in 2004, five years after it's release, after MV, Geedorah, and the Vaudeville joint...

DOOM 12 inches got love here and there from the heads I listened to rap with back then, and we caught his wave right into MV. The execution/culmination of that album felt perfect, especially with how I felt about underground and mainstream rap at the time: aka it sucked.

so DOOM on OD felt "unpolished," which is ironic, cause his sound is dirty as fuck in general.

but over the years my love for Operation DOOMSDay has only grown. He was honest, vulnerable, vivid, and just technically masterful in how he constructed the rhymes, and IMO the most "authentic" version of the character Dumile raps through.

OD feels like an album spawned out of a very real depression related to Dumile's life events and environments. He raps like he crawling out of it through his music, and it feels like the rawest of poetry to me.

MV is Dumile owning and knowing how to perform the Villian. It's wonderful rap music to this day, but revisiting OD recontextualized how Dumile crafts the character of DOOM through the lyrics/music.

Low-key it's why I upp'd this post. As I've been rereading the hell out of two novels I'm teaching my students, it's made me realize how much we can gloss over very important details, as lovers of art, when we first interact with some thing.

I was listening to other shit when JJ DOOM dropped, had reshaped my audio tastes, had an idea of what I wanted a DOOM record to sound like, shit he hadn't given us a thing since 2009's Born Like This. As my old replies shows, I gave the album two or three quick run throughs and moved onto what I wanted to listen to.

But listening to it on its own terms 5 yrs after the fact, JJ DOOM sounds so refreshing in sound, and DOOM is spitting ridiculoid bars, not his purposefully silly bars of DangerDOOM. It feels like the old hungry villain, but on a new sup'd up space craft.

ok, I'm done.