Ode to DOOM
The video for ‘Guv’nor’ has the track laid over it without much in the way of fanfare. A wicked trombone, I guesstimate, thrums from behind what I can only describe as the sinister jangle of stolen jewels. There’s a flute somewhere in there, serenading the return of an unprecedented musical force. When the rapper appears, mask first, it’s in disjointed form: pieced together from two separate but mildly reconcilable dimensions. The camera shakes, the beat heightens, at this doctored feat of quantum mechanics. You think to yourself, as I did, This is the moment in a super-hero movie, hell, any movie, in which the determined villain first announces himself to the world with one swift act of terror, spandex glistening in the moonlight. You think to yourself, This is quite the sound to attempt to spit a bar to. You think to yourself, Holy shit: This is my new favourite rapper.
DOOM marches towards the screen, towards you, with a pair of equally disjointed verses, with cosmic baby-steps out the vortex you and commercial music have tried and failed to trap him in. In one song, a little over two minutes long, he compares himself to an unpronounceable volcano in Iceland; shits on the global economy’s tried-and-trusted means of cleaning up after itself every so often; and anticipates a world in which you would consider trading your “cutest daughter” for food and a couple gallons of water. “Get the machine, blame it on the fireworks/Clean-up, y’all know where to send the wire, jerks …” This manner of wordplay does something I personally long for not just in gangsta rap, but in black creativity: it transcends institutional oppression, and purports to assume control of the universe. There are narrative entries, up and down hip-hop’s sprawling mythology, about how to rob (50 Cent), how to operate a medium-sized cocaine dealership (Clipse), and how to win a turf war on multiple fronts (Nas). There are almost none, on how you hijack a people’s consciousness.
“DOOM out the vortex/To your neocortex,” the masked villain raps, smooth as butter, on the Internet’s best-known evidence of any collaboration with Jay Electronica: the genre’s only other prominent dabbler in cosmic consideration. None of this, neither the in-video theatrics nor the wayward lyricism, works without a campaign strategy.
If you’re only just hopping aboard the DOOM train, because the man has exited this galaxy as stealthily as he entered it, it would be a mistake to try and canvas the anthology - which exists across various guises, calls on various collaborators. All of it is a musical experiment, but all of it fits into the idea DOOM has of himself as primary antagonist; a scourge from the underworld whose schemes are too delicious and too impossible for the mainstream culture to ignore. The mask, he once said, was so all you ever focused on was the music. Did the kooky new beat work? Did you catch, fuck it, the quadruple-entendre? Did you embark, thus, on a more enlightened, willingly dangerous journey into the self?
I could go on and on about rhyme structure, about what DOOM does or doesn’t intend on any one track, within any one lyric. When DOOM indulges in braggadocio, he’s never addressing some rival in the pursuit of material wealth or female adoration. His narrative voice is almost always that of a hostage-taker on the other end of a phone-line, or a black hole that wants to dip your entire planet in its dessert, or a simple man, limbs and all, that still needs to work to convince himself he can defeat time, space, gravity.
“Goony goo goo, loony cuckoo, Like Gary Gnu off New Zoo Revue/ but who knew the mask had a loose screw?”
I mean … who the fuck even dares?
No one’s going to say it out loud, because the underground champions its kings all by itself; but DOOM transcends genre the way Kanye West wishes constantly (and now tragically) that he could. DOOM is why a fair amount of truly explorative hip-hop listeners derive no value from J. Cole: because you can jigsaw together far too many of Cole’s lines before he raps them, and you can just about fathom DOOM’s. A talent like Kendrick Lamar achieves this on guest appearances alone, unpredictability, but doesn’t possess nearly the same level of mystique to spark endless, scholarly, mushroomy discussion as to what it all means.
Jay Electronica doesn’t have a mask: a symbol for us to rally around, a face we can all wear.
