I became aware of disaster movies in my early teens by way of Airplane! and I felt an immediate connection to them. Movies like The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and Airport showed me that even ensemble casts of celebrities – people like Steve McQueen (who I just sort of assumed wielded supernatural powers) were still at the mercy of natural disasters. They also exposed me to exciting new fears, like elevators, airplanes, and, thanks to Earthquake, the city of Los Angeles. I discovered these movies about the same time I became increasingly aware of the world’s inequalities, and took solace in them because they leveled the playing field; the people who survived were primarily alive because they were lucky (and had received top billing). Wits and skill, to say nothing of physical attributes or money, entered only minimally into the picture.

After 9/11, and especially after I moved to New York, I found myself drawn to disaster movies in which the city gets destroyed. As someone who has gone through life accumulating fears like others collect baseball cards, movies like Cloverfield and The Day After Tomorrow were a form of immersion therapy for me, putting me face to face with my worst, most irrational fears about the rational order of the city turned completely on its head.

2012 continues in this grand tradition, except instead of leveling a city, or even a region, it does us a chronic worriers a courtesy by destroying the entire world. Currently hovering at about 37% on the freshness meter at Rotten Tomatoes, 2012 has been blasted by critics for being schmaltzy, too long, and unrealistic. Still, in its own peculiar way, 2012 has an undercurrent of emotional realism that has been completely overlooked by critics.

The story is about as intelligible as one would expect from an end of the world movie: the sun has begun emitting a new form of neutrino which is rapidly heating up the Earth’s core (for some reason). With a heated core, all the world’s tectonic plates now move freely about the surface of the earth, causing the types of catastrophes that can only be rendered in  CGI. The movie follows Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) a failed novelist, as he tries to save his family by getting them one of several “arks” located in the Himalayas, built by a consortium of G8 countries and private investors.

To be sure, the movie is far from flawless, and the set pieces (and there are plenty) in 2012 is ludicrous. Curtis escapes with his family from Los Angeles in a limousine that handles like a Jaguar, while the San Andreas is opening on their tail, dragging the entire city into the abyss. The escape includes driving through the window and across the floor of a crumbling high-rise, launching over gaps, and skating just under a collapsing overpass. They eventually make it to a tiny propeller plane, getting into the air just as the runway falls away behind them. This narrow escape is repeated not once, but twice, making it off of the tarmac just as it falls away into the fissures enveloping the earth. Ideally, if you’re going to see this movie, or if you know anything about Roland Emmerich’s body of work, you should be expecting this. While the “taking off as the earth gives way” shtick gets a little tired by the third time, it’s still got some climactic scenes on par with those of other classic Emmerich movies like Independence day.

But when it comes down to it, Jackson Curtis is only the protagonist of the movie because he is the main character, not because of any particularly noble or even redeeming personality traits. He’s a taciturn, unfriendly, neglectful father, who is pretty much a failure in all social situations, and solely through an endless string of unfortunate coincidences is he able to see his family, and his family alone, at the neglect of all else, through this end of days scenario. One of the running themes of the movie, brought up by both Curtis and several other characters is people banding together to overcome impossible odds, but the sentiment is oddly undercut by the actions of the characters. Jackson Curtis is only concerned about saving his family, and even though he eventually teams up with a ragtag gang of survivors, they only do so because each holds information that is essential to the others for survival.

There are also some particularly macabre shots of spectacular deaths, people plunging off the side of precipices, and a couple of senior citizens that drive headlong into a wall, that are closely followed up by shots of Curtis’ children staring, tear-streaked and horrified, at the carnage. There are several scenarios in which people could be saved but are left to die, and the featured cast looks on as they die. This story, supposedly about unity triumphing over adversity has a strong undercurrent of individualism in the moment.

Which, honestly, was part of what made it so entertaining to me. Beneath the Vaseline lensed soliloquys about giving people the chance to fight for their lives is a darkly cynical movie about completely unlikable people lucky enough to survive. And if that’s not enough of a draw for you (spoiler alert), they almost crash one of the arks straight into Mt. Everest!

For the time being, I’d like to share a piece that I didn’t record, but I helped edit. It’s an interview with Josh Farrar, the author of the forthcoming book Rules to Rock By, which will be released in June of 2010 by Walker Books for Young Readers. We ran into some pretty severe data corruption issues trying to get this interview completed, so I’m really happy that it is going to see the light of day.

