The Chronicles of DOOM — Dinaburg Writes

by S.H. Fernando Jr.

I learned about DOOM from my ultimate frisbee teammate. After college, in my tiny studio apartment above a Thai restaurant and next to a bar that had open Wi-Fi (the difference between wifi and the trade name Wi-Fi is wild) that I accessed on a laptop with a wireless card shoved into the side port, we would listen to ripped CDs that he called “downbeat”—now probably in the genres of lo-fi or trip hop–so I never know the providence of the beats, nor the artists.

While I know I must have gotten some of these downbeats by 2003 (because I wrote a paper in my Shakespeare class about the El-P song T. O. J.), I still truly associate all the background names that pop up throughout The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast with my first year of rest and relaxation. Post-college “poor”: a car with expired registration tags, that rarely started; rent that was an unexaggerated 80% of my part-time restaurant salary; bars at night, where one draft beer tapped my wallet; friends that would force me out before my shifts to “enjoy our rare blue sky weather”; a single weekly meal at the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet, stretched to the absolute max.

These were the images that are conjured in my mind when artist names I haven’t though of in nearly two decades appeared on the page. And there is a litany of names: El-P, Slug, Aesop Rock, Cannibal Ox (the Vast Aire half?), and RJD2 brought me back to faster than any Madeleine.

To other people, those names might not hit like they did for me. So the book goes full hagiography, into the nitty and the gritty, to catch all the fans, no matter how slight. Chronicles is, well, a chronicle, and DOOM deserves to have as much of the full picture of his work out there as possible. So full marks and credit to the depth of knowledge, the legwork, and structuring that keeps Chronicles flowing.

The need for names extends past other artists, though. Example: DOOM is going to get a deal from the label Sub Verse–first, you’re going to get a few pages on who Sub Verse is, where they came from, and how they connect to DOOM. It’s all highly specific, and it needs to be: once you see the connections, the background history makes total sense to include in detail. But in the thick of it, after a few pages with scores of people from the late 90s that you’ve likely never heard of, it all can sometimes be a bit convoluted, even tedious:

Peter Lupoff of Lehman Brothers, a former musician himself, was looking to leave Wall Street and get into the music business. In 1998, he had already formed a company with producer Nile Rodgers and another partner called RRL Entertainment to invest in entertainment industry properties and projects.

After DOOM enters the scene, it’s clear why this type of detail is necessary, but for me personally that didn’t make it any easier to parse while reading. And it happens with frequency, because DOOM had his (metal) fingers in a lot of pies. Just know that if you’re getting bogged down by names, it remains important to try to keep them straight.

Unlike Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the gist—Wu-Tang auctioning off the sole copy of an album to a single dude—of which is a book that covers in detail one specific event that is of the type of wild that was inspirational and aspirational to DOOM, Chronicles isn’t targeted toward on thing, but a retrospective legacy, a posthumous biography, so it inevitably lionizes its subject. Which is great. It’s what I think anyone reading this book would want. You’re going in specifically to learn facts about an artist you already think is cool, or else you simply would not have read this book.

Reading things like the collab between DOOM and Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim made me realize I would have been really into it–except I rented Adult Swim DVDs from Blockbuster. Yes, that Blockbuster. By the collab, I was in grad school, gone to pop culture, living in the American Midwest and dodging questions about which football team I liked. My downbeat days were at an end basically right before the mainstreaming of DOOM.

Now, in the future, I learned about DOOM passing from street art three blocks away from my apartment. Fitting, I think, that I never knew DOOM from anything other than mix cds and graffiti.

this is not my photo—by the time I went to photograph, it has been painted over (with just black, no new art yet).

The dude was wild. This book shows it.

“I think part of the Missing Notebook Rhymes was him trying to get money from someone that wasn’t Lex, with beats he had no rights to, and he thought, ‘I can get away with this.’ I don’t even think he really cared if he got away with it,’ [DeMarco] says. It appeared to be just another ruthless money grab on the Villian’s part, though he clearly had his own reasons for doing so.
For someone who had gone out on a limb for DOOM time and time again, it was the final straw, but surprisingly, their relationship didn’t end on a sour note. “We bonded over our love for the Pink Panther cartoon,” says DeMarco. “And, so, he painted me a big painting, of course, a bandit from the Pink Panther cartoon robbing a safe. And that hangs in Adult Swim.” He also painted one for DeMarco’s boss, Mike Lazzo, of a guy holding a cosmic cube in his hand. “He gave me those just out of the blue and it was kind of his way of saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ you know, without really having to say, I’m sorry,” he says. “They just delivered them to work one day. Jasmine was like, ‘Hey, these are paintings DOOM made for you.’

What I really took away, what I really saw and saw that he saw, was that as a rapper, a singer, a musician of any kind, deep down, you’re a writer, you’re creating worlds, you don’t have to be what you write, even if the media format you choose tends to conflate the artist with the art.

I can’t emphasize this enough. This–laying this author/subject dichotomy out through cartoon-inspired personas–this is singular genius. Sticking to it through an entire career is high art. Unbelievably powerful, unmistakably wonderful. No one wants to speak ill of the dead, but the legitimate praise for the provable actions of DOOM within the pages don’t need high gloss. Good, bad, and ugly—he made a lot of choices that were out of pocket in theory, but so absurd as to be perfectly fitting. Having DOOMbots, someone else to wear the mask and rap for you at a show? If stage plays can have understudies, why not stick a buddy in the mask? The mask is a symbol, but it is also a mask, metaphorical for the role as much as literally on someone’s face. It’s not subtle, but being so blunt is its own sort of complexity—hiding in plain sight. To use the mask as a mask is a subversion, when everyone else things of it as some sort of grand metaphor.

The book elicits so much nostalgia in me, but the things I learned about DOOM that I didn’t know were far more interesting than the bits I had already brought with me. An unreal career that should absolutely be read by anyone interested in art and performance, not just hip hop heads. People who like “Music from all genres, except…”, I’m particularly looking at you.

What DOOM was about never changed. even if it changed the game itself. As he should, DOOM gets the final words:

[DOOM] further elaborated. “You know in a lot of ways it prevents a lot of bullshit from happening. Like a lot of bullshit associated with this particular genre of music, you know what I mean–paparazzi, the haters, whatever fuckin’ bullshit. In any other writing job, you don’t get this shit, but this rap shit, it’s almost like people expect you to be the dude you writin’. Like, I’m a writer, yo, I write for different characters, know what I’m sayin’?”