So, he was interested in ideas and esoteric thinking. And, at this point, by the time I met him, I felt very strongly that he was probably no longer considering himself a musician,” he says. “The reason it was so difficult to get music out of DOOM was because, actually, he was far more interested in exploring science, esoteric ideas—not perhaps in the way of like developing his own practical research—but in kind of, joining the dots and using that as a framework to imagine new rhymes and new ideas and to share them with his audience. Like that was very much the trajectory he was on and the way it felt to me was that in many ways he was being held back by this kind of, ‘When’s Madvillainy two coming out?’ ” In other words, Skeaping firmly believes that the pull of DOOM’s core fan base impeded his exploration of the creative paths that he wanted to pursue.
“It’s like trying to move on and do a new album and everyone would keep going like, ‘Oh, go on, then. Do that funny song you did like 20 years ago.’ That was like a big theme I’d say,” he posits. “And he’d certainly considered himself like some kind of journeyer and researcher. And I think as much within that, he was really interested in psychedelics. And I think that’s massively underplayed, like the extent to which psychedelics played a role in all his music. It wasn’t like booze and weed. It was like, this is a guy who was doing acid a lot, apparently for several years at a time with his brother and hanging out in Central Park. And from what I gather from DOOM—he didn’t go into much detail—but it sounded to me like the incident with his brother [Subroc] would have been directly related to, you know, being on acid.”
While DOOM, no doubt, had a history with psychedelics, his everyday escape remained alcohol. For breakfast, a can of liquid pumpernickel—i.e., Guinness Stout—would often suffice. Empty bottles of harder stuff would also turn up now and then around the flat. “He’d disappear off on walks,” says Skeaping. “I think he was really hiding the drinking. I’m gonna be honest, like looking back now sort of 10, 11 years later, I think he must have been drinking like a shitload more than anyone noticed.” After all, the hip Camden area that they called home was buzzing with bars and pubs. Instead of buying groceries and eating in, DOOM would also take most of his meals outside the flat. “He was going out to bars for dinner, and he was frequently out with friends and people that he knew,” says Skeaping. “So, I think Damon Albarn and those guys, there were a few people in that circle who I think he was seeing for drinks and stuff quite a bit. And he had his cousins around who began to turn up a lot more.”
One activity that Skeaping did not see DOOM doing much of was making music, even though, early on, he had arranged for his MPC and rhyme books to be shipped over. Apparently not hurting for cash, he also went out and purchased whatever he needed—including a pair of Genelec speakers and a top-of-the-line MacBook. But he ended up spending much of his time at the flat doing research. “He’d be on his headphones, and he’d mainly be in his room watching YouTube videos,” says Skeaping. “I mean, that was literally how I remember him was just constantly having YouTube lectures and videos. Sometimes ones where I would very clearly feel that it was, you know, garbage, and he was watching like weird conspiracy theory stuff, and others where it was really interesting things. But there was a sort of real mix and, obviously, like, again, he was looking for inspiration. He was looking for new ideas and new ways of imagining life.”
In addition to his insatiable appetite for learning, DOOM didn’t believe in coincidence, according to Skeaping, but rather quantum patterns that shaped reality. Viewing everything as part of a grand plan, he readily accepted his fate of ending up in England, and focused on bringing his family over permanently. The only other person with whom he shared his thoughts was, obviously, his wife, Jasmine. “They’d frequently be talking in quite sort of candid terms about like esoteric beliefs as if he was perhaps in some kind of like, I don’t wanna say cult or religion, but he’d been cherry picking the bits of religions that he found compelling and interesting, and they would talk about stuff like that,” he says. Most likely he is referring to the eclectic teachings of Dr. York, which provided the foundation for DOOM’s esoteric belief system.
For someone who had lived his entire life in the US, and still had a home and family there, it must have been a huge adjustment for DOOM to be “banished” as he expressed in song. “Therefore, the best I could do was to like, make sure he was supported and happy, or, at least as happy as he could be,” says Skeaping, who never asked him to contribute to the rent or any other expenses. “And, you know, he was with a WIFI connection and on his own and not being hassled, I think those were like the things that got him through.” Eventually, after almost two and a half months, DOOM moved into a spacious loft apartment in Bermondsey on the south bank of the river Thames. He stayed there for about a year before moving into an even more spacious (and expensive) converted church when Jasmine and his brood, which had grown to five children, finally joined him in England the following year.
