MF DOOM

by Douglas Passion

For those keeping track at home, we published the first part of the MF Doom interview trill-ogy about a week and a half ago. If you missed it, go back and read the previous jammy now. It's even got an intro to assist you in getting your mottled domepiece in the right frame of mind. Otherwise, continue on, as we discuss Dr. Zizmor, Doom's forthcoming album with Ghostface and even try to work out a Noam Chomsky-esque marketing plan.

As far as references go, you namedrop people like Dr. Zizmor [a dermatologist whose ads are famous on the subways]. Are those floating around in your head all the time, or do you watch TV and pick up a weird name and file it?

Usually it’s something I was thinking about for a long time. Like particularly, Dr. Zizmor, like you said. On the subway, in New York City, at the time, they had the advertisements that’s right above where you’re sitting. I don’t know how much dough he paid, but Zizmor had the shit sewed up, as far as advertising, for years. I’m going uptown, coming back downtown, so I kinda see his name. But then also, the way I come up with it is New Yorker shit. So, Dr. Zizmor? Aight, fine. Go see Dr. Zizmor, he gonna pick your skin up. So Zizmor, what does it rhyme with? Every time I find a weird word, I’m going to try to rhyme it with something. It’s natural, it just comes to me like that. The more weirder the word sounds, there’s gotta be something that can go with that and be funny. That one came out like that. Zizmor.

Getting into that a bit, when I listen to your old lyrics, you had an intricate flow, but it’s not like it is now. You have a devotion to rattling off syllables. How did that style develop?

It’s just a update -- it’s constantly going to switch. I’m like, “Okay, how could I make it iller?” What are the key points? I’m constantly looking for the key points in eliminating every extra; as I’m refining, I’m bringing out more of the thing that makes it ring – whatever the flow is. There’s something in rhyming that makes people want to hear it. It’s not like you’re just talking on a beat, so it must be somewhere in it. It’s the flow of the rhyme or something. But there’s extra things you don’t need in it either. There’s a lot of the English language you can cut out. You can slang it, you can twist it. So I’m like, “Whatever I don’t need, I’m taking out.” I’m putting in just the core of whatever brings the appeal to a person rhyming. As I broke it down now, it comes to the point where it’s just syllablistic references where the more syllables in the rhyming words the better – if you can make them all rhyme with the previous rhyming words. But there’s something about the frame of reference. American culture has a lot of frame of references that we can all kinda relate to. So, based on how society is structured with the TV and the witty programs we all seen and grew up to and can relate to from a certain generation, if you mix that with the appeal of “How you put those words together?” or “How’d you think of that?”, that’s just the trick to it. So I try to find new and better ways to do the same trick with less filler.

Who are some other emcees you look at as dudes who string words together really well? Paul Barman does it pretty well.

Yeah, Paul is sick with it. Like, forget it. What? Yo! I think he’s too sick with it. People aren’t going to recognize how ill until later. He’s one of the illest, now that you mention him. Of course, Nas. He’s one of the kings of that; he was one of the early ones who was doing it -- or recognized it -- and started really using it. That’s the mark of a true emcee – you fuck with words for real. You ain’t just trying to be on TV, or in style, or making money. That’s cool too, but it’s definitely a difference between emcees and rap motherfuckers. An emcee is the one that will fuck with the words and come and spit that shit and it will fuck with you like how he seen it would fuck with you ahead of time. It’s almost similar to a comedian, how he’ll sit back and know that shit’ll be funny before people heard it. But he’s putting it together in a way that, when you hear it in a succession of jokes, you laugh in a pattern that he predicted. So I give it to Nas, he knows what he doing when it comes to that. Rakim is one of the great starters of that whole technique of wordplay, really going into it and not just rocking the party. He’d go into the wordplay and keep doing it, like do it for the whole album, educated rapper-type style shit. But then you got Just Ice, another ill emcee from back then.

I felt like Lord Finesse doesn’t get a lot of credit for doing it either.

That’s another one too, yup. There’s a bunch of us out there. It don’t get as much shine as some of the other stuff, but I think it needs to be like that. You gotta dig deep to find the good shit.

