When I spoke with Daniel ‘DOOM’ Dumile in the Spring of 2003 for The Wire, my encounter went something like this: we talked for 30 minutes or so, and I peppered him with questions about his 1999 masterwork Operation: Doomsday as well as his recent foray as King Geedorah, Take Me To Your Leader. I worked at a Miami newspaper, too, so I was limited in the amount of time I had to interview him. Otherwise, I would have certainly pressed for a longer conversation.

Then, DOOM suddenly announced, “You should talk to my man King Ghidra!” (I’m paraphrasing here… the interview was captured on outdated technology, and despite my best efforts the past few days I haven’t been able to coax the microcassette recorder back to life). We hung up, and then I got a second call. It was DOOM, albeit with a slightly guttural vocal tone, like a New York day worker somewhat out of breath from running to catch the LIRR train to Manhattan who calms his nerves with a blunt.

“Yo! What up, this is King Ghidra!” he announced. What followed was 10 minutes of weirdly stilted conversation before I finally decided to end the call.

Today, of course, I would love to talk to DOOM pretending to be King Ghidra. He was an eccentric’s delight who melded Saturday morning cartoon iconography with lyrical jabberwockies and pulled off this feat with a light, magician’s touch. Far from an MC rapping for the sake of rapping, he produced original works full of thematic tension and emotional heft. From his group KMD’s quirky 1991 debut Mr Hood onward, each work pulsed with a unique concept, a stage for DOOM to unfurl cross-streams of ideas. “I sell rhymes like dimes, the one who mostly keeps cash but still brags about the broken times”, he once rapped.

When DOOM passed away last year at the age of 49, he was only a few years older than me. Moments in his career reflect points of my life as a music listener. I remember sitting in a high-school dorm room, watching Yo! MTV Raps, which had 3^rd Bass’s “The Gas Face” video on heavy rotation. I still recall the sensation of seeing DOOM, then known as Zev Love X, close out that hit (produced by Prince Paul) with a wheezy, slightly off-kilter flow that didn’t sound like anything else. This was an era when cameos on rap songs were relatively rare, and Zev Love’s verse was an unexpected surprise, like finding a crisp 20 dollar bill stuffed inside a birthday card.

As a college dropout barely sustaining myself on low wage retail jobs, I read about the confusion and press condemnation that ensued around KMD’s widely misunderstood Sambo cover art for Black Bastards, an album that Elektra shelved and didn’t see widespread release until indie labels began pressing it in the early 2000s. And in 1999, just as I was beginning a career in music journalism, I remember treating myself to a Christmas season shopping jaunt at Amoeba Records in Berkeley where I bought a vinyl copy of MF Doom’s Operation: Doomsday. It didn’t leave my turntable for the next few months. I couldn’t get enough of songs like “Hey!”, where DOOM slyly unpicks threads of Big Apple paranoia, “pretender Willies” and how he “rocks mics in 3-D” over his loop of the opening notes from Hoyt Curtin’s Scooby-Doo theme. “To all my brothers who is doing unsettling bids, you could have gotten away if it wasn’t for them meddling kids”, DOOM finishes, just before the voice of Scooby-Doo warbling “Over here!” cuts in. Who could resist?

If Operation: Doomsday marked DOOM’s remarkable vengeance on an industry that nearly destroyed him (and his rebirth after the tragic death of brother and KMD partner DJ Subroc) then the King Geedorah sessions with his Monsta Island Czars crew emerged as he planned his takeover of independent rap. It’s his only posse album, perhaps an attempt to bring along the New York associates who sustained him before his unusual ascent to cult antihero status. Like DOOM, most were survivors of bad label deals. X-Ray, who produced most of MIC’s Escape From Monsta Island, was briefly signed to Loud Records with his group Darc Mind. Biolante, who appears on the Take Me To Your Leader standout “Fastlane”, is better known as Kurious, whose 1993 Columbia debut A Constipated Monkey is one of the unsung gems of golden era rap.

In his interview with me, DOOM described Escape From Monsta Island as “just a way of putting MCs out there, giving them a platform to shine on”. The finished product has a rangy quality, and it’s clear some voices are better than others. But hiphop is not only a battle for supremacy of the id, it’s also a playground. Monsta Island showcases the participatory nature of the artform, a grand cipher of rhymers deploying Godzilla-inspired monikers, each taking their moment in the sun. DOOM’s longtime friend Percy “MF Grimm” Carey initiated the “Monsta Island” concept, taking the alias Jet Jaguar – but ironically, he got locked up on a four year sentence for drug offences, so he doesn’t appear on the album (DOOM recycled “No Snakes Alive” from their 2000 collaboration MF for Take Me To Your Leader). Grimm’s haunting graphic novel autobiography Sentences: The Life Of MF Grimm is highly recommended.

The MIC sessions dribbled out through Monsta Island, CD-Rs on X-Ray’s Mindbenda imprint and other indie fare like Rodan’s 2004 album Theophany: The Book Of Elevations. But it’s on King Geedorah’s Take Me To Your Leader that they coalesced into a statement of transcending urban blight and neglect. The album is produced by DOOM as the Metal Fingered Villain, and he weaves in snippets of dialogue from Godzilla fare like Destroy All Monsters as well as horror and sci-fi stuff like Dawn Of The Dead, evoking an attack on Western society by mutated creatures. He told me it’s an alien’s perspective on human relations, albeit “in a humorous way”.

DOOM’s approach reaches its zenith in the epic six minute collage “Monster Zero”. He collates disembodied voices over a sped-up loop from Idris Muhammad’s sonorous jazz fusion melody “The Saddest Thing”, creating a disorienting funk barrage. Two thirds of the way through, he suddenly calms the waters by flipping a drum loop from Boz Scaggs’s “Do Like You Do In New York”, a brief respite reminiscent of a Rick Rubin reduction. Then he starts the whirligig up again. There are few tracks more ambitious in DOOM’s beat catalogue. Only a handful of others like “Cellz” – his 2009 homage to Charles Bukowski’s nihilistic poetry signifying mankind’s self-inflicted decline – rival it.

Take Me To Your Leader was part of my soundtrack in the summer of 2003, just like the conversation with DOOM and King Ghidra that I struggle to recall now. It was driving around South Beach, blasting “Monster Zero”, going to outdoor parties and nightclubs… all things that have dissipated into the melancholy haze of life and its patchwork of briefly, lovely encounters, now just lingering effects to be treasured and missed.

Subscribers can read Mosi Reeves’s original 2003 article in The Wire 233, plus Hua Hsu's 2005 cover story on DOOM in The Wire 253.