I’m gonna have to work. I just need to fill out my time. And, so, I want you to get in touch with everybody, DOOM told his label head. His priority was getting money, according to Brown, who says, “At first maybe there were a handful of people that he’d promised verses to, or, you know, that had inquired about doing stuff.” The Lex boss reconnected him with Damon Albarn from Gorillaz, as well as the Australian band the Avalanches, for whom DOOM did a remix of “Tonight May Have to Last Me All My Life” (released posthumously in 2021). “Then he was like, ‘Oh, let’s record a project. You can pay me a track at a time, a verse at a time and I’ll just start knocking them out,’ ” says Brown, who put out a call for beats.
“He’d been working quite a lot with JJ [Jneiro Jarel]. They’d been on tour together. Jneiro had remixed him twice. So, they’d known each other for a long time and they’re both friends with Count Bass D. And so out of all the beats that we were sending DOOM’s way, he was only recording over the Jneiro Jarel beats,” he explains. “And I think at the time, you know, he was talking a lot about how he always gets the same kind of beats, same kind of samples, same kind of sound. And he just really wanted to do something different.” This desire to take a creative swerve, then, figured prominently into the JJ DOOM project. Brown, who was psyched to have DOOM in town and working again, started strategizing with him as they hatched an ambitious plan for the new album.
They decided to feature four prominent guests—two from the UK and two from the US. On the British side, Damon Albarn, with whom DOOM had already worked, was a no-brainer. But Beth Gibbons, the enigmatic and reclusive chanteuse from Portishead, seemed like the ultimate bucket list choice. As for possible American contributors, they settled on Kanye West and Nas, both of whom DOOM had hung out with on the West Coast and considered friends. Courtney Brown, who served as DOOM’s personal assistant for several years beginning in 2005, and was a friend of Kelis, Nas’s wife at the time, even recalled an episode in The Source when the two MCs freestyled over some Special Herbs beats after having dinner together in LA.
The Lex boss delivered on the two Brits. Albarn appeared on “Bite the Thong,” a manic electronic track on which he performs the hook, “I know / You go / We all go / POP!” in a heavily effected vocal that barely cut through the noise. Ironically, the track’s staccato beat and swirling textures represented one of the album’s more experimental offerings, whose subject matter revolved around rappers compromising themselves for fame. “We the wrong ones, so don’t even ask / It’s hard enough tryna breathe up in the mask,” DOOM rapped, as if feeling the heat from his own notoriety.
After sending Gibbons’s manager the music for a mellower, more conventional track called “GMO,” Brown received a positive response from them as well. “I think she just genuinely really liked MF DOOM, thought he was an artist that she wanted to work with, and liked the music, so it was just a really genuine thing,” he says. Unfortunately, her delicate, lilting vocals barely register above the track’s pounding kick drums. Meanwhile, we get a dose of the activist DOOM, as he dishes about so-called “Franken food,” rapping “Uh, I get what you’re sellin’ / Swellin’ from alien microfilaments its Morgellons / Even if you’re gellin’, what’s that in your melon? / And what the hell is they sprayin’? No tellin’.” Sharp-tongued as ever, his prodigious skills are burnished by research—this time into the bizarre condition known as Morgellons, which causes mysterious fibers to sprout from under the skin. “Sometimes I do have to hit the books real hard,” he later confirmed. “I’m taking information in and gathering data to look at a certain subject.”1
Brown also forwarded music to Noah Goldstein and Che Pope, of Kanye’s GOOD Music label. “They said he was recording on stuff and then we never got it, but we sent them probably every track on the album at some point,” he says. The perpetually busy Nas, who had grown into quite a mogul, diversifying his portfolio beyond music, turned out to be a no-show as well. Instead, it fell on Jarel to sort out two replacements—former collaborator Khujo Goodie, who dropped a short verse on “Still Kaps,” and singer Boston Fielder, featured on “Bout the Shoes.” Unfortunately, both solo turns, along with the only instrumental track, “Viberian Sun Pt. II,” seemed somewhat out of place and superfluous on the taut forty-two-minute album, encroaching upon DOOM’s limited rhyme time as well.
“With all DOOM’s stuff, it’s a lot easier for him to get it across the [finish] line when he’s not the producer,” Brown acknowledges. But unlike his other collaborations that only involved writing and recording verses, he remained fully engaged with this project until the end. “JJ was sending him like rough beats, DOOM was arranging them and then they’d go back to JJ and then back to DOOM,” he says. “Sometimes they’d changed the whole beat over the course of messing around.”
