Every couple of years I return to my favorite video on YouTube: a of the rapper then known as holding court in a studio, eliciting gasps and laughter from an unseen audience by reciting lyrics. This is all a capella; sometimes he adopts DOOM’s meter to emphasize its fine-watch precision, but more often, Mos breaks the spell and draws out the ends of lines as if he’s in utter disbelief: “Read the signs: ‘No Feeding the Baboons’???” he says, incredulously. “Seeing as how they got ya back bleeding from the stab wounds???” Toward the end of the video, Mos raps part of ’s “Meat Grinder.
” That full-length collaboration with Madlib—one of the most anticipated, aggressively bootlegged, and ultimately acclaimed underground rap records of its time—vaulted DOOM to a new level of notoriety even as it threatened to overshadow everything that would follow. But for the most part, the verses that captivate Mos are from , the 2004 album that punctuated one of the great madcap runs in rap history. At another point, someone from offscreen suggests that rapping alongside DOOM would be a challenge.
The famously virtuosic MC shakes his head. “It would be fun,” Mos says. “He rhymes as weird as I feel.
” What is most striking about —which Rhymesayers has reissued in a 20th-anniversary edition that includes a handful of remixes and brief clips from a previously unheard interview—is the way DOOM blends his absurd character sketches with real autobiography, his outr.
