Goff's Pick the Week- Madvilliany by Madvillain

Have you ever seen a super hero show on TV, read a comic or seen a movie with masked heroes and caped villians and thought gee I wish I could do that? Well Madvillian takes that concept to another plain. Now I admit that I’m a little behind in the times with this one, but in the case of Madvilliany, a collaboration between rapper MF DOOM and producer Madlib, late is way way better than never. Madvilliany was released in 2004, and almost eight years later the album is still as hard hitting and as ballsy as it ever was. In case you don’t know, MF DOOM is a rapper who hides behind a mask, he is the alternate persona of   Daniel Dumile a rapper with a past who was rising on the underground rap scene until the untimely death of his brother. The same week that his brother was struck by a car and killed, Dumile’s band was dropped from their record company because of a controversial album cover that prevented his second album from being released. After living on the street for some time, and in true comic book fashion, Dumile began rapping anonymously and vowed revenge against the music industry that took everything he had away from him, donning a silver mask similar to that of the Marvel super-villain Doctor Doom.

While Dumile’s origin story is enough to stand on its own, DOOM is only one half of the Madvillian puzzle, the other of course being Madlib. Madlib produced the record Madvilliany and lays down beats and samples that range from being excessively weird and difficult to rap over to exceptional and show stealing. He even contributes his voice to the record singing under the guise of Quasimodo, an alias that he used in his early days. The samples take a sometimes comedic take on DOOMs persona and how such an imposing real life figure could be perceived in the media. The opening and closing tracks both feature news cast esque samples describing the role villain’s play in modern stories and in life, how they are dark reflections of ourselves, and how Madvilliany are the worst of them all. But what is almost more impressive about Madvilliany is how well Madlib’s production shines. When a group or in this case a collaboration has a front man with personality it can be difficult for less outspoken members (or at least members who never speak on the record) to really shine. The fact that Madlib has more than once drawn my attention away from DOOM’s lyrics without completely usurping the ebb and flow of the record is amazing. Producing an album with the intention of having a rapper as skilled as DOOM over top of it and still getting noticed is equivalent to how good Brain May had to be to get noticed in a band where Freddy Mercury is the lead singer. It’s hard to imagine this album working as well as it does without Madlib, the beats just work, the samples are brilliant, thrown in combination with DOOMs persona and rapping style this album represents a super villain team up that would make the Fantastic Four cringe.

On top of that the lyrics and the themes that run through Madvilliany are all quite good. On tracks like All Caps, Money Folder and Rhinestone Cowboy, DOOM comes alive and spins some really insane rhymes. Dumile is very clever in some of the verses that he creates, often ending lines with long names to rhyme with long strings of words. As someone who has only started to enjoy rap; the verses that DOOM crafts were exceedingly enjoyable to listen to and instantly gratifying for me. They often are parodies of traditional rap, in a way DOOM is the embodiment of what rap is all about, he is bigger than life, flashy and  dangerous a terror to the neighborhood, but at the same time he is misunderstood, someone who has suffered greatly.

Another thing that Dumile does to flesh out the character of DOOM is indirect characterization. He shows how other people perceive DOOM through the eyes of his arch nemesis' Victor Vaughn (Vince's evil cousin/in comics, Doctor Dooms full name is Victor von Doom) and King Ghidorah the golden space dragon from Godzilla. These two characters play off of DOOM devilishly well, trying to thwart him at every turn but never succeeding.  All three characters have different distinct personalities. What’s more the three characters are all still voiced by Dumile, which lends itself to an interpretation of the work that DOOM, Victor Vaughn, and King Ghidorah all exist as entities in Dumile’s head. This adds a certain level of psychological depth to all of his records but  thanks to Madlib Madvilliany especially. It is hard to separate the character from the real man, making Dumile the real life super villain that we love to root for, a clever and sometimes campy caricature of what our childhood heroes would be like if acted out in real life.