Take “Banished,” one of their early efforts, which wasn’t even meant to be a song. Jarel had originally sent DOOM a short piece of music that he planned to use as an interlude. But the Villain took it upon himself to loop the noisy, futuristic rock-meets-crunk snippet, adding vocals to make it a proper song. In a departure from his usual laid-back delivery, he also rapped double-time, leading fans to believe his vocal had been sped up. “It wasn’t at all. It was just like, you know, DOOM liberated, showing off that he can rhyme over [a fast track],” according to Brown. “The weird thing about DOOM fans is that they’d rather have something like Czarface where he’s rapping over some kind of super regular beat rhyming about Captain Crunch cereal, than see him grow as an artist.” Sadly, that was probably true, as fandom clings to the familiar. But in London, DOOM was completely untethered—from friends, family, and any expectations—providing a perfect opportunity to shed his skin.
One afternoon during the summer of 2010, after DOOM had moved out, Skeaping received a panicked phone call from him. “He called me and was like, ‘Will, I’m having trouble. I can’t breathe. I’m outside my apartment.’ And like I was in between meetings, and it was a complete fluke that I picked up the phone. Luckily, I knew exactly where he was because I’d taken him to the apartment and was then able to call an ambulance for him and direct them to where he was, because he was like passing out.” When he and Brown subsequently visited him in the intensive care ward, after DOOM’s condition had stabilized, they discovered that he had had a massive heart attack. “It was like a pretty intense situation,” says Skeaping. “And I think from what I gathered, it was a touch-and-go, life-saving moment because he was, you know, essentially dying.”
Following this close call, DOOM remained in the hospital for several days while he slowly regained his strength. When friends popped by for daily visits, they found him in good spirits, and incredibly thankful to be alive. As to what could have landed him there, Skeaping says, “I suspect at this point he’d been doing various amounts of cocaine. And I don’t know if that had, you know.… On top of everything else, he was obviously not in good shape physically. He was like robust and active, but, you know, he had a substantial beer belly. I think you could say that he did not look like a healthy guy.
“Whenever he went to a bar, he must have been doing, like, a lot of spirits and he was drinking Grey Goose and bottles of champagne,” he adds. “And I guess in some ways that must have made him feel like he wasn’t drinking vodka behind a park bench, you know, but it was still booze in vast quantities. Anyway, it caught up with him.” Whether booze or something more sinister, practically everyone who dealt with DOOM or knew him well would regard him as a functioning alcoholic. Considering his addictive personality, flirting with harder substances certainly did not bode favorably for his general health and well-being.
As DOOM lay recovering in the hospital on a restricted, low-sodium diet, he started complaining about the food to his wife. Skeaping remembers a phone call with Jasmine where she asked him to get DOOM some McDonald’s. “And I remember thinking to myself, like, what the fuck is going on? This is bonkers,” he says. “So, as far as I can remember, she said, ‘Well, if you don’t do this, I’m going to, you know, you’re not gonna put the album out. That’s the last time you’re gonna work with DOOM.’ ” Upon receiving such a blunt ultimatum, Skeaping figured he had no other choice but to smuggle in some McDonald’s, but not before a surreal negotiation with DOOM over his order. “The most exciting thing he could do was, like, pull one over on someone or do a little prank and get something extra,” he says. “That was his modus operandi, always. Like, it wasn’t even about the thing. It was just doing a little move that managed to get the extra thing he wanted.” That behavior, according to Skeaping, extended to more than just quarter-pounders.
On February 21, 2012, DOOM had been booked to appear at the Boiler Room, an online streaming platform known for hosting DJ sets by cutting-edge artists. “I went to pick him up to DJ and to take him to the venue,” he says, “And he was like, ‘I’m not doing it.’ He wasn’t ready. He didn’t wanna do it. And I was like, come on. This is starting in like an hour, you’ve gotta do it. It’s not a big deal. He’s like, ‘I don’t wanna do it. I don’t feel comfortable doing it.’ ” Skeaping suspects he hadn’t prepared a set. But, luckily, Jarel, who happened to be in town, had accompanied them. “We dressed him up in all of DOOM’s clothes, gave him DOOM’s watch, you know, put the mask on, the cap on, did the facial hair, put a pillow under his sweatshirt so that he looked like DOOM with a big beer belly. And it was entirely convincing, amazingly,” he recalls.
