Interview with Doom about the recording of Madvillain, how he wrote to and around Madlib's instrumentals, how he wrote rhymes more generally - and also talks about his son who died tragically young.
To mark Madvillainy's 15th anniversary, SPIN spoke at length with MF Doom about his memories of making the album, its impact on current underground rap, and the prospect of a sequel.
www.spin.com
"You have to go the extra mile to use a technique like that in your writing. When you’re looking at quality of wordplay, you’re looking at, how many words repeat in a bar, or two bars? How many syllables can you use that still make sense in a song? In certain ways, you get a triple word score. You know how in Scrabble, you have triple word score joints, the way you get points based on words, and how they correlate on the board? It’s similar to getting points like that, if you really take it to the next level.
What I be looking at is the quality of the rhyming word: phonetically, how the tone is, in the pronunciation of the word. Regardless of language—you can be fluent and speaking Spanish, Arabic, whatever. You can use an Arabic word to rhyme with a Spanish word and have English slang all in between it. As long as the word itself rhymes, you still get points for that word. And the reference is another way of bringing that same thing home. How many references can you cross and still stay on topic? And still rhyme? The more complex the subject matter and wordplay is, that’s where you get your points.
I’m a rhymer, so I go for points. I ain’t going to be talking shit about the next dude, or bragging about shit I got. I talk broke shit, I talk about shit I don’t got, or things I’m striving for. Say you’re speaking from a point of view where you’re talking to yourself, in maybe a sad mood. How do your tones come across? Can people feel what you’re saying? Can they hear what you’re saying? Are you well pronounced? Maybe you purposely were a little bit sloppy with it, to bring the point across. Can you bring the point across and still get the rhyme points? It’s like gymnastics on paper."