One of the first lines on the album is a diss towards his old crew Monsta Island Czars, whom he refers to as “Midgets Into Crunk” (he is not kind towards the differently abled, and the Bush era’s most popular “r” epithet flies around like a spitball here). This is the same instinct that led Marvin Gaye to make a masterpiece as part of his divorce settlement.
And I wonder if the other reason he’s so good here is because he knew he could be, and because it tickled his ego to bring such heat to a project that doesn’t particularly require it. Food, an MC who comes up with combinations of words you feel like an idiot for not having thought of before even while acknowledging the man on the mic as one with godlike skill. This is the dizzying DOOM of Madvillainy and Mm. Adult Swim had just revived “Family Guy,” cementing itself as a cultural entity, and was now preparing to become one of the most influential entities in the last 15 years of left-field hip hop-first through this and Shinichiro Watanabe’s anime soundtracks, then through Flying Lotus’s bumper music and its Williams Street imprint.ĭOOM was the last piece of the puzzle to come together, and I wonder if even Burton and DeMarco were surprised by the game he brought to this project. Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton had scared the crap out of everyone with the brazen possibilities of sampling by mashing up Jay-Z and the Beatles The Grey Album that’d gotten him a gig producing Gorillaz’ mega-platinum Demon Days, and “Crazy” was on the horizon. DOOM had come off Madvillainy, the rare rap album to get written up in The New Yorker, and the solo triumph Mm.
Adult Swim boss Jason DeMarco had to agree.Īll three parties were hot shit at the time. Producer Danger Mouse had already been working closely with Cartoon Network when he pitched the idea of an album built around beats made from samples of shows from its new programming block Adult Swim. Given the blowsy cash-grab verses MF DOOM was prone to in his latter years, it begs the question: why is it so good? The easy answer is that DOOM was drawn to a project celebrating the cartoons he loves. The Mouse and the Mask is a shamelessly commercial project redeemed by the sheer strength of its performances it is so, so much better than it needs to be.