Even hardcore fans who attended that night were none the wiser until the story eventually came out. “He loved that ’cause it was like a heist,” says Skeaping. “And we were all in on it together, and we had a little secret, and he still got the loot at the end. Like he got paid several thousand pounds. And it was, you know, it was like a real bonding moment. I think that’s when he realized that I was prepared to help out on a scam.” But such episodes also put the label manager in a difficult position, ultimately influencing his decision to quit the music industry. (He currently works as a climate activist for Extinction Rebellion.)
Though DOOM had dodged a major bullet regarding his health, lingering issues still dogged him. “I was really worried about his cocaine consumption, you know, I just wanted to make sure that he wasn’t doing cocaine or if he was, it was in some way rationed,” says Skeaping, who felt somewhat complicit. “I think I even took a bag away from him, and said like, please don’t do this. It’s gonna kill you. And he’s going, ‘No, I’m as fit as an ox. I’m fine. I’m good.’ Anyway, I think, at this point, he had quite a lot of facilitators around him. But he was actually in better health [when] he came out of this, and we definitely went out of our way to limit what he was doing as much as we could.” At the same time, however, no one in the UK was in a position to tell a grown man how to conduct himself.
Living in London, where he was detached from his past, offered DOOM the ultimate anonymity, which had always been a major concern. After settling into his own place, he also gained a measure of autonomy not enjoyed since his bachelor days since it was much more difficult for the label, or even his wife, to keep tabs on him (though Jasmine and their five children eventually joined him). For their part, Lex respected his privacy and left him alone, allowing him the space to work. But, once, after trying to contact him and receiving no response for a couple of days, Brown started to worry. So, one summer evening, he drove down to DOOM’s loft. “And I got there and, you know, still couldn’t get hold of him, ringing on the door and ringing on the buzzer of the gate,” he recalls. Eventually, when somebody let him into the courtyard of the property, he proceeded to DOOM’s ground-floor flat, where he found an open window. Not comfortable entering on his own, he called the landlady, and after explaining the situation, she suggested calling the cops.
When a male and female officer responded to the call, Brown relayed his concerns regarding DOOM’s sudden disappearance and his previous health issues. The policeman then climbed through the open window and let Brown and the other officer in through the front door. Littered with used takeaway cartons, beer cans, and empty bottles of liquor, the place, at first glance, appeared to have been ransacked. “There was a big flat table that was covered with like models that you glue together, like plastic Airfix models, kinda thing, and little constructions with crystals hanging on them and kinda mystical crystal things,” according to Brown. “And then the biggest bag of weed and just piles of scrunched up bank notes, just a mountain of them.” Though the police initially suspected a burglary, they couldn’t figure out why so much money had been left lying around. They didn’t even bother about the weed, to Brown’s great relief, as DOOM’s bad housekeeping most probably saved the day.
“The police locked the door, and gave me a number to follow up, you know, that kind of thing,” he says. “I can’t remember the exact series of events, but like maybe the next day or that night or something, somebody got a message from DOOM, and he was OK.” But when he returned to his flat, he discovered that the policeman had dropped the key to his handcuffs. “And when I spoke to him,” says Brown, “I was like, man, there was quite a lot of drama, you know, are you okay? And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, sometimes you just gotta check out and get away from things, you know? But I was working, don’t worry.’ But for him that key to the cuffs is obviously symbolic to name the album.”
In addition to its clever title, Key to the Kuffs (Lex, 2012) stands out as DOOM’s most experimental album, and one that finds him really stretching himself as an artist. Stranded far from home like a modern-day Ulysses, he obviously has plenty to get off his chest, and offers more personal insights this time around. The album landed three years after his last project—par for the course for DOOM—but not soon enough for those spoiled by his fertile period, for whom it seemed like he had been on hiatus forever. But it’s amazing he was able to pull together such a strong showing considering everything he was dealing with at the time.
Songs like “Banished” and “Guv’nor” expressly deal with his forced immigration. “Villain got banished / Refused out the US, he ain’t even Spanish,” he says on the former, clarifying, “No not deported / Be a little minute before things get sorted.” Though he didn’t know it at the time, that would never happen. Meanwhile, on “Guv’nor,” cockney slang for someone in a position of authority, he references his new surroundings, saying, “Vocals spill over like the rolling hills of Dover.” The fact that they are actually cliffs would have, obviously, ruined his rhyme scheme. Speaking of which, in the same song, he tackles the utterly unpronounceable Icelandic volcano, whose eruption during the spring of 2010 played havoc with air traffic across Europe: “Catch a throatful from the fire vocal / With ash and molten glass like Eyjafjallajökull.” Triple word score for the Villain!