Please head over to Sarah’s blog Desirous of Everything to learn a bit more about the book and the interview.

Streaming:

Download:

Josh Farrar Interview

(right-click and press “save target as” to save the song to your desktop)

The full text of the note:

Yes I go to tomkins square park sometimes. Once I saw this stuff written in chalk there. It sounded like something you would say. I’m very sorry if I insulted you if you did the same thing it would just be normal, not insulting right? Let’s run away from our parents and get married. We don’t have to wait until we grow up. We can take Jack with us. You can get pregnant because you have fur on your stomach and I think the baby will like that. I like it. I’ll help the doctor take the baby out of your belly button. And we will make love. I love when you force me to kiss you. It’s so cute. Please be patient when we make love. It takes me longer to cum because of medicine I take. I love your spots. They are as beutiful as the stars in the sky night sky. Can I kiss them? I don’t want to be a prostitute or anything. I could spend all day with you every day and never get tired of you.

❤ The Russian Girl
(from the park)

I sincerely want to believe in this story, even as it’s passing into David Lynch territory, but something about this last note just doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m beginning to wonder if this is some kind of viral marketing. Still, if it is, why would they pick one of the least traveled bridges in the city to do it on? I’ll post any new notes I find on here, but I’m leaning toward hoax at this point. If you have any insight on this one, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve also been asked to do a couple more audio interviews in the style of the Oneida podcast that I did in July. I’ll provide more information as it presents itself.

In the meantime, a little shameless self promotion. I’m playing a show tonight with inimitable Jon Shina and Tempo No Tempo. It’s at Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn. You should come by, it could be fun.

Additionally, I will be providing interstitial sounds for Brahloween 5, at Secret Project Robot (210 KENT AVE) in Williamsburg on Halloween night. For the past three years, I’ve been Brahloween’s resident DJ, but this year, I’m trying something a little different. I’ll be bringing two synthesizers, my guitar, and an array of noisemakers to drop some marvelous space science to get some mouths watering. Some of my favorite bands, including Sightings, Red Dawn II, and THE FACES will be playing, along with Big Bear and The White Deer, two bands I’m excited to hear.

Also, unlike the past couple of years, I actually have a costume idea and will actually be dressing up. See you there.

Mario in 1990

When the Genesis was first released, bundled with the game Altered Beast, I remember it as a revelatory moment. The graphics were so spectacular that I was willing to completely overlook the fact that the game wasn’t actually fun. The sprites were huge and detailed, the characters had musculature, and I had spent the past five years playing as a big-nosed pixelated plumber. Now that I was a werewolf with the frame of an Adonis, there was no turning back. I was undeterred by the fact that the game had just five levels, that the controls were terrible, and that it was nearly impossible to beat.

This story is important because it’s an object lesson in the history of gaming. It was that very mentality – that graphics could supercede gameplay – that gave rise to the short lived Full-Motion Video (FMV) Game craze of the early 1990’s.

Beginnings

Altered Beast Guy in 1990

FMV has its roots in an arcade anomaly called Dragon’s Lair. Released way back in the summer of 1983, it was a huge departure from the standard video game format. The game was read from a laserdisc rather than a circuit board, and instead of using standard digital graphics, it used real hand drawn cel animation created under the supervision of former Disney animator Don Bluth, director of The Secret of N.I.M.H. and An American Tail.

The gameplay in Dragon’s Lair was also unlike any game that preceded it. Since it was animated, video would play, and the player would have to move the joystick or press the sword button at key moments to advance. Make the right move at the right time, and you will continue to the next snippet of animation; make a mistake, and an animati0n plays showing the main character’s death. While the game discreetly beeped when it was time to move or swing your sword, it gave  no indication of which direction the player should be moving or what button to press. The gameplay was fast and disorienting, and mastering the game required a significant investment of both time and money.

Dragon’s Lair was visually stunning,  unlike anything that came before it, and, at least initially, massively popular. Released during the great video game crash of 1983, the game attracted throngs of amazed onlookers, and was consistently popular in spite of being the first arcade game that cost 50 cents. It was so popular that arcades took to mounting a second monitor to the cabinet so that the gathering crowds could watch while the game was being played without crushing the player against the cabinet.

However, the game’s popularity also worked against it. The laserdisc players used in the cabinets were meant for standard playback, but Dragon’s Lair required the laser to jump quickly to different parts of the disc to queue up the next scene, causing the players to quickly wear out. Additionally, the timing in the game was, at best, imperfect, making it incredibly frustrating to players. Angry jostling of the cabinets led to frequent alignment issues with the laserdisc player, massive upkeep investments from arcade owners, and a lot of “out of order” signs.