There are rappers who have classics album that have just gotten into multiple syllables within the last few years.

It’s a constant, you can go with it forever. Language is gonna change. There’s words that we don’t even use no more, words from the ‘40s, ‘50s, so everything goes 360. We bringing them back too and flipping ‘em. Even slang from the early ‘80s that young cats right now done forgot about or never even heard. So I’ll spit them joints and cats be like, “What you meant when you said that?” It almost brings slang back and keeps things remembered.

Some of your stuff sounds almost like 1940’s gangster shit.

Oh, yeah. That’s funny to me, ‘cause that’s my field right now. I’m really into how they used to talk back then in America. It almost reminds me of slang now, it’s as ill. So we can’t forget about that.

Do you watch old movies just from the linguistic perspective?

Sometimes I’ll do that, sometimes I’ll read. Most comes from reading, just researching words.

Speaking of colorful words, let’s get into the full project with Ghostface again. What’s the progress on that?

Well, it’s coming along. There’s no way to really say. It’s like, to me, in my mind, it’s already done. We got all the beats we gonna use. I already know how it’s gonna come out -- but then again, I don’t know how it’s gonna come out. But it’s coming, put it like that. It’s going to be that shit.

I’d heard that you were going to be more involved in the beats than the rhymes on the project.

You never know ‘til the end of it. It’s early in the game, but right now, I’m definitely producing the whole shit, probably 95 percent of it, unless we hear another beat from somebody that’s ill while we’re doing the project. We ain’t going to go solicit beats from motherfuckers, but there’s cats that we fuck with. If it’s somebody in the family that come with an ill beat, alright, we gotta throw that on. Other than that, I’m producing the whole shit. As an emcee, so far, it’s half and half. But I don’t know, Ghost, he’s definitely really, really good comp. He’s the kind of motherfucker that keeps you on your toes. So I don’t know, he might have more rhymes than me. I might be like, “That’s a wrap." I might can it. [chuckles] But I’m trying to keep up with him right now.

He’s another guy whose style has adapted. He sings along with hooks now and uses multiple syllables.

Yup, it does back to the old school style. Like Slick Rick, with how he used to do the singing style. Hip-Hop is coming back to a phase where the shit is starting to come back around. The corny shit is really starting to fade, it’s starting to lose its luster. Fake chains start to turn green after a while, people start noticing that shit.

In terms of artistic integrity, you pretty much stay in your lane. But we’ve seen you on records with Gorillaz or with De La – have bigger labels tried to hit you up? How would they work with you?

That’s a good question. To me, you can’t sign me. The only way you can find me is if you got the paper; so usually they tempt you with the paper and there’s some other hitch to it. They want you to do this. So anybody with any intention of wanting anything other than giving me my paper and letting me do my thing, you ain’t gonna find me. There’s no way to sign me. I haven’t heard about no labels really trying to do it like that. But I’m like this; whatever makes it major –everybody in the world hear it – everybody can hear it still without it being on any particular label. So what makes a major label really a major label if it’s not the broadness of your spectrum or how many people you can get you music to? If that’s the case, we get our music to the whole world too. So it ain’t no difference.

If you were an A&R doing an MF Doom project on a big label, how the hell do you market it?

Hmmm.

Can you put Doom with Chingy over a Scott Storch beat?

You’d have to do something with colleges or the grass roots level or some Noam Chomsky-type shit. Have him speaking on panels. That’s the only way to market it, from the intelligent aspect of it or the wordplay aspect of it. Or the theater aspect. You couldn’t come from the propaganda aspect. It wouldn’t work at all. You’d burn yourself out instantly with the mask factored into it. That’s another reason why these cats isn’t getting at me – the only thing they do is market shit and sell shit that you have to put propaganda on to sell. Nothing has to do with music. The way to do it though, to a smart A&R, they could G-off right now. Sign him for a few mil or whatever and come from the angle of the theater. Go back to the performance aspect, the art of it. The intellectual aspect, the words -- the etymology of it, the history of words. The way that everybody’s the same, but different at the same time. We’re all intermingled. Hit from the college aspect, the children at that learning level. That would be the way to do it.

Stay tuned for part three, which we have creatively dubbed: "Part III".