MF Doom is one of my favorite rappers. His beats are sick. His rhymes are clear, clever, intelligent. He raps with style and technique. He speaks on real life with wit, charm and a smirk. He always references comic books, cartoons and events from our (apparently) similar childhoods. I can relate.
Being such a big fan, I was disappointed when I couldn't make it to his mid-August shows in SF. And then I heard that he didn't show. Instead, an impostor donned the mask, lip-synced over two tracks, and took off. Worse, a friend in LA said he'd done it there the week before. Then reports started to stream in from more Doom-less dates.
Disappointed, I started searching the Intertron for news. The best report was from the Village Voice, which summarized everything I'd been able to learn via The Oracle.
"The first thing out of my mouth to my buddy was, 'Wow, that doesn't even look like him,' " says concertgoer Dan Schwab, a buyer for Adidas who flew down from Portland, Oregon, with his girlfriend to see the show. "He looked way skinnier—at least 30 or 40 pounds lighter than the guy I've seen before. The guy who was up onstage was just walking back and forth, doing a little bit of the 'rapper hands' action and giving high-fives."
Though unverified accounts of "fake" Doom shows have been swirling for a couple years, the critically beloved rapper usually does justice to his brilliant studio catalog in concert. Schwab, for one, says Doom's performance on the same stage two years earlier was one of the best he'd seen.
But this guy was a joke.
"I went up to the sound guy about two songs deep and said, 'No one can hear Doom's mic.' He looked at me and said straight-up, 'I know. His mic's not on, and that's not MF Doom.'"
No fun at all, and seemingly a slap in the face to fans and concert goers. But should fans have seen this coming? I mean, this is the same guy who "once said he planned to release an album called Impostor". Is Doom providing commentary on the state of the music industry, or on fandom, or on rapper as act as opposed to rapper as person?
In 2005, he even employed a double for a pair of photo shoots.
"He'd been calling our editor saying he wasn't feeling good and wasn't going to make it, but for the shoot he sent his hype man [Big Benn Kling-on] in the Doom mask," reports Scratch art director R. Scott Wells, referring to his magazine's story on The Mouse and the Mask, a full-length collaboration between Doom and the producer Danger Mouse. "The photographer didn't know any better, so he just went ahead and shot him. When we got the film back, we knew it wasn't Doom. Benn's a much bigger guy."
"I spoke to Doom, and he tried to tell me something to the effect of: It was a new persona he was experimenting with," says Jerry L. Barrow, who was Scratch's editor at the time. "He had some sort of justification for it, but to me it was really unprofessional." (The pictures were scrapped, and the magazine made light of the situation by running Photoshopped pictures of figures like Jessica Simpson and Saddam Hussein wearing the infamous mask.)
. . .
Doom appears to have performed the same stunt at Elemental Magazine, which he confirmed in a letter to the publication in late 2005. . . . [Doom] noted that several different actors, from Adam West to George Clooney, have played Batman. His note concludes, "In the world of hip-hop music on-the-other hand things might be considered even stranger although not at all unusual. When you have artists 'playing' themselves, pun intended while having someone else more qualified to write the story (beats and or rhymes). To each is owns, after all its just entertainment right?"
Even a 2003 NPR piece seems to foreshadow Doom's Wizard of Oz act:
Remember, even MF Doom, metal mask and all, is a created character. . . . According to the story that Doom tells, Viktor Vaughn is a scientist and a rapper who's traveling the cosmos looking for the best places to practice his art.
I'm left hoping that The Villain is pulling an Andy Kaufman. Based on the depth and genius of his body of work, I'd bet he's laughing at us, with us, and giving someone the metal finger right now. Hopefully he'll start performing again in the near future... in person this time. For now, I'll stick with Madvillainy and MM...Food?, and stay far away from his shows.
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