Dragon’s Lair was also extraordinarily expensive. Laserdiscs were a relatively young technology and hadn’t made any real in-roads in the home video market yet. While the average cabinet game at the time cost about $2,500.00, while Dragon’s Lair cost about $4,000.00. “We’re riding on a horse we can’t get off of, ” said video game distributor Andrew Loewinger in a 1983 Washington Post article about Dragon’s Lair. “We end up putting all our money back into the machines. “

A slew of lesser known imitators and a second game by the same creators called Space Ace came and went, but none of them enjoyed the same success as Dragon’s Lair. By the end of 1984 the novelty of the gameplay was wearing off, and the game was costing more to maintain than it brought into arcades. Dragon’s Lair cabinets were being sold off at a fraction of their purchase price. A home console that played laserdiscs called the Halcyon came out in 1985, but it retailed for $2,500.00 and the developers, RDI Video Systems (founded by Rick Dyer, co-creator of Dragon’s Lair) went bankrupt after releasing only two games. By 1986, it appeared as though this novel form of gaming was coming to an end.

Digital Pictures

In late August, 1989, the Turbografx-16 console was released in America. The system mostly flew under the radar in the United States, running a distant third to its competitors, the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis. It is important, however, as the first game console that had an add-on CD-ROM component. The CD-ROM made available an unprecedented amount of space; where the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis cartridges ran out of space at about 5 Megabytes, some CD-ROM games were several hundred megabytes. On the Turbografx, this extra space was mostly utilized to beef up cut scenes, and improve the quality of music in the games.

Around the same time the Turbografx-16 was being developed, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was working on a console with the board game company Hasbro that would run on VHS video cassettes instead of cartridges. Called NEMO, the system was to utilize the same gameplay mechanics as the laserdisc games, but would employ actual filmed content as opposed to animation. In spite of years of development and plenty of hype, the system never came to fruition and was scrapped just shy of its proprosed release date. Two games developed for NEMO by a company called Digital Pictures, Night Trap and Sewer Shark, later became lightning rods for both praise and criticism of FMV games.

FMV finally gained some traction a few years later by way of the Sega-CD, a CD-ROM add-on to the Sega Genesis console, released in America in 1992. Sega of America decided to pin its hopes for the Sega-CD to FMV gaming, and ported Night Trap and Sewer Shark from the NEMO to the Sega-CD as launch titles.  Advertising and interviews from around the release of the Sega-CD prominently feature FMV games to the exclusion of almost all other titles, save huge properties at the time (like Batman Returns) or reliable franchises (like Sonic the Hedghog.)

The technology shocked even industry insiders. Steve DeFrisco, gaming industry veteran and programmer for Digital Pictures, remembers being completely blown away by the technology. “Nothing had really been done like that before,” says DeFrisco. “Yes, there were games that had video sequences in them, but to interact with the video on such a granular level was pretty cool.”

These games enjoyed the same initial surge of interest that Dragon’s Lair experienced. Sewer Shark got strong reviews when it was first released and the video game press focused heavily on FMV games. On the interest that these games initially received, more consoles such as the Philips CD-i and the 3D0 were developed with FMV gaming in mind. Digital Pictures went on to produce fourteen FMV games for a variety of consoles, becoming the the most prominent, though by no means only FMV developer.

A big selling point of these games was verisimilitude. No longer did players have imagine a few pixels on a screen into their favorite action hero or movie star; they could play a game where they controlled an actual person. The producers of these games were even able to pull in some B and C-list actors and actresses, including Yasmine Bleeth, Walter Koenig, Debbie Harry, Corey Haim, and Dana Plato. Yet, while the combination of recognized talent and state-of-the-art graphics brought players to the games, it quickly became apparent that these games were simply not any good.

The problems that plagued the Dragon’s Lair gameplay experience persisted in this new medium. The games were comprised of short segments of filmed content. In a game like Prize Fighter, a boxing simulator from the first-person perspective of the boxer, every time the player landed a punch, the CD player had to queue up the shot of the opponent getting punched, which made for incredibly disjointed gameplay.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZHirslVzQs]

In addition, the Sega-CD only had a range of 512 colors, and it could only display 64 of them at once. “The limitations of the game systems, and the compression techniques used to reduce the data size really hurt the quality of the images on the game machines,” says DeFrisco. To improve the frame rate, the games typically displayed the video in a window roughly 1/4 the size of the screen, so most of the screen was just a frame around this small swatch of action in the center. Even then, that action was very pretty pixelated, and the limited color palette made the games seem washed out.

