The Villain and Me.
Reflections on what MF DOOM taught me about living a creative life, 20 years later.
A foundational part of my creative development took place while directing music videos. And many of these projects were created in close collaboration with resonant (now legendary, even mythological) Black voices—lyricists and beat makers including Saul Williams, Nas, Snoop, Wyclef Jean, J Dilla, Method Man, Redman and Madvillain.
Madvillain is MF Doom and Madlib.
I’d known Madlib’s work with the Lootpack and Quasimoto, and we’d connected after he’d moved to Los Angeles with the rest of Stones Throw around 2000. And MF Doom, I’ve been a fan since his earliest moniker, Zev Love X and work with 3rd Bass and KMD.
Madvillainy is their sole LP.
A few weeks ago, Madvillainy received an RIAA Gold Certification for 500k copies sold – 20 years after its release. Apparently, there will be a gold record with my name on it arriving sometime soon.
I was lucky enough to direct two music videos from the Madvillainy project: ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ and ‘Accordion.’ Produced with minimal support, budgets I can’t quite remember, and a crew of collaborators who got behind the vision, these videos were released on the DVDs Stones Throw 101 and 102 (which took it’s subtitle from an ‘Accordion’ lyric: In Living the True Gods.) and later on the nascent platform of YouTube.
By the time the idea of doing videos for the record was even discussed, Madvillainy was already the stuff of legend.
The demo version of the album had been infamously stolen and leaked from Madlib’s hotel room in Brazil (a trip I was supposed to be on but ducked out of due to grad school) and sat dormant for a year, while both MCs tended to their wounds and the label figured out exactly what it meant to have an album that was this hotly anticipated leaked out into the world. I remember hearing this demo tape via a burned CD-R on a small boombox the word ‘MADDOOM’ scribbled on it with a fresh Sharpie.
But then word got out that Madvillainy was finally to be released, with new songs and new versions of demo songs.
At the time, Stones Throw was commissioning more animated videos than live action—probably due to the fact that their artists weren’t interested in being the center of attention—and the first video from Madvillainy, ALL CAPS, was the creation of my friend James Reitano, in the style of an animated Silver Age comic book.
Then one afternoon at Stones Throw Manor in Mount Washington, I met Doom.
I remember where we were, Doom standing next to the bar counter near the kitchen. We started talking about one of the new tracks ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’ ‘Me and O,’ he would start with, speaking about Madlib with his given name Otis while letting me know exactly what it meant to be a Rhinestone Cowboy. What a kind human being he was. I remember his warm smile and how incredible it was to hear his voice in person.
While it was pretty clear that Doom didn’t want to star in a live action video himself, he did have some ideas and some interest. And for someone who was as notoriously private as Doom—we’re talking about an artist who wore a mask, first a stocking, then a spray-painted Darth Maul mask, then a modified metal gladiator mask that weighed about four pounds, to ‘control the story’—this vulnerability felt like a huge breakthrough. I was excited to work with him.
Trust your gut: I had a much stronger feeling about ‘Accordion,’ another one of the new songs than ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’ It was much more of a left-field head-nodder and it was built around a sample from a friend’s record. But Doom was only willing to do ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ and that was the video I was commissioned to direct and I didn’t want to push things.
The music video for ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ was based on a story Doom told me about hiding his mask in a dumpster in NYC before ducking into a bodega…
What would happen if a regular dude came along and found the mask?
We took on the challenge of telling the story in the most compelling way possible, given the tools at our disposal and an almost immediate timeline. We would be doing almost no prep: a quick location scout, mapping out specific times we had to be in specific places.
And then on the day, we’d quickly feel out what was working in each location, and shoot. My crew at the time thrived on improvisation and intuition—we’d used a similar approach to great effect in a docu-drama with Questlove—and for me it felt like a much freer way to work than meticulous storyboarding and being overly reliant on the kind of cute music video concepts that were prominent in the early aughts.
‘Rhinestone,’ lyrically, seemed to focus on coexistent dichotomies, heart and mind, skill and success, wit and wisdom, poverty and wealth—this is part of what Doom and I spoke about—so my crew’s willingness to be present and to respond to what we felt in the moment was completely apropos.
Jump right in: We started pre-dawn on the edge of Chinatown with a mild hangover from two pitchers of beer with Doom the night before—he loaned me his mask to get a few early morning shots. More on this later, but can you picture us sitting at a bar in Little Tokyo talking about KMD, the mask in a plastic bag on the table?
I have so many memories from that day: eating breakfast at with Doom, our actor accidentally getting blunted to the point of incoherence, Doom deciding to appear in a few shots, Doom wandering on the banks of the LA river, the crew posing for a photo—taken by Doom, note the mask—at the last setup.
(A lot of this is documented in the article I wrote about the experience for Frank 151’s Doom issue years ago — DM for a copy.)
Learn from your collaborators: There was a moment in our last setup for Rhinestone where Doom asked our actor if he could ‘Take the bop out of his walk. And walk like a regular white guy.’ It really reminded me how simple honesty yields better results than beating around the bush. And he was absolutely right. Thank you, professor Dumile, your boldness in communication taught me something.
Do the work: Did we get what we needed? I thought so. I edited Rhinstone and everything flowed. Loved our coverage and how the story came through.
But the label didn’t see the vision. It was different from what a rap video was supposed to like, handheld and raw, jumpcuts and flares. I showed it to an editor I’d worked with, someone who had edited really legendary music videos that I respected. He didn’t get what I was going for. I tried all kinds of animation tricks, but got no reaction.
