For most of my life, I "vibe-listened" to rap. Meaning that I had sort of just bathed in the sound of the music, without paying attention to the details. The obvious but big detail I had missed was rhymes, and how much rappers use wordplay and all kinds of virtuosic rhyme schemes when they rap. Here I want to talk about MF DOOM, and how he took it to another level. This is a kind of word-wizardry I have seldom heard.
Rhymes have a bit of a childlike quality for me. I don't focus much on rhymes when I read poetry. Indeed some of my favourite poems do not even have rhymes, for instance the modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot and his Four Quartets. I love this kind of language that is on the verge of incomprehensibility. Another example is the prose in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, where he is trying to represent the nonverbal consciousness of Benjy, who cannot speak.
MF DOOM gets there the other way around, sort of. His rhymes are put in the foreground to such an extent that grammar and comprehensibility get pushed aside. Not completely. Truly random words would be mere childish babble. DOOM’s language is controlled: it’s dancing on the verge of making sense.
Look at this image where his opening rhymes from the song "Meat Grinder" are highlighted.
He rhymes nearly every word, but aren't they just nonsensical? "Tripping off the beat kinda, dripping off the meat grinder". What the hell?
First of all, let's talk about the rhyming aspect. “Tripping off the beat kinda / dripping off the meat grinder” forms an extended multisyllabic rhyme, meaning every word in the first sentence rhymes with every word in the second sentence. And if we change the lines after to "pimping soft heat niner, stripping soft sweet minor", it would all rhyme. (Try it.) But DOOM does something a bit unexpected. He changes the rhymes around and moves where they are placed on the beat. Instead of placing “heat niner” at the end of a phrase, he uses it to begin the next one:
heat niner | pimpin’, strippin’ | soft sweet minor
The opening and closing form matching rhyme units—heat/sweet and niner/minor—while pimpin’/strippin’ stacks another rhyme in the middle. It isn’t quite a palindrome, but the phrase feels constructed from the outside in. Now for the meaning. If we look closely, the words aren't random either.
He has a way of dancing around the beats with the rhythm of his rap. It's almost not in time, and "tripping off the beat kinda" could be a reference to that. “Dripping off the meat grinder” makes me picture minced meat emerging slowly and smoothly from a grinder, kind of a grotesque metaphor for DOOM's delivery. "Heat niner"—probably a gun—and "pimping, stripping, soft sweet minor", apparently describing a girl, where "minor" makes the line uncomfortably ambiguous. Although the words never settle into a clear narrative, they aren't random either. I feel like they are subservient to their rhyming quality, but their meaning is never completely sacrificed.
MF DOOM has been one of my main musical discoveries this year. His album Madvillainy is just incredible. Go check it out!