Still, technical limitations were not the only problems plaguing FMV games. A game starring actual people is only as good as their performances, and FMV games are notorious for both bad acting and ugly, low-budget productions. Some of the games played up a low-budget B-movie aesthetic, like It Came From the Desert, but most of the games took themselves very seriously. Since the selling point of FMV was the cut scenes and video, these games were chock-a-block with painfully bad acting.  The cost of producing a game that also has a filmed component required that the developers budget for actors and for programming. FMV games were incredibly expensive for the time, with an average budget of about three to five million dollars. In order to see the game to completion, there was a willingness to cut corners on the filming production.

an example of the acting in Sewer Shark

Some FMV titles barely qualified as games at all. The Make My Video series in particular were designed less to entertain than to showcase the platform for which they were built. Each of the games contained three music videos by a particular artist that the player was supposed to re-edit. Artists included Kriss Kross, Inxs, and Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch.  The games established nearly nonsensical and arbitrary narratives in which characters requested specific images and effects in a music video. The player then had to re-edit one of the the videos by splicing in some simple video effects and a couple of streams of public domain stock footage. Once the video was edited together, you got to watch the playback in a single screen in the center.

And that was it. You got to watch the video you had just edited together using the three available buttons on a sega genesis controller. Since each of the Make My Video games came with only three videos, the gameplay, which started out boring, quickly became unbearable. Players immediately had a strongly negative reaction to them, and they were commercial failures. These days, the Make My Video series are often shortlisted on “worst video game of all time” lists.

Full-Motion Panic

The same verisimilitude that made these games popular also brought them some unwanted attention that ended up changing the gaming industry forever. While there were plenty of games  out at the time that contained extreme gore and violence, FMV brought a level of realism to them that caused even non-gamers to pay attention. The fact that there were real actors in the games rather than sprites made even moderate violence seem both more real and more dangerous.

Two months after the release of the Sega-CD, the Senate Judiciary and Government Affairs Committee held a hearing on video game violence. The hearing, co-chaired by Joesph Lieberman and Herbert Kohl singled out the FMV game Night Trap (as well as Doom, Mortal Kombat, and a few others) as everything that was wrong with the gaming industry. The following week, Night Trap was taken off shelves at Toys R’ Us stores across the country.

To hear it described, Night Trap sounds extreme: a gaggle of young co-eds get together for a slumber party at a strange house in the middle of nowhere. Unless the player can save them, they are picked off one by one by some evil vampires (called “augers”), who kill them by through use of these collaring mechanisms that drill into their necks and drain their blood. There’s enough in that brief synopsis for someone to find objectionable, and for the media to sensationalize. To actually watch the video, however, tells a far tamer story. The augers look less like vampires than they do men with limps lumbering around in fumigation suits, and the blood draining mechanism was designed to look ridiculous enough not to be taken seriously according to the filmmakers. The following was the scene singled out by congress as being particularly objectionable.

Not only is the footage pretty tame, but the game was built so that the player was likely to miss most of the more extreme scenes. The premise of Night Trap was that the player was in a control room viewing video cameras set up throughout a house. At the precise moment, traps had to be sprung to capture the augers. However, the game took place in real time, and it was only possible to view one camera at a time, so most of the gameplay was flipping through empty rooms looking for the action.

All of the attention surprised and confused the team at Digital Pictures. “There were plenty of other games that had far more gore than Night Trap,” says DeFrisco. “I mean, the finishing moves in Mortal Kombat - ripping out someone’s skull and spine – were far more intense than someone sucking your blood out with a machine. But it was the first time live actors were used in a video game.”

in an interview with Gamasutra, Night Trap co-creator Rob Fulop describes the debacle as cynical political posturing. “The subsequent witch hunt led by Joseph Lieberman regarding Night Trap was just politics, plain and simple,” says Fulop. “He never personally saw Night Trap, nor did anybody on his staff bother playing the game. I know this because I met him and asked him if he had ever seen Night Trap and he said, ‘no’!”

