Two of Rap’s Great Oddballs | On Madvillainy

By Sam Hockley-Smith

Picture it: Otis Jackson Jr.—more widely known as the producer Madlib—sitting in his window seat thousands of miles in the sky, surrounded by sleeping passengers. Maybe his shade is cracked open just enough to let stars shine through, casting light on a Discman playing an album’s worth of music he’s made that not a single member of the general public has heard yet. If you already know the story, you know what happens next: he lands in Brazil, where someone, somehow gets ahold of that CDR and leaks it on the internet. The album on that CDR is a version of Madvillainy, a long-gestating collaboration between Madlib and the rapper/producer MF DOOM.

Although Madlib and DOOM had both achieved plenty in their careers by the time Madvillainy was officially released in 2004, the album is a perfect combination of these two oddball artists’ predilections: a lo-fi, almost punk approach to production; grainy recordings from old cartoons; a love of weed, beer, and more weed; and insular, internal rhymes that eschew conventional song structure as we understand it. On top of that, both had already developed rabid fanbases who were fiending for the official album after enjoying the leak. That fan expectation quickly gave way to a cult aura nurtured and cultivated on rap message boards, around prehistoric vaporizers in dorm rooms, and beyond. In other words, a lot of people really wanted to buy the album in a way that neither the label—Stones Throw—nor the artists could have anticipated. But what was Stones Throw supposed to do? The leak came early enough in the history of filesharing that there was no blueprint for them to follow. Should they have officially released what had leaked? Should they have shelved it forever?

Whatever the case, Madlib and DOOM already had other plans. The pair simply started the whole thing over again, creating the version of Madvillainy now enshrined on streaming services, wax, and CD. Making music that eventually gets deemed classic is a complicated matter. Everyone’s part, no matter how small, factors into the creation. But there are major players, too. And when they’re unwilling (Madlib is generally reticent to do interviews) or unable (DOOM passed away in 2020) to set the record straight, we’re left to construct a narrative from the bits available to us. Truth is subjective anyway. It’s the perception of art that matters.

Will Hagle’s book Madvillainy—the latest in the 33 1/3 series of small books about iconic albums—seeks to tell an untellable story. It’s not a definitive document of Madvillainy because no definitive document could ever exist. Instead, it’s a cult object. It feels like it should be passed around college campuses, frayed cover, pages annotated to the point of illegibility, marked, folded, water-warped and stained, its own sort of talisman.

As Hagle writes early in the book, Madvillainy “straddled the analog and digital eras while exceeding expectations of both.” The observation sets up an important conceit: from the second it was conceived, this album existed outside of time. It didn’t engage with musical trends so much as it circumvented them entirely. More magic happened when public expectation and preconceived notions about hip-hop and art butted heads, conjuring lore from blunted philosophizing over Soulseek leaks in bong rip-choked air at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For that reason, at least in part, it’s nearly impossible to construct an official Madvillainy history.

So Hagle’s book features zero direct quotes from either artist. Then again, it doesn’t need them. Each 33 1/3 book tends to be hit or miss, and success seems to be largely dependent on the reader’s personal relationship to the album being written about. Even with that caveat in place, Hagle’s Madvillainy is one of the best of the series because it jettisons the stale rules of music writing (no forced canonization needed here!) in favor of a narrative structure that echoes the album’s aesthetics.

Instead of relying on an omniscient third-person narrator, Hagle calls upon three fictional journalists: Dr. Truthaverse, The Seen, and Timothy A.I. Verselli. This choice mirrors Madvillainy’s canny use of alter-egos and lyrical turns of phrase to obfuscate the truth. It also highlights the deep ties hip-hop—especially the hip-hop that Madlib and DOOM made together and separately—has to the ever-expanding pop culture universe: Saturday morning cartoons, old comic books, inside jokes and rambling, weed-head philosophizing. How else can you explain how a perma-stoned musical genius and a trickster rapper trying to outrun death and pain created one of the great rap albums of all time?

The result is not dissimilar to Jonathan Lethem’s great New York novel Fortress of Solitude. Like Lethem, Hagle imbues just enough magical realism into his text to keep things surprising. In that sense, Hagle’s writing is generous: it recognizes not just where Madvillainy sits in the hip-hop tapestry, but also the music industry as a whole. If you’re looking for the definitive oral history of the making of the album, keep looking. But if you’re looking for an infectious celebration of creativity and a glimpse into two minds who shared a deep, pure love of music, then you’ll be able to marinate in these pages, celebrating an album with a reputation larger than its actual sound.

Hagle gives us important insights into the unpredictable, sometimes mundane nature of Madlib’s and DOOM’s artistry. Take this anecdote, my favorite in the entire book: while Madlib was constantly making beats pretty much everywhere he went, he made the bulk of Madvillainy by working traditional hours at a rented house in LA’s Mount Washington neighborhood. Everyday from 8 or 9 AM to 5 or 6 PM, Madlib “clocked in” (smoked weed), then made beats until it was time to go home.

