The Other Alias

Not Zev Love X, not King Geedorah, not Sci Fly, not Viktor Vaughn, not Metal Fingers, not the Super Villain, nor any spelling variation of the aforementioned; I'm talking about King Dumile, a name with exactly one credit. DOOM took on this alias for his sole appearance alongside international rap group A State of Mind (ASM) on the appropriately titled "Masking" off their album, The Jade Amulet. This is actually a narrative album wherein one of the two rappers from ASM and each of the guest vocalists on the album assumes the roles of a particular character (and the other rapper from ASM serves as the narrator). King Dumile is a kind of tyrannical antagonist who appears on the album's penultimate chapter/song, and when you hear it, you can tell DOOM didn't phone this in; he really embraced the concept and wrote his verse in a way that suited the story — and made for a dope animated video as well. Here you can see the guys from ASM talking about how the track came together. Below is the video animated by Monkey Eggs.

The Art of DOOM: Character Concepts, Cover Art, Sketch, Graffiti and Paint

Dumile's sambo character appeared on 
every KMD cover, either crossed out or hanged

The original version of the Black Bastards cover art,
which provoked the unwarranted ire of a Billboard 
columnist, leading Elektra to shelve the album.

The final version signed emef

DOOM drew this character in the sketch book of
Ego Trip journalist Noel Callahan-Bever in 1997 

DOOM's MetalFace tag, also from NCB's book

Per Operation: Doomsday front cover artist Blake
"Skotch 79" Lethem, DOOM traced this cartoon off the TV for an outline

DOOM's tag from the inside cover.

The DOOM-tagged van from the back cover
of Operation: Doomsday

A throw-up by Skotch 79 aka KEO and DOOM,
jacked from KEO's Instagram page

DOOM, clearly having not lost a step, did this mural in 2012 for adidas Originals

A painting DOOM did for Adult Swim's Jason DeMarco,
downloaded from his Twitter page

R.I.P. MF DOOM

I know I’m not alone when I say that MF DOOM was one of the artists who got me into hip-hop. And by “into,” I mean really, really into it: listening to it constantly, aspiring to be involved in it, doing my best to live out that aspiration, thinking in beats and rhymes. For those of us who grew up worshipping Wu-Tang then worked our way back to golden-era hip-hop via the early ‘00s and late ‘90s underground scene, DOOM’s music was a driving force that at once bridged these movements and soared beyond them.

Everything about DOOM was iconic, not just the mask: the dollar-bin sample selection that was in constant conversation with itself; the smorgasbord of pop culture references that mined philosophical treatises from Saturday morning cartoons and Saturday afternoon Daikaiju films; and the intricately structured yet effortlessly breathless rhyme schemes, cadences within cadences, like mesmerizing burners sprung to elaborately dynamic life from deceptively simple sketches. It would’ve taken him three or four words to say all that, it would’ve sounded six thousand times better, and maybe freestyled.

When KMD’s first album dropped, I was five or six years old, so I’m one of the fans who never heard of Zev Love X until Black Bastards was released on Sub Verse. To this day, it’s my favorite DOOM album, one of my favorites by anyone for that matter. To my ears, the audio collage of “Garbage Day #3” is a high watermark for sample-based music. In just over two minutes DOOM and his late brother Subroc lay the thematic groundwork for what could be a full catalog without so much as one lyric. And then they proceed to rap and produce circles around their Native Tongues forebearers. And they would’ve been in their early 20s when they wrote that album. Truly inconceivable.

Of course, there’s no wrong answer to “what’s your favorite DOOM album,” and one can make a case for any number of them being among the best of their time. The run he went on from 1999 to 2004 has to be one of the greatest by any rapper/producer in any era. People forget he also produced prodigiously over that stretch, including no less than eight volumes of his Special Herbs & Spices series as well as the majority of MF Grimm’s The Downfall of Iblyss: A Ghetto Opera, an overlooked classic with a story behind it to rival even DOOM’s own reinvention saga.

