As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
—RUMI
On November 14, 1989, “The Gas Face” followed “Steppin’ to the A.M.” as the second single off The Cactus Album (Def Jam/Columbia, 1989), becoming something of a phenomenon, and helping push the album toward gold sales. Its zany, tongue-in-cheek video was notable for three reasons: 1) it sparked a major beef by throwing shade at MC Hammer, who had the top rap song in the country at the time with “U Can’t Touch This,” a full-scale rip-off of Rick James’s “Superfreak”; 2) it featured a slew of high-profile cameos from the likes of comedian Gilbert Gottfried, label boss Russell Simmons, and rappers Flavor Flav, EPMD, and Run-DMC—not to mention an appearance by then Def Jam employee Bobbito Garcia, who would play a pivotal role in DOOM’s future; and 3) no longer relegated to the background, Zev Love X finally hit prime time, closing out the song with a featured verse.
Cracking a Mona Lisa smile, the rail-thin rapper—sporting his trademark John Lennon wire frames with a gold hoop piercing his right nostril—almost stole the show with his effortless delivery and the laid-back demeanor, firmly embedding him in the minds of the MTV generation. Subroc popped in briefly, too, during the line, “Subroc cut at you with a clipper,” mugging next to the 3rd Bass insignia he had carved in Serch’s fade. At the video’s conclusion, Zev, wearing a service-station attendant’s overalls, jokingly gave the “gas face” to his friend Dante Ross, whom he had met through Pete and Serch. The former Rush employee was now working as an artists and repertoire (A&R) rep for Tommy Boy Records.
In heavy rotation on Yo! MTV Raps, the breakout success of “The Gas Face” made it the obvious choice to perform on television when 3rd Bass was invited to appear on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1990. The late-night talk show had only premiered the previous year, but already made for must-see TV among the young, urban demographic at whom it was aimed—the show’s rise coinciding with rap’s steady march toward the mainstream. Consequently, the charismatic host with the teeth-baring grin earned a rep for giving many rappers their first leg up on network TV, where an appearance as his musical guest meant instant exposure nationwide. Crouching inconspicuously on the DJ platform as he waited to drop his verse, Zev was clearly not accustomed to such attention, but performing live helped pull the quiet kid from Long Beach out of his shell.
In addition to Arsenio, he accompanied 3rd Bass to Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater as well as numerous promotional gigs, including their album release party at LA’s Palace Theatre in January 1990. That’s where a photographer captured a shot of him posing with Pete Nice and N.W.A’s Dr. Dre and Eazy-E. In April, when the group kicked off a big arena tour, sharing the bill with Big Daddy Kane and Digital Underground, who brought along a young dancer named Tupac Shakur, Zev was right there in the mix, rhyming in front of packed audiences. “Those shows were fuckin’ crazy, man,” he recalled. “Coliseums in North Carolina type shit—10,000 people. At that time, I was just doing my verse from ‘Gas Face’ for 3rd Bass so I’m only onstage for 16 bars—one minute. Nervous as hell, though. Every time. But as soon as I get offstage it goes away, and the crowd is spinning like, ‘Ohhhhh!’ So those times kinda set it off. In my mind, those were the best times.”1 His journey into the spotlight had been swift and unexpected, thrusting him into the center of a scene of which he was formerly only a fan. “Back then, Kane would come over and we’d kick it with him sometimes,” he added. “I used to talk to Pac a lot. We used to be like the two extra guys going onstage, so we’d be talking backstage and at the hotel about working on our own shit.”2
After “Gas Face,” it was on, according to Serch, who says, “It was like a hundred miles an hour. Like all of a sudden, we were rhyming on the tour bus. We were rhyming with Pac and Shock G in hotels. Everywhere we went, we would rhyme, like everywhere. It was like a broken faucet that once you turned it on, you couldn’t turn it off.” Despite the long hours on the road coupled with the sudden and drastic change of lifestyle, Serch says, “He was still very much a practicing, devout Muslim on the road. He didn’t change. One thing about DOOM, DOOM didn’t change just because of where he went. Now, he might have become more worldly, you know? As we all did, right. We all kind of discovered different shit. And so, it was very much this amazing time.” But behind the novelty and allure of the experience, their youth and naivete helped obscure the fact that they were really nothing more than glorified record-company employees. As much fun as they may have been having, they were hamsters running on the fast-paced wheel of the music industry and, therefore, subject to its dictates.