Some of his most quotable verses appear on “Rhymin Slang,” the track that officially launched the album. “Got to do it, snottily putrid, true grit / Came to spew spit like bodily fluid with mucus,” says DOOM, boasting an internal rhyme game that is as tight as ever. In the second verse he unleashes one of his patented tongue-tying tornados: “Rarely scarcely scary glaring stare / Let’s be very clear, MC’s is derriere / As well as aware, wearily, just don’t be nearly near, you hear me? Yeah.” Aside from such an awesome display of alliteration, he shows his clever sophistication, dissing the competition in French.
Although this album lacks a feminine perspective, he still aims one at the ladies with a mature love song directed at his wife. The weeping strings of “Winter Blues” convey the pain of his separation as he raps, “Each and every day making cash with Satan / Can’t eat, can’t sleep, it’s exasperatin’ / Mad light burning off / All he needs is one warm hug to keep from turning off.” On the same track he deftly weaves in a reference to Henrietta Lacks, a Black cancer patient whose cells were preserved for use in medical research without her permission. The track’s finale includes a long vocal snippet by Dr. Jewell Pookrum, who speaks about the benefits of the natural pigment, melanin.
Of his latest collaborator, the Villain said, “Usually when I write to another producer’s work it brings out other elements, and with this dude, the way his production is, these songs are on a different level.”2 Not since Vaudeville Villain had he written to such unconventional material. Jarel displays a knack for totally changing up his sonic palette from one song to the next, making the album’s progression interesting and unpredictable. No stranger to the mic either, he holds his own on the solo “Dawg Friendly,” on which he raps, “Ayo, D, what the deally? You know me / Dropping all these beats to slap these cats silly / Feeling 90% of these dudes? Not really / So many wack cats that I’m more dog friendly.”
While Jarel also contributes all the musical interludes between tracks, DOOM, as usual, handles all the skit material, which, for the first time, are not exclusively culled from cartoons. Aside from snippets of Spider-Man, which find their way into the opening skit, “Waterlogged,” and “Ello Guv’nor,” whose title as well as dialogue come from an episode of Cartoon Network’s Regular Show, most of the other voices come straight out of DOOM’s YouTube research, manipulated for comic effect. It’s especially entertaining how he chops up outtakes from esoteric teacher Bobby Hemmitt, known for his stream-of-consciousness monologues delivered in Ebonics with a South Carolina twang, who never gets boring.
While sharing the mixing duties with his partner, DOOM always reserved the right to EQ (equalize) his own voice and to get it to sound how he wanted. When it came time to master the album in London, he also insisted on being present, and went through the process no less than five times. “We ended up picking up the bill for a whole day session, you know, and it was like 150, 250 quid an hour for DOOM to sit there with an engineer,” according to Brown. “He was super persnickety and really aware that anything he dropped was gonna be, like, analyzed and torn to bits.” As always, DOOM was right.
While reviews for the album were mostly positive, an influential outlet like Pitchfork only gave it a 7.3 rating on top of a very mixed review, which Brown blames for hampering the marketing campaign. But this was no longer the early aughts, which saw sales of the dominant format, CDs, peaking. In the decade before downloading and streaming finally eclipsed sales of physical product, the bottom fell out of the music industry, affecting independent labels especially hard. The JJ DOOM album and its accompanying collection of remixes, Bookhead EP, suffered as a result. Brown quotes sales of between 35,000 to 40,000 copies, a far cry from even Born Like This, which sold at least double that amount. For most of his second incarnation as an MC, DOOM had practically defied gravity, but he was swiftly heading back to Earth.
In August 2011, a full year before Key to the Kuffs dropped, Nature Sounds released the twelve-inch of “Victory Laps,” thought to herald the beginning of the long-anticipated collaboration between DOOM and Ghostface. First announced back in 2005, when both artists appeared together on the cover of Mass Appeal, the proposed project—alternately known as Iron Man vs. MetalFace, DOOMStarks, and Swift & Changeable—seemed plagued by problems from the outset. “DOOMStarks were signed by Nature Sounds,” says Brown. “I’m not sure what their deal looked like, but they licensed it to Lex for the world outside of North America in 2005 and so I picked it up and we picked up the publishing, and then I think tracks just started getting cannibalized, you know, like, ending up on other projects.”