So ‘Rhinestone’ sat, much like the demo of Madvillainy. I loved what we’d shot, but I knew in my heart what it was missing: Doom.
Time away can be a gift / slow cooking leads to tenderness: A year later, Doom was in town and willing to perform to camera for Rhinestone. I remember that call well.
There is no such thing as coincidence: Madlib had sampled the song ‘Experience’ by Daedelus for this track. I happened to know Daedelus because I had directed his first video—my first video, too—for a class in grad school. And we’d become friends. He was down to come out to set to be in a few takes. I had a feeling that Daedelus being involved would open Doom up to shooting Accordion, too. And lo and behold, Doom liked the idea.
Use what you have: We definitely weren’t going to pay for a studio space, but the Stones Throw office was cool enough and I knew that Masa my DP could light it in a compelling way with almost nothing. I invited Brittany, an incredible dancer and choreographer (check her in J. Lo’s ‘Get Right’) I’d met on another project, to come out and freestyle too (see the theme? it’s all intuitive and improvisational), and I felt like her presence would add a layer of emotion and visual poetry and strong, feminine energy to the boy’s club we had been assembling thus far.
I finished ‘Rhinestone’ pretty quickly. ‘Rhinestone’ could be seen as the Los Angeles third in a trio of verité MF Doom videos , the other two, ‘Dead Bent’ and ‘Questions,’ shot in New York, though I hadn’t seen them at the time.
I’m not totally sure why I sat on ‘Accordion’ for as long as I did. It was a moment in time when there weren’t many venues for music videos. It was too specific for MTV, and throwing it to the ravenous dogs on the internet didn’t seem like a good idea either.
The universe is a storyteller: In 2007, I was asked to do a gallery screening at Rick Klotz’s Reserve Gallery on Melrose and needed a new piece to premiere. I had a few in progress to choose from, but ‘Accordion’ came to mind first, so I put some time in and got an edit together, something I felt strongly about. So this is where ‘Accordion’ premiered:
Take creative risks: ‘Accordion’ is more portraiture and performance based than ‘Rhinestone,’ but there is actually was a very simple concept at play as well: Doom walks up and down the darkened hallway like an accordion moves in and out.
Never mind the fact that it was a Magnus organ that made the wild sound Madlib sampled, not an accordion. But that’s an important fact too: Madlib called it how he heard it, and he heard an accordion.
And I feel like the video resonates with this idea, too. We shot at two in the morning. I had a Heineken in my hand during all of the takes from Accordion. At that point in the experience, Doom and I had worked together enough to share a common creative language. Ditto for Masa, our cinematographer, who went on to shoot Silver Linings Playbook, among others.
All of these elements created space for a level of comfort in expression that most likely wouldn’t be present in a more rigidly structured film. Egon stopped by on the way back from Tokyo, Jank hung out and did playback (I feel like there’s a shot of me and Doom just waiting to be seen from his Yashica t4 roll of that night), but there really wasn’t any creative intervention outside of the people who were actually making the film. Imperfections, off moments and all: this video is less marketing film, more raw, cinematographic art that documents a conversation between Doom, Masa and myself at that moment in time.
Make the client happy, but make your future self happy too.
Stones Throw got what they wanted, Rhinestone, which presently has 4.5 million YouTube views, and I got what I wanted, Accordion, which presently has 13 million views.
I still hold strongly to my beliefs that risk taking is critical to creative success. That planning is important but more often than, like the million misattributed quotes floating around the internet confirm, that the plan usually gets you to the first skirmish and not beyond. So being aware of your intuition and honing your improvisation chops is crucial. That you can write concepts and scripts and make decks and powerpoints, but that sometimes you have to make the thing. The thing that that little voice inside is telling you to try. Without asking permission.
The concept you’re proving is probably…you.
There are a lot of details missing here—I don’t speak about Doom much—but they’ll be in the book about my experiences as a hip hop kid, from time spent with NWA as a teen to directing music videos to writing and direcing my first narrative feature film.
And a final note…
You never know the true value of an experience until much, much later: When YouTube first emerged, I wasn’t ready for such wild and unfiltered comments. But when I’ve visited these videos recently, the comments are incredibly moving.
Here are a few of my favorites:
The guy playing the accordion in the background is actually the composer of the original track which Madlib took the sample from. His name is Daedelus and the song is "Experience". Just keep ya eye out like aye aye captain.
This is one of the most legendary songs in hip hop.
I forget he is dead sometimes. I used have panic attacks multiple times a day. This song got me through them so many times. RIP DOOM. You with your son and brother now.
I never cry. These news got me in fucking shambles. I was 14, misguided and unsure of myself. Then I heard this song and I started to delve into his music. The man changed my life, he taught me to be myself - Fuck what everybody else thinks, just be you. I have Doom to thank for that.
I’m actually crying rn... Rest In Peace Daniel Dumile... you saved so many of us from that dark hole
And it reminded me of something: that as creatives, we never know who our work will influence. There will always be haters, but there will also always be people who will receive the work and find inspiration and motivation in it. And ultimately, the audience is more important than my own tastes and projections. It’s true.
Rest in peace, Daniel Dumile, and thank you for the experience.
Find snippets from my personal hip hop history here.
Also subscribe for more essays like this one, on topics ranging from being in Tokyo with DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist to my relationship with food critic Jonathan Gold.