The battle for market share between Nintendo and Sega during this period was intense. After dominating the console market for years with the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega had just edged Nintendo out of the top slot. Nintendo’s chairman Howard Lincoln took advantage of Sega’s negative publicity to try and promote their system as family friendly by taking the stand during the congressional hearings to say “A game such as Night Trap will never be produced for a Nintendo system.” The following year, Mortal Kombat II was ported to the Super Nintendo, with all of the dismemberment and gore intact.

Debates about game censorship raged, with bloviating senators making hyperbolic declarations about how “sick” and “twisted” these games were. Lieberman claimed that games like Night Trap “are no mark of a civilized society” and said that he wished that they could be constitutionally banned. Digital Pictures founder Tom Zito argued that the game was meant to be satire. In the end, the hearings resulted in the creation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, an industry self-regulation organzation that parallels the the MPAA. The rating system that the ESRB created closely mirrors the one devised by the MPAA up to and including an “Adults Only” rating, which, being the equivalent of the MPAA’s ‘X’ rating, precludes those games from being sold for most consoles. Most chain stores won’t sell games that bear the ‘M’ rating, which corresponds with the MPAA’s ‘R’ rating, to children without parental consent.

Ironically, the creation of this rating system had the same unintended consequences as the system created by the MPAA. By creating a framework in which there was a place for violent or suggestive video games, the ESRB rating system legitimized more extreme games and allowed them to make their way onto the consoles and into the mainstream gaming market.

For a while after the Congressional hearings the popularity of FMV games skyrocketed, but the surge in popularity was temporary.  The 3D0 and CD-i were both spectacular failures, and even though Digital Pictures continue to produce games for a couple of years, eventually attempting to incorporate more traditional light gun style gameplay into games like Corpse Killer, they went out of business in the 1996 (Tom Zito, founder of Digital Pictures, declined to be interviewed for this article). Developers eventually abandoned the genre, and by the end of the 90’s FMV games were a thing of the past.

DeFrisco thinks that the games were just too divisive among gamers and too hard to market. “Gamers don’t like them because there is not enough interaction, and movie watchers don’t like them because there is interaction. So, they are, ultimately, a niche-market. Not a very large fan base. But we could not have known that without actually producing the games to see how they did.”

Vaporware Revival

In the past decade, computer emulation of old video game consoles has renewed interest in the Full-Motion Video genre, and a few unreleased FMV oddities have made their way into the lore of gaming history. While not entirely an FMV game, Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, a complete and unreleased game for the Sega-CD, surfaced on the website The Lost Levels in 2006. The game was basically supposed to be a trick that the owner can use to play on his friends, and quickly became infamous for a mini-game called “Desert Bus.” Desert Bus required the user to drive a bus from Tuscon to Los Angeles, and the whole trip took 8 hours of real time play to complete. Penn Jillette explains on the website GameSetWatch:

You saw nothing. It was just desert stuff going by…and there was a little green tree hanging from the rear-view mirror, one of those things that makes your car smell better? And it would just kind of drift in slowly to one corner of the screen. And you couldn’t take your hands off the controller, and if you did…it didn’t have a spectacular crash, it just slowly went into the sand, and then overheated and stopped, and then the game was you being towed backwards all the way back to Tucson.”

It is notable as the only in-game appearance of Lou Reed, who blew up Penn & Teller when the player tried to play the game on the “Impossible” setting. Note the obnoxious midi version of “Sweet Jane” playing in the background.

In the late 90’s, a website for another FMV game called Duelin’ Firemen appeared on the internet, with very little information other than a reel with in-game clips. The game, produced by a Chicagoan video production company called Runandgun, Duelin’ Firemen was to be about two teams of firemen racing around Chicago in an attempt to outdance one another while the city burned to the ground. The game starred 70’s blaxploitation staple Rudy Ray Moore, as “Chief Crispy” and featured a host of underground luminaries including Tony Hawk, Timothy Leary, Mark Mothersbaugh, Ivan Stang, David Yow, Steve Albini, King Buzzo. The final boss fight in the game was to be against the Japanese psychedelic noise band Boredoms.

I spoke to the creators of the game in 2006 for an article about the game that never ended up getting published. Director Grady Sain told me that on top of overreaching as filmmakers, trying to make a video game without any programming experience, they had the misfortune to be developing for the 3D0 console.  “[3D0 was] all set to be hot shit, but basically, as soon as Sony announced the Playstation, [3D0], in a period of about 3 or 4 months, were no longer in the hardware business at all. This title, Duelin’ Firemen, was slated to be one of the flagship titles for the original launch of the 3D0 console.”

