Madvillainy

Madvillainy came out on Stones Throw on 23 March 2004, MF DOOM and Madlib recording as Madvillain. They made it at Bionic in Los Angeles, at the Bomb Shelter in Glendale, and at Doom’s crib in Atlanta. Madlib supplied the beats: jazz, soul, film and library offcuts, chopped until the loop feels found. DOOM raps in the mask, internal rhymes stacked so a bar can hold a joke and a threat. Money Folder had come out on 11 November 2003 and reached number 66 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart, a modest number for a record that was not chasing that chart. All Caps followed in February 2004. The title is a rule about how the name is written, and also a good description of how the rhymes feel: compressed, capitalised, no room for a loose adjective.

The album debuted at number 179 on the Billboard 200. That is a small entrance for a record that later got treated as a monument. The songs are short on purpose. A loop states itself, DOOM says what he has to say, and the next loop starts. There is no single you can lift out and send to radio without the surrounding miniatures, which is why Money Folder’s chart position stayed modest and why the album still circulates whole. Stones Throw, Peanut Butter Wolf’s label, was the right door: a crate-digger’s imprint putting out a crate-digger’s collaboration with a rapper who had already quit the idea of a conventional career once.

People now meet the record through the mask, which photographs well and explains less than the rhymes do. The useful way in is still All Caps, then the tracks around it, then the realisation that Madlib’s loops are doing as much authorship as the voice. Two cities, three studios, one label in Los Angeles, a chart position that did not predict the afterlife. The afterlife happened because the songs are finished in a minute and then finished again.

Sources

• Madvillainy: Stones Throw, 23 March 2004, studios, Money Folder, All Caps, Billboard 200 number 179.