After hearing one of the Special Herbs releases, Ghost had contacted DOOM about using selected tracks on the Fishscale and More Fish albums, both released in 2006. (Incidentally, later in 2012, Masta Ace released an entire album based on Special Herbs instrumentals, called MA DOOM: Son of Yvonne.) In return, Ghost made cameos on The Mouth and the Mask and Born Like This, as the two announced their own collaborative project. “He [DOOM] actually tried to stick two tracks from DOOMStarks onto JJ DOOM,” according to Brown. “But it just seemed so pointless to have them on there. DOOMStarks is all themed around Charlie’s Angels, so all the tracks kind of fit together thematically.”
In interviews from July 2009 and late 2011 regarding the status of their collaboration, Ghost repeatedly claimed to be waiting on DOOM, who, when asked, claimed the opposite. But the Villain was known for taking his time and never rushing the work—especially when it came to something as important as his dream project with Ghost, whom he obviously held in high regard. In a concerted attempt to finish the album, Nature Sounds arranged for a recording session in Amsterdam that took place sometime between 2012 and 2014, where DOOM and Ghostface apparently met face-to-face. “DOOM sent me the recordings from that stuff from those sessions,” says Brown. “But I don’t think it was as productive as they hoped ’cause I think, you know, both DOOM and Ghostface were pretty smashed.”
By the time the two MCs shared the same bill at London’s storied 100 Club, on April 18, 2013, their long-anticipated collaboration had become somewhat of a chimera. Who knows if they even saw each other that night, considering DOOM’s penchant for disappearing in a taxi following his hasty exit from stage. But he definitely ran into another MC from upstate New York, an up-and-comer known as Bishop Nehru (Markel Ni’Jee Scott), the night’s opening act. At the tender age of fifteen, he had won a talent contest sponsored by WorldStarHipHop that he parlayed into appearances on Hot 97 and Power 105.1, New York’s top rap stations. The following year, he released his first mixtape, Nehruvia, a throwback to the nineties boom-bap sound, featuring production from the likes of DJ Premier along with Madlib and DOOM. Riding a huge buzz at the time, he had been invited to come to Europe to open for Wu-Tang Clan’s 20th Anniversary Tour.
According to Nehru, “DOOM’s people reached out to me and said they were interested in working with me. I played the Converse ‘Get Dirty Show’ at the 100 Club in London recently. We spoke there and DOOM was mad chill. A real cool dude. It is a dream come true to be honest. Seems like it was just yesterday when I first discovered his music.”3 Though they didn’t talk business that night, they hung out and got to know each other better over burgers. Subsequently, they announced a collaboration titled NehruvianDOOM, produced by the Villain, in which Nehru handled most of the vocal duties.
Unlike DOOMStarks, this project came to fruition not long after its inception. Lex released NehruvianDOOM (Sound of the Son) on October 7, 2014, to mostly positive reviews, even though the nine-track, thirty-two-minute album seemed lacking or unfinished. While Metal Fingers produced most of it (with an assist from Madlib, who contributed “Disastrous”), he only rhymed on four tracks, usually just popping in for a quick verse or hook. Either he wanted to give his younger partner a chance to shine, or was attempting to get away with doing the least amount of work possible. As far as DOOM was concerned, both were probably true. Lyrically, though their styles complemented each other, as much hype as followed Nehru at the time, he was hardly in a position to carry an album on his own—even despite its brevity. After being signed to Nas’s Mass Appeal label in 2014, Nehru left a couple years later, and despite releasing new music in the interim, has yet to materialize another full album.
NehruvianDOOM happened to be DOOM’s last major contribution behind the boards. But of the eight tracks he produced, two were previously released instrumentals from the Special Herbs series and one was a recycled beat. These included “Darkness,” a vocal version of “Bergamont” (from Special Herbs 9&0), which sampled the horn fanfare from “Black Man’s March” (Now Again, 2003) by L.A. Carnival, and “Coming for You,” originally “Fo Ti” (from Special Herbs, Volumes 7&8), which sourced a suspenseful snippet from the soundtrack of the seventies children’s show The Electric Company. On “Great Things” he also used the same Waltel Branco sample from “Zoraia” (CBS, 1975) as he did for the track “Devastator” (Unicron, 2008), featuring Trunks. On the remaining five joints, one of which was the opening skit, “First Day of Class,” DOOM pulled samples as well as vocal snippets from his usual sources—cartoons or children’s records, TV shows, movie soundtracks, and jazz. After releasing back-to-back experimental albums, however, he covered no new ground here.