On top of the 3D0’s failure, the gaming industry very quickly realized the limitations of FMV and  shifted away from it. “Interactive movies kind of had their heyday right around there,” says Sain. “Night Trap and Sewer Shark. Night trap was the real big one. It got in a lot of trouble, but it was good press for us. That shit dried up so quick. It was like a year later when I was like ‘What happened to all of that?’”

Sain told me that even after the game fell apart he hoped to cobble together the filmed components of the game to make a short film, but the events of September 11th put that idea to bed. “After 9/11,” says Sain, “there’s just no way without completely re-writing it that it could ever be taken seriously. . . It’s just too ghoulish and bizarre.”

In the end, what doomed Duelin’ Firemen was what put FMV games down for good. Video games were coming along at a clip too rapid for FMV to keep up, and while these games seemed technically amazing in 1992, by 1995, they looked archaic and obsolete. “Even if movie watchers were interested, they didn’t want to go out and buy a game console just to watch a movie,” says Steve DeFrisco. “3-D first-person shooters were just hitting the market as well. They promised better, more immersive worlds with far more interactivity.”

These days, gamers tend to look back on the FMV era with a mixture of bemused curiosity and sometimes vicious derision. Most of the gamers who missed the FMV era were weaned on 3D platforming and first person shooters, both of which offer quite a bit more immersion, so FMV games look anachronistic and ridiculous in comparison. Even though FMV’s legacy is as one of gaming’s great missteps, for a few years in the early 90’s, they were considered both the future of gaming, and dangerous influence on young gamers.

Hope to see you there!

I culled samples from about 20 different songs and just lined them up end to end, recorded some vocals and here is the finished product. I wish the refrain sounded a bit less like “Who Let the Dogs Out,” but it’s not bad for about six hours work, and it’s always nice to have an excuse to break out my vocoder. Oh, and since no one seems to understand the sample at the end except me, it’s Method Man saying, “he’ll be like ‘oh sh*t, that’s the jam!’”* Special thanks to Sarah for the “say whaaaaat?” at the very end.

*This song is not work safe. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Streaming:

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Dem Diplomatz

(right-click and press “save target as” to save the song to your desktop)

Streaming:

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The Rathskeller

(right-click and press “save target as” to save the song to your desktop)

MF Doom is Daniel Dumile, a Long Island native who began his career under the stage name Zev Love X. After getting his start with a verse on 3rd Bass‘ minor hit single “The Gas Face“, Dumile and his brother, DJ Subroc, released the album Mr. Hood (1991) with the rap group KMD. During the recording of their second album, Subroc was run over by a car and killed. Once completed, KMD’s second album, Black Bastards (1993), was held from release because of controversial cover art. Around this time the group disbanded and it seemed that both KMD’s members and their music would be a footnote in Hip Hop history.

But it appears that Dumile wasn’t done yet. In 1997, he began quietly releasing singles not as Zev Love X, but as the mask-clad rapper MF Doom. He drew from the mythos of the Fantastic Four supervillain Dr. Doom, wore an intimidating iron mask (the MF is short for “Metal Face”), sampled liberally from old Fantastic Four cartoons, and referred to himself as “the illest villain.”

His break from the rap game noticeably changed him as a performer. His voice took on a noticeably gruffer patina, and his flow developed the lucid ease of conversation, but the most dramatic change is was in the depth of his lyrics. As Zev Love X, Dumile wrote fairly abstract rhymes. As Doom, they became downright surreal.  In just a few bars he would throw off densely laden references to arcane 70′s kids shows, old school hip hop, sci-fi, comic books, cartoons, classic soul, the MF Doom persona’s mythology and tie it all together with some effortlessly evocative wordplay:

Goony goo goo loony koo-koo like Gary Gnu off New Zoo Revue/But who knew the mask had a loose screw?/Hell, could hardly tell/Had to tighten it up/Like the Drells and Archie Bell

-Rhinestone Cowboy, from Madvillainy (2004)

On top of his new found lyrical dexterity, he also began producing and releasing instrumental only records called Special Herbs. Each of the instrumental albums (there are 10 in total) feature beats that appear on his releases, beats produced for other performers, and some beats that to this day have no associated vocal track. These tracks also found their way onto Doom albums as background music for skits made up of vocal samples from newscasts, cartoons,  and commercials.