Indeed, for such a singular artist, a remarkable amount of DOOM’s most iconic work was done collaboratively: with Subroc as KMD, with KEO on the mask, with Madlib as Madvillain, with Danger Mouse as DANGERDOOM, and with the Monsta Island Czars, who’ve featured prominently on these pages. A true visionary, he brought in the best and brought out theirs. Let’s not forget he also did four tracks on Ghostface Killah’s Fishscale, and to this day heads clamor for a DOOMSTARKS album.

Long Island has given the world some of the most original and landscape-altering rap music in hip-hop history, and DOOM’s was perhaps the most uniquely earth-shattering of it all. I haven’t even touched on Take Me to Your Leader, probably my second favorite album of his, and already I feel like I’ve given birth from the heart spilling words here. God do I hope there’s another King Geedorah project in the archives. Man am I thankful there’s one in the first place. By any name, Daniel Dumile was an absolute inspiration and an unforgettable genius. May he rest in peace.

The 10 Most Viewed Long Island Rap Posts of 2020

Like the title says, these are Long Island Rap Records' 10 most visible posts of 2020, as determined by the little view count icon in the Blogger user interface.

10. Thoughts on a couple semi-obscure De La songs from 1993 and their legacy
It warms the heart to see this post squeaking onto here, as it’s easily one of my quirkiest in recent memory, connecting Tony Touch mixtapes to Buhloone Mindstate-era b-sides to my all-time favorite album, Stakes Is High to Ras Kass’s foray into the East-West beef. Also, my lady bought me the Ego Trippin’ (Part 3) VLS for Xmas (imported from Japan no less).

9. Hus “Wavo” Kingpin – The Threesome EP
Hus never takes years off, but 2020 was an especially prolific one for him. This being arguably his strongest project of the year, and a very early post on Cognac Spaceship being the fourth most viewed post in site history, it’s fitting that Wavo should find himself on this list. Shout out the Internet Archive for being a place where you can still find Madonna’s Sex book online.

8. Lil Pharo – “F4mous” / “Hendi”
Artists and managers who hit the submission page: good things come to those who wait and also to those who share these posts across their social media channels. There was about a month between submission and follow-up here, so obviously I’m not in the practice of premiering hit singles ahead of pay-to-play sites, but I’m happy to provide a platform for those who do their due diligence.

7. “He’s a Caveman, It’s Another Time.” R.A. the Rugged Man Puts the Id in Long Island.
R.A. the Rugged Man is known as both a crazy motherfucker and a devout hip-hop head, and this interview shows why. His antics are legendary, but for me it was most fun hearing R.A. talk about his roots in the mid- to late-1980s LI hip-hop culture. I learned a lot from our discussion. Trust I’m still trying to find the Latino freestyle single that provided his first appearance on wax.

6. Andy Koufax – I’m From A Little Place
Fun fact: the original promo for this album compared it in a roundabout way with a pineal gland cyst and was attributed to Jesus Christ. Side note: the Long Island Rap Record Store page that also launched with this release brought in more views than the top two posts on this list combined. If one-twelfth of those visitors bought a tape, they’d be sold out. If you buy one, I’ll be super grateful.

5. “It's a dirty game of chess or checkers. Get paid or be left naked and desperate. I lit a candle and played Jamaican records, prayed and rested next to my favorite weapons, saved my bread up and then made my exit. I'm going back and forth with the thoughts of quitting like table tennis, but what's the game if the players ain't in it? Every pen ran out of ink on the day this was written.”

4. Roc Marciano: The Flipmode Era
The only surprising thing about Roc Marciano having two of the year’s top 10 posts is that neither of them is in the top 3. This post was basically me cataloging an afternoon spent listening to Flipmode Squad songs from 1999-2001. In the immortal words of Busta Rhymes, “So then they said, ‘Oh, so that mean we gon’, you gon’ switch it on em?’ I said, ‘Yeah, Flipmode. Flipmode is the greatest.’”

3. Dreddy Kruger Spotlights LI Talent on Think Differently Two: The Audio Film
Dreddy hit me after seeing DJ Booth’s feature on I’m From A Little Place. This led to me doing a feature on his latest project, which is a great listen, and DJ Booth doing a feature on the man himself, which is a great read. Definitely check all that out if you haven’t and look out for more Think Differently-related posts coming in 2021.