Amidst the moments of concrete insight about artistic process, Hagle’s narrative has cloaked the album’s story in obvious fictions to better emphasize the impact of the album. Even if he hadn’t, DOOM’s and Madlib’s music—which creates a musical world all its own from crusty samples, off-kilter drums, and a sense of musical lawlessness that leaves you wondering why every artist doesn’t break every rule all the time—invites an intensely personal response. So even the quotes from players involved in the making of Madvillainy should be taken with a grain of salt. That’s not to say anyone is lying. When you’ve had a hand in making an album that’s now considered a classic, everyone’s involvement, no matter how small, is suddenly imbued with a level of magical thinking. Do we really want to hear about how DOOM and Madlib sent files back and forth on burned CDRs? Or would we rather imagine two of rap’s great oddballs forging a connection in a secluded house in the hills of Mount Washington, collaborating not in a quixotic effort to create a classic album but simply in service of their art?

Bolstering this narrative, Hagle opts to dive deep into both Madlib’s and DOOM’s origin stories. Long before Madvillainy was even a gleam in their eyes, both men were working against the prevailing forces of the hip-hop industry to push themselves into new creative territories.

In his early years, MF DOOM (then known as Zev Love X) and his brother Subroc made music as the group KMD, recording playful, subversive tracks with a dark edge lurking just under the surface. Subroc’s untimely death damaged his brother’s psyche so dramatically that Zev Love X disappeared from the public eye for years. When he returned, it was with an approach to beatmaking that sounded like he was recording samples right off a TV and into his MPC, an alter ego, a mask that existed somewhere between Marvel’s Doctor Doom and the faceplates from Russell Crowe’s Gladiator, and a penchant for on-stage trickery and antics of obfuscation that prompted the question: “Is the guy performing right in front of me actually MF DOOM or just another mask-wearing dude lip-syncing MF DOOM’s lyrics?” He added to this air of mystery by promising albums that would never, ever see the light of day, an affinity for selling the same beats to different artists, and an obsession with adopting an endless stream of alter egos that were always in conversation with each other.

Similarly, Madlib’s career has been filled with announcements for albums that never materialized. He also deploys multiple alter egos to disguise the fact that he’s playing the part of an entire band, or jumping into genres he’s not naturally associated with. Basically, Madlib seems to be disinterested in anything but forward momentum; if he revisits something, it’s only to offer up a remix or take a new angle. Hagle nails this creative streak in one of my favorite passages in Madvillainy: “Madlib doesn’t want to be Seen. He doesn’t necessarily want to be heard. He wants to hear music. So he can listen to it, and make it better, so he can listen to something else.” Madlib devours music. Not literally, of course, but close. Since Madlib denies us access to himself and his process, how else can we talk about the thousands upon millions of beats he’s made—the ones he’s probably making right now that we will never hear, the ones that the Biggest Name in Rap might pass over, only to be relegated to a decaying external harddrive or a packed-to-the-brim cloud server?

But what about Madvillainy itself? As Hagle reminds us, it’s an album with virtually no hooks. It’s also an album that includes a track called “Accordion,” built on an “accordion sample” that does not feature an actual accordion. It’s an album so full of inside jokes and references that it exists in conversation with nothing but its own insularity. Madvillainy’s success is a testament to what happens when brilliant minds grant us access to their world but can’t be bothered to act as guides. The best way to enjoy the album, or Hagle’s book, is to trust the artists—to allow yourself to be in on their joke.

By the time I realized I was in on it, Madlib and DOOM were both in the habit of announcing still-unreleased albums, and there were rumors floating around that DOOM was sending imposters to perform shows in his stead. In the early 2000s, I bought a ticket to see MF DOOM perform in my hometown of Seattle. I drove the ninety minutes from my college in Olympia, Washington just to see him. He didn’t show at all. I tried it again a year or so later. A man in an MF DOOM mask took the stage. He seemed thinner. The whole thing felt slightly off in that intangible way that feels like a dream but isn’t. At the end of his short set—we’re talking fifteen to twenty minutes max—the crowd seemed bewildered. What had they seen? Was it the real DOOM? If it wasn’t, did that make the set less good? Looking back now, I barely remember the show itself. I couldn’t tell you how it sounded or who opened. I couldn’t tell you if DOOM or the Approximate Version of DOOM was any good. But I do remember that no one could be sure it was even him, and that the uncertainty was so pervasive it didn’t really matter if it was or was not him. In a way, not-knowing whether we’d seen DOOM perform was a more enjoyable experience than seeing him actually perform. I felt like now I was part of a secret club. Those of us who witnessed this imposter-not-imposter performance were all in it together. The moment was mine. The moment was theirs. The moment was ours.

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