Despite pocketing a $45,000 advance for an album that he never delivered and going AWOL for several years, DOOM eventually found his way back to Adult Swim. At first, Jason DeMarco wasn’t returning his calls, until he learned from Jasmine that one of their daughters had been in desperate need of medical attention at the time. “I can’t be mad at him. It’s like he was a super villain,” he says. “He was a nice guy, but at the same time, he wasn’t afraid to fuck someone over if it helped him out and he needed some shit. Like he wasn’t gonna worry about it, right? I mean, you’re talking about a guy who had an apartment and didn’t live with his wife ’cause he wanted to have affairs and his wife was like, ‘Fine then stay in your apartment.’ He was a complicated man. I don’t think anyone really knew DOOM. I don’t even think Jasmine really knew DOOM.”
The reason he kept forgiving him and giving him further opportunities, according to DeMarco, was because “I understood to some degree that this is just his nature and it’s the gamble you take when you work with him. When you work with DOOM, you’re not working with an equal partner. You’re working with somebody—at least, unless you’re an artist—who you are helping fund something they want to do. And you either accept that and go, ‘I hope whatever comes of it is good for him and for his art’ or you say, ‘I can’t risk any more of this because I might lose my job or get in trouble or whatever.’ And I basically rode that line for twenty years.”
After the two finally spoke and settled their differences, DOOM offered up some new music. Instead of doing a regular album, however, they came up with the concept of serializing the fifteen rare or unreleased tracks, which would be called The Missing Notebook Rhymes. They would release one track per week, for free, on Adult Swim’s website. As DeMarco told Mass Appeal, “They’re tracks that [DOOM] either doesn’t have a home for, or they are part of other projects which aren’t necessarily complete, but we can sort of tease them. It’s sort of a peek at everything he has going on right now.”4
Released on August 7, 2017, the first track, “Notebook 00—Negus,” was a collaboration with Sean Price that DOOM had recorded before that rapper’s untimely death in 2015. Featuring two underground legends, it was an ideal way to kick off the series. Unfortunately, DOOM hadn’t produced the track, nor did he have the right to release it. Crummie Beats, the producer, demanded compensation from Adult Swim, who had no recourse but to pay him. In fact, over the ensuing weeks, the company was besieged by other such claims and realized that DOOM had not paid any of the outside producers or artists involved. There was also the small matter of DOOM’s exclusive deal with Lex, who had no qualms about protecting their rights and going after other labels that put out their artist’s material.
On September 26, following the release of “Notebook 06—Pause Tape (Remix),” Adult Swim had no choice but to remove all the Missing Notebook Rhymes material from their website, issuing a statement that they had terminated their relationship with DOOM. An explanation would only come after DOOM’s passing in a series of tweets sent by DeMarco. “I think part of the Missing Notebook Rhymes was him trying to get money from someone that wasn’t Lex, with beats he had no rights to, and he thought, ‘I can get away with this.’ I don’t even think he really cared if he got away with it,” he says. It appeared to be just another ruthless money grab on the Villain’s part, though he clearly had his own reasons for doing so.
For someone who had gone out on a limb for DOOM time and time again, it was the final straw, but, surprisingly, their relationship didn’t end on a sour note. “We bonded over our love for the Pink Panther cartoon,” says DeMarco. “And, so, he painted me a big painting, of course, a bandit from the Pink Panther cartoon robbing a safe. And that hangs in Adult Swim.” He also painted one for DeMarco’s boss, Mike Lazzo, of a guy holding a cosmic cube in his hand. “He gave me those just out of the blue and it was kind of his way of saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ you know, without really having to say, I’m sorry,” he says. “They just delivered them to work one day. Jasmine was like, ‘Hey, these are paintings DOOM made for you.’ ”
In hindsight, 2017 turned out to be one of the toughest years in recent memory for DOOM. Though he had made unprecedented progress as an artist and huge strides toward healing since the twin tragedies that had rocked him years earlier, the hands of fate delivered a crushing blow. On Monday, December 18, he sadly posted news of his fourteen-year-old son’s passing on Instagram. “King Malachi Ezekiel Dumile 2/22/03–12/18/17 the greatest son one could ask for,” he wrote, holding a picture of the deceased. “Safe journey and may all our ancestors greet you with open arms. One of our greatest inspirations. Thank you for allowing us to be your parents. Love you Mali.” Losing a loved one was tragic enough, but losing a child was unimaginable. It delivered a jolt from which the Villain probably never recovered.