2. Darc Mind Was Here: Kevroc & X-Ray Reflect on 30 Years “Going Through It”
The possible opportunity to some day do this very interview was one of the main reasons I started writing about music in the first place, so you’ll have to understand when I say that this is easily my favorite post in the site’s history and the one I’ve gone back to most throughout 2020. With so many threads to follow from here, I expect to continue returning to it for many years to come.

1. An oral history of IGT, the Ill Got Team.
A post on IGT was long overdue, to the point where I felt the only way to do it justice would be to include a little bit of everything I could find on them. To organize it, I used the same tactic I’d adopted for my post on Rakim’s early years (the site’s second most viewed ever). I’m happy to report this ended up connecting me directly with IGT’s Lagato Shine, who was nice enough to submit some tracks for LongIslandRap.comp v4 and who will no doubt be featured here again in the future.

J.Yard - No Pity for Winners

For many artist-performers and professionals in general, there's a clear divide between presented persona and personal presence. For others, it's harder to distinguish. J.Yard's No Pity for Winners is self-produced, -engineered and without a single guest feature, but that's not what has me thinking about the blurred lines of daily grinds and performance art. More impressive is that it's all those things while also autobiographical and ambitious in the truest sense of those words. It's the kind of project that, irrespective of streaming stats or sales or critical reception, is victorious in and of itself. I don't know J.Yard personally — his manager sent me a couple videos a few months back — but congratulations to that man for everything. #NP4W.

Crazy Harry - "No Narcan"

There's no way to glamorize opioid overdoses. You pass out, seize and turn blue. The stark darkness is emphasized by limits on access to medications that can prevent overdose deaths, as Crazy Harry's "No Narcan" depicts. In working on this post I tried to source some needle exchange or Naxolone distribution programs to link, but these byzantine webpages are all I could find.

Urbvn Architects NYC - Mutual Understandings 2

Mutual Understandings 2 follows up on the group's collective debut and showcases some of their extended collective with features from Profound, Matty Stones, Yung Kobain, Smerk, who also appears on the first album, and V1NO, who delivers a show-stopping performance on "Real Ties." At the project's core, however, remains the trio of Josh Alias, Yung K, and Blaq Kush, three MCs whose creativity is matched only by their daring; see lines like "Cybernetic internet got me outlandish / I stay on line like I'm waiting for a sandwich." Also new in UA world: Blaq Kush's identifiably titled No Dental Insurance is pay-what-you-can for 48 hours.

Some More Gifts from Johnny Storm

(Unreleased) I’m deadass leaving this up for like 10mins so listen to it while you can. pic.twitter.com/E6xAo2oXgS

— Johnny Storm (@_FlyGuySky_) December 20, 2020

(full song) Christmas In 99 pic.twitter.com/rCzdSlOkEi

— Johnny Storm (@_FlyGuySky_) December 26, 2020

"Ghost of P" is off Lyrical Assassin 5. The 2nd joint is unreleased but definitely needs one of those. "Christmas In 99" is a little something from St. Nicholas, who was Black.

Prince Paul - The Crazy Forgotten 80's

Prince Paul dropped another installment in the It's Not the Size Your Mix It's How You Use It series streaming on his Mixcloud page. The description labels it part 1, so hopefully there's another coming soon. Note: it's been five years since the last one so some patience may be required here.  Also required listening: the hilarious and insightful interview podcast Prince Paul and Open Mike Eagle did earlier this year, featuring in-depth discussion of some of Paul's best and lesser known projects. Completely unknown: whether or not Prince Paul received the cassette tape and letter I tried to send him this year.

Grandmilly - Cookies For Santa (Hosted by Shozae)

"This is more than music to me, this shit is everything / Sun, moon, and stars, the science of being / Chris Kringle, I'll call him Santa, that means Satan to me / When you black they be looking at you like you got a disease / So I keep a mask like it's Halloween for the quarantine." Grandmilly and Shozae are back with some seasonal presents of mind, produced by Zenan. This the same duo that brought us 2 Stoopid Dogs, Motel Six, Mausoleum, and Adventureland, so don't be surprised when the whole tape bangs. Great minds think alike. Touch the tracklist to download via Mediafire, or stream below sans outro due to Soundcloud being a tool of neo-capitalist oppression.