Posts about Madlib (RSS, JSON)

8AM — “Madvillainy” is the best Hip Hop album ever produced. Its origin story is sufficiently hazy, the stuff of folkloristic legend. A lot circumstance and coincidence led to Madlib and MF Doom finally coming together in a studio, the possibility of them never meeting was very real, and we’d miss out on this masterpiece today. The album was leaked online before it was finished and completely re-worked after.

The production is so otherworldly. It sounded “different” when over-produced tracks from Timbaland or the Neptunes took the final steps to Hip Hop’s full commercialisation. Madvillainy is a collection of short tracks composed of intricately layered jazz samples, perfectly matched by DOOM’s word smithery. There were no hooks. This isn’t music you blast in your Nissan Micra, trying to impress the ladies sitting outside the cafe with a stereo system worth more than your car. You listen to this album at home; alone, sipping whiskey, smoking a pipe.

Once you get past the boring parts of the Will Hagle’s Madvillainy, where he explores how Madlib and MF DOOM met, who introduced whom to whom and who dropped records where and when; and who deserves credit and who doesn’t—once you get past those ego-centric accounts, the book turns to Madvillainy’s music and becomes interesting. The album’s artistic significance is rooted in Madlib’s and DOOM’s interplay and cross-reference between sample, beat and rhyme. One example: the track “Meat Grinder,” in which DOOM never references meat, or grinding, or the grinding of meat.

The opening sample, about a jar beneath a bed, draws from Frank Zappa: a kindred genre-blurring, jazz-influenced weird with an absurdist sense of humor who experimented with Quasimoto-style tape effects. The name of the album from which the sample was taken? Uncle Meat.

Hagle unveils puzzle pieces to many of the Madvillainy’s songs, which makes you appreciate a great album even more.