Daniel Dumile died in October, 2020. Rest in peace, DOOM.

MF DOOM is one of my favorite artists. Verbose, villainous, venomous, and variegated, he wrote perfectly-crafted spitball lyrics, sounding crooked when straight, inhabiting this limnal space between ludicrous and lasvicious. He was an oddball writer, sampling rhyme schemes, references, and rhythms at will.

His lyrics appeared slapdash, haphazard, adding a pinch of whatever spice he had on hand with little concern for the continuity of the flavor palette, But he was a skilled chef, layering style upon style with a voluminous vocabulary, creating crackpot crockpots of dense and intense flavor, where the full range of notes was never fully revealed on the first taste.

There was something unbalanced, teetering in his style. His annunciation was slurred, and his rhyme schemes would meander on the track. You wouldn’t mistake him for a metronome. But he never meandered so far as to slip off beat, and never drawled so hard as to be misheard. He was like a drunken master, a mischievous writer, demonstrating masterful skill and control in spite of his inebriation and reclusion.

He was able to play it all straight to absurd lengths. Listening to DOOM is like watching Monty Python. It’s just so much fun, with so many jokes and witty lines delivered so creatively that each track is fully absorbing. It adds another level of satisfaction to appreciate the skill it takes to write each line and set up each joke, that you marvel at how seriously you have to take writing to be able to say something so patently silly with such perfect pace and timing. The appreciation only grows once you consider the artist’s full body of work. Delivering such consistently high quality writing over the course of a career is just stunning.

I would hope the comparison is fair; he seems to hint that such inspiration wasn’t far away: “It’s how son became a big man from a black boy, to name names, I’m a really big fan of Dan Aykroyd.” (Saliva, Vaudeville Villain).

I’m certainly not the only one to appreciate this.

To send us off, here’s an excellent video accompaniment to the classic MM.. FOOD album. Enjoy.

And his playlist includes my favorite songs from the illest villain, which I had finished making the day before his death was announced. Peace.