The early 2000′s were a creative renaissance for Dumile. 2001 finally saw the release of Black Bastards, and between 2003 and 2006, he released a seven albums on which he did either the lion’s share of the MCing or producing. Madvillainy, a collaboration between Doom and the west coast rapper/producer Madlib is considered one of the greatest underground Hip Hop albums of all time.  On top of these releases,  he released eight of the ten Special Herbs collections during this period.

The breadth, depth and consistency of his output makes the intervening years all the more painful, because Doom  flamed out spectacularly. Between 2006-2008, only a few singles and some substandard remix records came out. He got production credits here and there, but it was largely just beats taken from the Special Herbs collections (though, to be fair, sometimes used to great effect – see Ghostface Killa’s 9 Milli Bros off of 2006′s Fishscale.)

Not only was he not releasing new music, but his public behavior got more and more bizarre. More bizarre, that is, than wearing a metal mask all the time. Formerly known as a fantastic performer, reports began to emerge that he was lip syncing at his shows, followed closely by the accusation that the person performing wasn’t MF Doom at all, but an imposter (or “Doomposter”) wearing his mask. This culminated in a performance at last year’s Rock the Bells festival where he (or his surrogate) was literally booed off the stage.

As far as I, a rabid fan, was concerned, Doom had a lot to answer for, and I figured Coates would either hold him accountable or at least provide some explanation for his sudden and precipitous drop in output. I assumed the article would be a detail of incredible personal strife that has kept him from showing up at performances and recording new material. Instead, all we get by way of explanation is “Dumile routinely sends out one of his comrades in the Doom costume and has him lip-sync the entire show. He sees this as a logical extension of the Doom idea.” Dumile apparently finds fleecing his fans hilarious:

If Dumile had his way, he would take it further. He jokes that he’d like to dart back stage after a performance, take of the mask, and then wade into the crowd-beer in hand-and applaud his own work. In conversations with strangers, if the subject of Doom comes up, Dumile will simply play along, like Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne.

“I’m the writer, I’m the director,” Dumile said. “If I was to go out there without the mask on, they’d be like ‘who the fuck is this?’” He went on, “I might send a white dude next. Whoever plays the character plays the character . . . I’ll send a Chinese nigger. I’ll send ten Chinese niggers. I might send the Blue Man Group.”

In March of this year, Doom released his first album since 2005, Born Like This. I was optimistic because it received generally favorable reviews, and I was hungry for a new Doom record. There are some amazing tracks, notably the album opener, “Gazillion Ear“, produced by the late J. Dilla. But the album just doesn’t have the same bizarre energy of his previous efforts. Doom seems to be doing a lot more yelling and flailing on this album, and, to my surprise, he’s still plucking 5-year-old beats from the Special Herbs records.

The nadir of both the album and Dumile’s career as a rapper is “Batty Boyz”, a track that stands out as exemplifying the disconnect Dumile has regarding the ‘character’ MF Doom and the way he is perceived as an artist. The song is a cartoonishly homophobic jab at superheroes for dressing “In thigh high boots, red tighty-whities and blue cat suit (Holy Homos).” The title “Batty Boyz” is meant to is an evocation of superheroes like Batman and an invocation of the Jamaican Creole term for homosexual. It’s a slur often used by influential Jamaican musicians who implore their listeners to murder gay people. While homophobia is alive and well in the rap scene (see: ‘No Homo‘), the song comes off as lazy and distasteful coming from an artist as talented and funny as Doom.

I assume that Dumile would justify this by claiming that it’s told from the villain’s perspective, that these are not his actual opinions. That it makes perfect sense for a supervillain to emasculate superheroes by calling them gay. I assume, because Coates never asks him to justify this song, his Doomposters, or his long hiatus. While Coates spends most of the article tacitly acknowledging that Dumile is becoming a victim of his own success (the bulk of the articles narrative is Coates accompanying Dumile as he does anything and everything but recording), a lot of the piece is just nostalgic reflection on The Golden Era of Hip Hop and how MF Doom spared Coates from disaffection and disinterest as rap became more commercial.

I’m still hopeful that Doom can redeem himself when (or if) Swift and Changeable, his long anticipated collaboration with Ghostface Killa is released, but that album has been in the works for as long as Dumile has been on hiatus. With no album release date in sight, a weak new album, and seemingly no interest in actually performing, I’m pretty much ready to write him off. Ah well, Doom, we’ll always have 2004.