Rap, like Zev, was growing up, and the former rebel sound of the streets found itself in an awkward adolescence. One indication was that the big boys (i.e., major labels) started paying it serious attention. The Source, formerly a stapled newsletter run out of the dorm room of two Harvard rap fanatics, transformed almost overnight into a thick, glossy monthly with a salaried staff and offices on lower Broadway, thanks to a corporate advertising windfall. The magazine had declared the eighties the “Rap Decade,” charting the art form’s rise from obscurity onto the national stage. But 1990 proved to be a pivotal year, the beginning of what could be considered the battle for the soul of rap. Two distinct camps—mainstream and underground—emerged, continually at odds over the course of the new decade. On one hand, acts like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice dominated the charts with multiplatinum major-label debuts that pulled rap firmly in the direction of pop. But that same year also saw hardcore releases by Ice Cube (AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted), Public Enemy (Fear of a Black Planet), EPMD (Business as Usual), Boogie Down Productions (Edutainment), and Eric B. & Rakim (Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em)—all uncompromising voices who repped the culture to the fullest without selling out.
In between these two poles, artists both new and old were vying for a share of the expanding audience. Some, like Run-DMC and LL Cool J, attempted comeback bids to mixed success. On the West Coast, the seeds of gangsta rap planted by N.W.A continued to flourish through the efforts of Compton’s Most Wanted, Above the Law, and King Tee. Meanwhile, back east, a more cerebral, conscious rap found expression in the works of newcomers like Brand Nubian, Poor Righteous Teachers, X-Clan, and A Tribe Called Quest. Tribe, of course, represented the latest incarnation of the Native Tongues posse, a loose affiliation of like-minded artists who melded streetwise slang and Afrocentric concepts with jazzy, abstract beats. Their initiation into the industry came after appearances on albums by their predecessors, De La Soul and Jungle Brothers. Due to a lack of experienced A&R people familiar with rap, established groups often fulfilled the role of discovering and developing new talent, as 3rd Bass had done with KMD.
Pete and Serch had always intended to put their brothers on, but as it turned out they didn’t have to try too hard. Their old friend Dante Ross, formerly of Rush and Tommy Boy, had recently made the move to Elektra Records, then part of the expansive Warner family along with Atlantic, known collectively as WEA. With the power of the purse behind him, he was actively assembling a top-notch rap roster that included New Rochelle’s Brand Nubian and Leaders of the New School from Uniondale, Long Island. “Even when Dante was at Tommy Boy, I had told him about DOOM and KMD. And then finally, when he went to Elektra and actually had more power, you know, he was always talking about like, ‘Yo, let’s get DOOM. Let’s see what they can do on a demo,’ ” Pete recalls, “So it was already like that. Dante already had the inside track.”
One would imagine that Def Jam had an interest in the group since they first appeared on the label, but according to Pete, “Def Jam would’ve only given like the regular deal of $125,000 and Dante was talking like a much bigger number.” Serch adds, “The only time it became a negotiation is at the very last minute, Tommy Boy offered us more money. We went back to Bob Krasnow and Dante and we’re like, look, just match this deal. We don’t want more money, but we can’t take less money. So just match this deal. And Dante had some feelings about that. Like he thought we were sticking him up, but we weren’t sticking him up.” Elektra wound up playing ball, signing KMD for $250,000 in 1990.
From the perspective of teenagers still in high school, the deal may have seemed like hitting the lotto. But in the music industry, well-known for exploiting artists, things were never as they appeared. After lawyers and management each deducted their 10 to 15 percent fee, the lion’s share of remaining funds went to covering studio costs, paid out in installments. That didn’t leave much left for the artists themselves. But Ross, who described the Dumile brothers as practically twins, who were “really endearing and charming,”3 took them under his wing. In order to save money, he gave them access to a pre-production studio that he and his partners John Gamble and Geeby Dajani—known collectively as Stimulated Dummies (or SD50)—leased in the basement of the Westbeth artists building in Manhattan’s West Village. Working dutifully most nights, they demoed the whole album there over the course of four or five months, before mixing it at Calliope Studios on Thirty-Seventh Street.
Just prior to their signing, Zev added a new third member to the group to relieve him of some of the lyrical duties, as Sub was still mainly focused on production. Unfortunately, their homeboy, Jade One (aka Rodan), had recently been kicked out of high school in Long Beach, so he had to transfer upstate to finish his education. Taking his place was Onyx the Birthstone Kid (Alonzo Hodge), a fellow Muslim youth from the neighborhood, who was not even writing rhymes at the time. Onyx had first bonded with the Dumile brothers following an incident in which he had been chased down the street by a vicious neighborhood mutt. While trying to take refuge at their house to escape getting bit, he accidentally put his hand through a window and badly cut himself. After Sub accompanied him to the hospital to get stitches, Onyx ended up with a friend for life.