Like a circle completed, DOOM’s last recorded albums were collaborations with the group Czarface, composed of rappers Esoteric (Seamus Ryan) and Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck (Jason Hunter) along with DJ/producer 7L (George Andrinopoulos). A decade before forming their comic-book-inspired supergroup, the Boston duo of 7L & Esoteric had witnessed the birth of MF DOOM at the Nuyorican Poets Café, as he rocked the crowd with only a sheer stocking covering his face. “It was probably one of the first times an actual idol had been humanized to me,” says Esoteric. “This was an artist I’d see rocking on Yo! MTV Raps as Zev Love X from KMD in the early ’90s, and that level was something that just wasn’t tangible for me.… He was like a superhero.” Though traveling in the same indie rap circles, they never had the opportunity to link up at the time. But 7L & Esoteric did end up collaborating with the Wu-Tang wordsmith for a track called “Speaking Real Words” (Direct Records, 1999), released as an EP.
Fast forward to 2013, when the group Czarface announced themselves with a self-titled debut on Boston’s Brick Records. Street artist L’Amour Supreme (who incidentally illustrated the cover of this book) helped the group realize their comic-book-inspired mascot, who graced the cover, resembling the Terminator. Combining a return to the boom bap sound of the nineties with pop-culture comic-book references and a whole host of high-profile cameos—from Ghostface Killah, Roc Marciano, Cappadonna, and Action Bronson—the album was well received, debuting at number thirty-four on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop chart. For the follow-up, Every Hero Needs a Villain (Brick, 2015), it was almost a no-brainer to ask DOOM for a guest verse on the track, “Ka-bang!” According to Esoteric, “The collaboration for ‘Ka-bang!’ came about pretty easily, just reaching out through a mutual friend and the collaborative relationship started from there.”
After burnishing their indie credentials with two more successful albums, the group wanted to try something different. “We liked the idea of a ‘versus’ type of collaborative record, and when I threw out the title ‘Czarface vs. Metalface’ to 7L and Deck, it really inspired us to try and make an LP happen,” says Esoteric. “DOOM was down, but he suggested that we call it ‘Czarface meets Metalface,’ so it was more us working together as a team than as rivals clashing and competing.” Even though DOOM was living abroad by this point, working remotely did not pose a problem. 7L would send beats to Deck and Esoteric, who recorded their parts first. “I’d send them to DOOM, and he’d playfully rename the beats when sending over ideas,” says Esoteric. “For instance, I sent him the ‘Nautical Depth’ track, but the working title was ‘Meet in the Subway,’ and he’d send it back with a verse, and a file renamed ‘MEAT IN THE SUBWAY,’ stylized in all caps.” Working assiduously, they knocked out the album’s sixteen tracks in about a year.
When Czarface Meets Metal Face (Get on Down/Silver Age) dropped on March 30, 2018, it immediately shot to the top of Billboard’s Heatseekers chart, also peaking at number 5 on the Independent chart and at 134 on the Top 200. It had obviously been a while since the public had heard DOOM on a full album’s worth of material, though he had been busy doing one-offs with the likes of Flying Lotus, Cannibal Ox, Earl Sweatshirt, and Danny Brown. So, the interest and curiosity were there, but for all its golden-era nostalgia, the album seemed somewhat tired and DOOM uninspired. After constantly challenging the listener with his technical flows and proving that he could spit to any kind of rhythm, he seemed content to simply coast this time around. Considering the painful loss of his son the previous year, such a lackluster performance was not at all surprising.
The idea for a follow-up came from their distributor at Traffic Entertainment, Joe Mansfield. This time they also released an accompanying comic book, written by Esoteric, on which DOOM, a control freak to the end, revised some of his lines. Though they completed the ten-track album by April of 2020, COVID had struck by then, so they took the summer to fine-tune the record. Then, the announcement of DOOM’s passing on December 31, 2020, further stalled the album, which finally saw light on May 7, 2021. As Esoteric said, on its release, “I speak for everyone involved when I say we were incredibly fortunate to have collaborated with DOOM.… He was a one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-duplicated emcee, producer, and visionary. We wish peace and healing to his family, friends and everyone touched by the gifts he shared with the planet. MF DOOM FOREVER.”5 Such a simple but fitting eulogy, no doubt, resonated across the DOOMiverse, soon to be followed by many more.