"Operation: Doomsday" — Is It Actually the Best Album Ever From MF Doom?

I zoom in on a hip-hop icon's debut LP in honor of its 25th anniversary.

Some hip-hop conversations can’t be confined to the genre’s well-worn tropes and historical lore alone. Any discussion about Daniel Dumile, aka MF Doom, Viktor Vaughn, Metal Fingers, Zev Love X, and many other personas, is one of them.

With a career spanning three decades and a half-dozen classics to his name, Dumile’s impact is better contextualized alongside surrealist giants like Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali than other emcees. His production style was proudly off-kilter, with beats and samples floating in and out of time signatures and beat grids. His rapping was defiantly haphazard, operating on its own free-associative plane, unmoved by whatever trends and rhyming frameworks were popular in the moment. In an era where rap began to quake under the weight of increased mainstream expectations, Dumile sought to burn those consumer expectations to the ground. He did just that with Operation: Doomsday, his 1999 coming-out party of an LP that changed the underground hip-hop game forever.

For as virtuosic a talent as Dumile was, the road to crafting a rap masterpiece was far from easy. He got his start when he was still a teenager, making up one half of KMD as Zev Love X alongside his brother, Dingilizwe Dumile, who was known professional as DJ Subroc. The duo were signed to Elektra Records and, as Jon Caramanica wrote for Spin, “primed to be the next A Tribe Called Quest.” But, in 1993, the label decided to abandon their forthcoming album, Black Bastards, after they misconstrued a Black reclamation visual as a racist dog whistle (which, when you consider KMD’s outwardly pro-intent lyricism, makes you wonder if record execs actually listen to what they put out in the first place, but I digress). Shortly thereafter, Subroc was struck and killed by a driver as he was trying to cross the Long Island Expressway. He was 19.

This tragedy sent Daniel Dumile’s life into a grief-stricken tailspin. After courageously finishing the work he and his brother had started, he retreated from the music scene altogether. Rumors persisted about his activities during this time. Some claimed he’d become a drifter, hitchiking and couchsurfing his way from place to place, trying to heal. Others whispered about rampant self-medication with drugs and alcohol. But, in 1997, he resurfaced, freestyling on underground legend Bobbito Garcia’s radio show. Those spots led to him signing with and releasing singles on Garcia’s indie label, the microscopic but highly respected Fondle ‘Em Records. Alongside imprints like Rawkus and Stones Throw, hip-hop owes a huge debt to Fondle ‘Em for gifting talent like Dumile with a platform to galvanize the underground.

He did so with an album that was completed in no time, for essentially no money. “Doom recorded most of that over a three-week period in my apartment on my MPC, using my records,” said DJ Stretch Armstrong, the New York native who was the yin to Garcia’s tastemaking yang on college radio. “He never slept for more than 3-4 hours at a time. The funny thing is, none of it was planned. He never asked if he could crash and make music […] He came over and just started getting busy and just stayed getting busy. We’d play different versions of songs that would eventually become the album but at the time it really just seemed like he was creating music because he had to, not looking at a release date or goal down the line.” Dumile was clearly a man possessed, driven by forces that would shape his distinctive alter ego, MF Doom.

In art, originality is a tenuous concept. Every new creative expression builds on and is informed by what’s come before it. The Doom persona, presented on the album’s cover as a man covered in metal and shrouded in a green, monk-like get-up, was inspired by the Marvel supervillain Doctor Doom. But, every time I listen to it, I have trouble tethering his work in any “sounds like” identifiers. To this day, no one sounds quite like him, depsite massively successful acts like Tyler, the Creator and Gorillaz giving it a game try. Try as they might, imitators can’t equal Doom’s soulful playfulness that, even when his bars were at their most vulnerable, like on the LP’s heartfelt closer, “? (Question Mark),” was couched in a cartoonish flair. Like his famous headgear, that technique purposely puts a distance between the artist and the listener, forcing you to consider the art on its own terms, without being influenced by celebrity or pop culture baggage.

As much as he could, Doom wanted to present his music to you in a bizarre vacuum.

Beyond his production prowess, which turned quiet storm ballads and TV themes into blunted, brilliant backbones, his biggest contribution to hip-hop’s growth was as a lyricist. Browsing the prose that makes up the Operation: Doomsdaytracklist to enough to make your head spin. It’s not simply that Doom drops bar after fire bar for nearly an hour (the complete reissue of this album, which is the one you’ll find on most streaming services, runs nearly two-and-a-half hours due to the instrumentals), it’s how dense and calculated each choice is. Consider the opening moments of the unforgettable “Rhymes Like Dimes:”

Ayo, yo, y’all can’t stand right here
In his right hand was your man’s worst nightmare
Loud enough to burst his right eardrum, close-range
The game is not only dangerous, but it’s most strange
I sell rhymes like dimes
The one who mostly keep cash but brag about the broker times

The internal rhyming schemes, the rapid-fire delivery, the unapologetic bravado—it’s everything you want in a killer rap cut.

Or this section from “Doomsday:”

Metal Fist terrorists claim responsibility
Broken household name usually said in hostility
Um, what is MF? You silly
I'd like to take ‘Mens to the End’ for two milli'
‘Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo!’ That's an audio daily double
Rappers need to fall off just to save me the trouble, yo
Watch your own back; came in and go out alone, black
Stay in the zone, turn H2O to Cognac

Say what you want about the “best” rappers most music fans will name, like Eminem or 2Pac. They’re great, don’t get me wrong. But Doom, even in his rawest and least polished form, was already asserting himself on a completely different level. Don’t forget, Operation: Doomsday came out nearly five full years before Madvillainy, his collaborative masterpiece with Madlib, dropped. To have this record as your launching point—never mind, one of the greatest music origin stories of the last 50 years—should say something about the respect we need to put on Doom’s names (as well as the others Dumile assumed throughout his career).

In the time it’s taken me to write this, I’ve considered swapping my earlier analogy regarding Magritte and Dali for another, more contemporary one: Bo Jackson. He’s widely considered one of the most talented athletes of all time, playing both football and baseball professionally. Maybe that’s a more apt parallel when comparing Dumile to other emcees. Others played the same sports. Fewer still had Hall of Fame careers. But, when it’s all said and done, he was the most naturally gifted at what they did, like Jackson.

Rest in power, king.

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Where does this MF Doom classic rank on your list of the best hip-hop albums of the 90s? Sound off in the comments.