Describing the workflow on that first album, Mr. Hood, Zev explained, “Me and Sub would do whatever we could do. It wasn’t necessarily sectioned off. It was really just for fun in a lot of ways. I would dig in the crates, find loops, and come up with a concept. Then, I’d usually get close to finishing it, but I’d be too lazy. I never liked messing with computers or programming drum machines or samplers. I left a lot of beats half done and Sub would come in and finish a lot of them. Onyx was only vocals. He didn’t fuck with the music at all. He added a lot of humor to what we were doing. His angle was ill.”4
While backing up Zev on album cuts like “Mr. Hood at Piocalles Jewelry/Crackpot,” “Who Me?,” “Figure of Speech,” “Bananapeel Blues,” “Trial ’N Error,” “808 Man,” and “Boy Who Cried Wolf,” Onyx appeared on only one solo jam, “Boogie Man!” Sub, who had just started coming into his own on the mic, contributed verses to “Humrush,” the posse cut with Brand Nubian; “Nitty Gritty”; and “Soulflexin’,” while taking a solo turn on “Subroc’s Mission.” The bulk of the production was credited to KMD, except for “Hard Wit No Hoe,” credited to Sub alone, and “Humrush” and “Boogie Man!,” for which SD50 supplied the beats.
On the surface Mr. Hood reveled in tongue-in-cheek humor and inside jokes, but its content actually proved to be much more subversive. “We based the album on the Sesame Street concept, incorporating loads of puppets and learning, which will get kids into it,” Zev explained. “So, we incorporated that humor with education, with confrontation, with touchy subjects that people don’t want to hear about.”5 Case in point, “Who Me?,” in which they go right after racism, is a song that contains samples from a Sesame Street audiobook, Shapes & Colors: Ernie’s Favorites! (Golden Books, 1986). In it, Zev takes exception to the black-faced caricature known as Little Black Sambo, rapping, “Pigment, is this a defect in birth? / Or more an example of the richness on Earth? / Lips and eyes dominant traits of our race / Does not take up 95 percent of one’s face / But still I see, in the back two or three / Ignorant punks pointing at me.” In an ironic twist, however, the group adopted the controversial image of Sambo as their unofficial mascot, who makes a cameo in the song’s video as well as on the album cover. It proved to be a means of redeeming such a racist symbol in the same way that Black people made the N-word into a term of endearment when used among themselves.
More emblematic of the album, however, would be the ubiquitous Mr. Hood, a character whose stiff accent and dialogue, sampled from a Spanish-language instructional record, served as the conceptual glue to tell a larger story. “So, the whole record was based around us schooling him from being this drug dealer type, just dropping little jewels on him, schooling him, bringing him into the crew kinda thing,” Zev explained. “But by the end of the record, he gets it into his skull, he starts being more aware, more conscious of what’s going on.”6
Unlike Sambo, however, Mr. Hood wasn’t just a fictional character, but paid homage to a member of GYP, who had been a friend of the Dumiles since middle school. He earned his nickname by being a neighborhood fixture—that guy who was always in the middle of the action and got along with everybody. “If the ’hood was human,” says GYP’s Uncle E, “he was just the embodiment of that, you know. [He] liked to hang out, liked to be at the house parties and, you know, just having a good time snapping, you know what I mean? He was, like, all the fun things that all the kids liked to do in the hood.” DOOM and Sub thought enough about their friend that they wanted to include his image on the album cover alongside theirs. “I didn’t know I was actually gonna be on the album cover,” says Mr. Hood, “Although they did tell me they was gonna name the album after me. But it kind of went through one ear and out the other, you know?”
Then, one random school day when he happened to be eating lunch, Sub popped his head into the cafeteria. “He was like, ‘Yo, we gotta go.’ I forgot exactly where he said, but he said, ‘Yo, we gotta go to the city.’ And I didn’t think nothing of it, you know, we were always getting into something,” says Mr. Hood. “I was just so happy to see them.” After joining DOOM and Sub in a rented limo, they stopped to pick up some other friends. Next, they made a pit stop at Burger King before proceeding to a photo studio on Twenty-Second Street in Manhattan. Upon arrival, Mr. Hood was dispatched to the makeup room against his will. He wound up arguing with the makeup lady for twenty minutes before finally relenting. “They gave me a hood, ‘Yo just, put this on and take this picture, whatever.’ And I actually didn’t like that hoodie they had on me, I was like, ‘Yeah, I could’ve brought my own,’ ” he says. “The next thing you know they show me the album cover, like a week after. I just was like, wow, I couldn’t believe it. It still didn’t like sink in.”
The cover of the Mr. Hood album featured a vintage, black-and-white photo of kids playing hopscotch on a Harlem street in the fifties, taken by renowned street photographer Arthur Leipzig. He was still alive when contacted for permission for its use, and enthusiastic about his work being reimagined for a new audience. In the era before Photoshop, art director Carol Bobolts had to manually doctor the original to include color photos of the three group members posing in the background with Mr. Hood’s face in the foreground—a study in contrasts. She used a special Scitex printer, found only at HBO Studios, to achieve such a distinctive look. A cartoon graphic of Zev’s hand-drawn Little Black Sambo with a red line through his face adorned the top right-hand corner, while the letters “KMD” were superimposed to look like colored chalk on the hopscotch board. Though he couldn’t claim credit for finding the photo, Zev was probably drawn to it for the same reasons that Leipzig clicked the shutter—it captured the innocence of youth, a magical time to which there was no going back.
