Madvillainy

MF DOOM wore an actual metal mask and refused to perform without it. He was a villain by design, a character as much as a rapper, built on comic book mythology and an encyclopedic knowledge of golden age hip-hop. Madlib was the obsessive crate-digger who had spent years building beats from the most obscure corners of recorded music, jazz fragments, library records, old soul samples bent and pitched into something alien. When these two found each other, what they made was Madvillainy, and it sounds like nothing else in the genre's history.

The beats shift and warp constantly, rarely longer than two minutes each, with no hooks and no choruses and no effort whatsoever to sound commercial. Madlib made much of the production during a trip to Brazil, sitting in a hotel room with a portable sampler, a turntable, and a cassette deck, pulling sounds from local records he had found crate digging and feeding them into something darker and stranger. DOOM raps in ellipses and riddles, hiding punchlines three bars later, referencing obscure films and villain mythology and cooking recipes with equal affection. The lyrics reward obsessive listening in the same way a great novel rewards rereading.

The whole album leaked online fourteen months before release when someone stole an unfinished copy, which frustrated the duo enough that they shelved the project temporarily and returned to finish it differently. What came out is widely regarded as the most important underground hip-hop album ever made, cited by producers and rappers across every subsequent generation as the standard for what the form can achieve when it ignores all commercial expectation entirely. Start with "All Caps" and "Accordion" and prepare to spend years inside this record.