I was finally starting to understand that I had a choice between fighting to be the loudest voice in the circle or fading into the background while the better voice took the limelight. It wasn’t an eventful year turning thirteen, but things started to shift. I had finally made friends, but I also learned that you could lose them if you spoke out. I recognized my place in the social hierarchy, knowing the popular girl everyone had a crush on wouldn’t take interest in a kid with pimples and spiked hair. I was embarrassed when my teacher would later anonymously read a fictional story to my writing class about the romantic musings of a confident kid who was gentlemen that ended with him going on a date with said fictional girl. I imagined this account of myself as the hero in the story, but I thought about how cheap it was to allow myself to have a happy ending. But the reality was I wore baggy clothes with a knack for shoes and highlighted lack of approach. I didn’t know how to talk to girls, let alone anyone outside of my friend circle. I was flustered when I was asked a question and was expected to answer. I felt like a weirdo. So when rejection was imminent, I did what any sensitive kid would do. I listened to music. Only this time, I went searching for something different.
When I was 4, I watched my older sister and brother work through the process of recording music videos on VHS tapes, which would result in a visual collage of hip hop music. We lived in Bremerton, Washington during the time, and it rained a lot. There wasn’t much to do but watch TV and work on projects. Perhaps, to them, this was both. As they continuously wound the VHS tape back and forth, they were careful to choose a moment of the VHS to ‘STOP’ at. This act was important for flow so that way the music video the tape cut at would seamlessly blend into the next one, albeit a few static lines rushing their way down the screen to indicate the endurance of the tape. The lost art of seamlessly blending one recorded video to the next, which was all based on one’s taste in hip hop. For years, that tape defined my music taste as a kid. I would pop it into the player, and I digest the lasting legacy that my siblings left behind. It consisted of artists they both loved: Aaliyah, Tupac, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, Tamia. I had known and loved this era for a long time, but overly dramatic teenaged heartbreak tricked me into thinking it was okay to dispose of old feelings in search of new ones. I wanted to listen to something for myself.
As a military brat living in Gricignano di Aversa, Italy (a comune north of Naples), I didn’t have a record store to go to. I had the Naval Exchange (NEX for you civilians). The NEX is the one-stop-for-all shopping center that had all of your needs. Oftentimes, family shopping trips at NEX always ended in the Software and Electronics, where the CDs were located. My brother worked at this section of the NEX before leaving for college. The summer he left, I spent the months searching for underground hip hop on Limewire on the his older computer. Some artists downloaded includes Binary Star, Genelec and Memphis Reigns, Immmortal Technique, Murs, and a bevy of other names. I had also found a bunch of tracks under the name MF DOOM. Maybe it was the guilt of downloading that compelled me to start buying albums, but there was no denying the fact that he had a lot more tracks on Limewire than the artists I had initially listened to. For that reason, his presence stuck with me. It felt right to buy his record and give it a chance. By not downloading his catalog, it felt like I unknowingly gave myself the option to go into his music with a clean slate. I had no idea how his voice sounded like, no idea what he looked like, and no idea who produced his instrumentals. All I knew was that he wore a mask.
When I got to Software and Electronics, I went to the rap section ‘M’ and furiously searched for an CD with a mask on it. Any one of them would do. Just like that, the internet gap closed, and I found a physical copy of Mm…Food. I kept it clutched in my hands the way one walks down the avenue with a prized book. I continued to look for other artists I had seen on Limewire, but I had no luck. I bought the CD with the allowance I had saved up. I nodded to a few people that knew my brother then left to go home and listen to the CD. (I would repeat this process of CD searching a year later when DangerDoom released, which I also bought and consumed immediately.)
The first listen of Mm…Food provided me with the antidote for my heartbreak. I don’t know what synthesia is, but I envisioned his music akin to being in a dark forest and stumbling upon a hidden science experiment where lots of pink ooze start to corrode the roots of the trees that stood tall. It almost felt like a stab at the conventions of the traditional hip hop I was listening to, but something that sounded like an experiment that had no real synthesis and conclusion and kept on going as long as the mad scientist stayed up through the night. I stray from the word abstract, because MF DOOM’s music was already fully formed the moment I got the “Vomitspit.” I didn’t know it then, but I had finally found a voice that vindicated being a weirdo, one that would lead me to force upon friends the legend of the supervillain. His craft made me consider words as a carefully set of meanings that are created in one’s mind to evoke a set of feelings, questions, and scrutiny to some of life’s most meaningful and inane conundrums. It’s almost as if his words were the bubbling solution in a beaker and the production was the beaker attempting to contain the solution from bursting.
MF DOOM’s legacy is subjective to the listener, but I believe it’s highlighted by his invitation for participation, contextualization, disruption, and execution of what is possible as an artist. Moreover, he invites the listener to participate in his music and find dynamic meaning in what he has put together. By that same token, to think about his fallout with the hip hop industry only to come back even stronger should be a philosophical thesis on resilience guided by a strict belief in process. (In other words, this is my cheap way of implementing his approach to the work I’ve done in a library or archive – to treat each task as creatively as possible and to widen the audience in an attempt to let people in on the secret. This, of course, is done by disrupting canon, gatekeeping mentalities, and privilege.)
What strikes me about the legacy of an artist is their ability to find spaces in obscure places, collections, or environments. I wasn’t supposed to find MF DOOM’s music in Italy on a military base with other kids interested in hip hop as much as I was. But there’s truth in gravitation and that we take notice of anything or anybody out of the ordinary. Some people have the mystique and charisma to draw you in. Their genius is unspoken. Sadly, it is often times we acknowledge it after they have passed or they have done something extraordinary. Maybe his genius was the paradox of limelight. The moment one steps away from it, we want more. We want access to their art. We want to hear their voice, see their progress, and connect with them. I’m guilty of this. I long for the days where finding things was as easy as going to the store and being able to pick up a new record. It’s too much a headache to pay for flipped records in the wake of an artist’s death. It makes me question if legacy is about the profitability of one’s art after they passed or the buried messages and connections of what led to them achieving their masterpiece. Again, the supervillain has left me with more questions than answers. Is art tangible? Is it a lived experience? Does it belong to the audience or the artist?
As MF DOOM planted the seed for his manifesto as a supervillain, he proselytized a generation of creatives into a cult that listened to his message and took from it the ability to explore their own artistic terrains without compromising a message. His ability to function under the guise of King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn, DOOM, Metal Fingers showed his versatility, subverting the notions of the identity and opening the discussion of what the mask truly means. I think of it as our chance to wear the mask and deny any ideas that we’re more than outside perception and scrutiny. We all should be in the lab, reviewing the blueprint, and hatching up the plot to realize our voice.
For the meantime, I’ll be daydreaming of a memory. It’s fall. I’ve had some time to settle into being thirteen. I’m on a tour bus in the middle of the Croatian country side on a trip with my mother. With headphones on, I look outside at the ravine that flows along the highway. The valley is covered in green and it glistens after an afternoon shower. It’s my first time listening to Doomsday, and visions of “Red and Gold” as I sit and watch nature in its limelight from beyond the window view.
*
“All hail the king and give him three cheers, fam,” Subroc and King Malachi said. They welcome him back to the lab. Instead of going straight to work, he sits in his chair. He is in the background, away from the plane of human existence where we mourn his passing. Fools he thinks. His trusty comrades ask him, “What’s next, DOOM?” DOOM takes his mask off. Something is different. Once full of laughter, he thinks of the magic trick he pulled off. He answers. “Transition.”
Daniel “MF DOOM” Dumile, January 9, 1971 – October 31, 2020. Brother, Husband, Father, Supervillain.
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