While working on the album’s lead single, “Peachfuzz,” DOOM and Sub got an assist from their younger brother Dimbaza, who was only fourteen at the time. Like the Three Musketeers, they had come up together as B-boys, with Dim always in the orbit of his elder brothers, whether engaged in deejaying, writing graffiti, breakdancing, or rhyming. They developed an informal system of passing on skills, according to Dim, whereby, “Sub will always be the learner and then make DOOM the one who’s a student when he comes home and then they’ll bring me into it and make sure I’m just a backup who also knows. And it always worked that way.” Despite not being an official member of the group, Dim contributed in any way he could while they were working on the album. “My brothers practically gave me the assignment to just stay open to hearing shit, stay open to whatever sounds dope,” he says.
At the time, he was involved in a group of his own with his best friend Lou, a Puerto Rican kid from the neighborhood. While messing around one day, Dim recalls, “We sampling, we checking loops at Lou’s house for our shit. And as soon as we heard the ‘Peachfuzz [sample] we looked at each other and was like, ‘Yo, that was dope!’ We knew that it was too dope for our little garage band project that doesn’t have any traction, no labels interested. We were like, all right, we gotta bring this over to my brothers.” The sample in question, which featured a smooth bossa nova beat punctuated by a melodic piano, was lifted from the opening bars of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (Columbia Records, 1967) by O.C. Smith, a singer probably best known for recording “Little Green Apples,” one of the breakout hits of 1968.
“We was like, ‘Yo, check this out. Y’all gotta hear this. This is dope. What do you think?’ ” says Dim. “And they played it and they was, like, ‘Yo! yeah.’ That’s when we learned that they were trying to find a beat for the song. They just had the concept, the idea, and knew that that was gonna be the first single.” Pairing the piano sample with another drum loop from O. C. Smith’s “Sounds of Goodbye” (CBS, 1969), KMD came up with the most memorable track on the album. A metaphor for the transition between childhood and adulthood, “Peachfuzz” signaled that they were growing up, and that life was no longer simply fun and games as responsibilities beckoned.
The video for “Peachfuzz,” which debuted on December 5, 1990, on MTV and BET’s Rap City, portrayed a daily slice of life for the members of KMD. As adherents of the Ansaaru Allah Community, they were dressed in all-white robes and turbans, selling incense and educational pamphlets on the streets. Despite their supervisor’s reminder to “Be humble,” they couldn’t repress their teen spirit, comparing themselves to rap stars in magazines and trying to impress girls. Incidentally, one of these girls was Zev’s real-life girlfriend at the time and eventually the mother of his first child. Of course, 3rd Bass made an obligatory cameo—this time with Serch sporting a “KMD” carved into the back of his fade—as did Grand Puba Maxwell, of Elektra labelmates Brand Nubian, playing the xylophone. “Peachfuzz” represented a kinder, gentler, more playful style of rap, not designed for dancing, making a statement, or trying to call attention to itself, but compelling and exciting just the same.
The only other single to merit a video was “Who Me?,” released on April 24, 1991. Featuring more of the same shots of Ansaars selling incense and KMD clowning with friends and riding BMX bikes, it also introduced their Sambo character, played by someone dressed in a costume resembling a sports team’s mascot. Once again, KMD proactively employed humor to deflect any hint of controversy. In a bizarrely prophetic twist, the video also showed the group rapping under a street sign that read “KMD Street,” which would not become a reality until 2021, after the passing of both DOOM and Sub.
Mr. Hood came into the world on May 14, 1991, the same day as albums by De La Soul (De La Soul Is Dead) and Ice-T (O.G. Original Gangster). Only two weeks later, N.W.A’s much-anticipated Niggaz4Life debuted at number two on the Billboard Top 200 before claiming the top spot the following week. Compared to such high-profile competition, Mr. Hood barely registered a reaction, reaching number sixty-seven on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop albums chart, though “Peachfuzz,” the album’s most successful single, peaked at number eleven on the Hot Rap songs chart. Regardless of mainstream perceptions, The Source, then the sole arbiter of taste in hip-hop circles, gave it a 4 (out of 5) mic review—equivalent to a very affirmative thumbs up. In a longer feature about the group, they called it, “One of the most innovative and original albums since [A Tribe Called Quest’s] People’s Instinctive Travels.”7 By the hairs of their chinny chin chin, KMD had arrived.