On The Record:
Finding Hip Hop Through MF DOOM
On The Record is a series of first-person pieces penned exclusively by TuneCore artists.
“It felt completely alien to us on first listen”
It was just after DOOM passed – my brother, Oscar, who had really been our band’s hip-hop compass, put us onto Madvillany (the 2004 collaboration between MF DOOM and producer Madlib). It felt completely alien to me on first listen.
The band – Chris, James, Sam, and I – we were music students at the time, and were definitely impressed by anything overly technical, which was maybe good for us as instrumentalists, but maybe not so much when it came to production, or song writing, or respecting that less is more. DOOM really came along and moved us out of that headspace.
“It was the perfect way into hip-hop for us at the time.”
It was the perfect way into hip-hop for us at the time. Our tastes in music were real different when we met almost six years ago, but Madvillany blended so many of the things we loved individually, under the guise of a vocal presence that felt completely new to us. The whole thing felt like it was very much in a lane of its own. The beats on Madvillany are definitely ‘jazzy’, so we were into that, but the nature of Madlib’s loops really drew our attention to the nuances in the feeling and texture, rather than the technicality of what was being played.
The palette of sounds really struck us at the time; the slide guitar, the soft tambourine, the cartoon sound effects, the completely unrelated intro with the weird talking.. and the minimalism of it was so cool. It felt so sinister and mean.
You can hear it on “Meat Grinder,” especially.
Hip-Hop History Teaches: Less is More
Due to our backgrounds, and because we have our own unique relationship with hip hop, it’s kind of hard to say. We have learned and performed a lot of ‘the classics’, like MF DOOM, and I think we’re all hoping that that has sunk into us somewhere deep somehow.
It definitely informs the production side of things and informs how we make music now that’s for sure. The instrumentation, the arrangements, the drum processing, the pallet.. These are all things that are present with us whenever we’re making music now.. we do a lot of referencing. And we also try to do our best with the least equipment possible, rather than always wanting to make our setup more and more complicated.
When I think about Dilla, or DOOM, or DJ Kool Herc, it’s amazing to me how much they were able to do, more or less within one unit.. they were all masters of their equipment, and of their craft.
“If That’s Not Hip-Hop History Informing The Present…”
To be honest, we are late arrivals to the world of hip hop, and we’re coming from small towns in England, so it’s probably been quite a different vibe than what DOOM created. But maybe because we all arrived into it together, and have had the luxury of being able to discover so much dope music that has come before, we’ve formed our own relationship with it in a way.We used to go out to pubs a lot, and would almost always end up talking about what we wanted to listen to or play next.
Eventually we ended up performing an MF DOOM tribute at a spot called
the HipHop Chip Shop and I think that was the first time we realised that there was an audience of real people who were down to hear our take on things.
If that’s not hip-hop history informing the present, I don’t know what is.