Take Me to Your Leader: MF DOOM’s Overlooked Masterpiece
Follow the light.
The light is your guide.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Madvillainy, the most celebrated record in the legendary catalogue of rapper MF DOOM, was made entirely in tandem with another artist. The metal-faced villain has always reveled in the theatricality of comic-book style collusion, and his 2004 masterpiece made alongside famed producer Madlib is one of many DOOM projects to appear under a joint moniker: Madvillain, DANGERDOOM, JJ DOOM, and more. Even his earliest work was as one part of the rap group KMD alongside his brother Subroc (before the latter’s tragic death and the group’s subsequent implosion), and though his return with Operation: Doomsday in 1999 was in many ways a complete overhaul for the artist once known as Zev Love X, his collaborative spirit never waned throughout the man’s many incarnations. Hidden in the credits of two tracks on that album (Red & Gold, Who You Think I Am?) was the birth of yet another persona: King Ghidra, an oblique nod to the Godzilla franchise that hinted at the upcoming release of DOOM’s most ambitious musical scheme.
Given its unusual niche in the MF DOOM discography, that Take Me to Your Leader rarely receives the same verbose analysis or cultural recognition as the rapper’s most acclaimed releases is hardly surprising. Released in June 2003, the album broke away from the already acclaimed Operation: Doomsday and DOOM’s budding renown, billed under the name King Geedorah and featuring relative few verses from the masked MC himself. Take Me to Your Leader places him instead in the role of producer and overall mastermind, while enlisting a cavalcade of regular DOOM associates and other guests to fill in the lyrical gaps. Reassessing it nearly two decade later in the wake of Dumile’s sudden passing, the record’s atypical charm and airtight tracklist have sadly done little to sway its overall reputation; it’s hard to get your equal share of dues while belonging to a discography that can also boast of eternal classics like the aforementioned Madvillainy or DOOM’s 2004 solo effort MM..FOOD. But Dumile’s achievements on Take Me to Your Leader deserve all the attention and admiration of his most lauded releases, and even all these years later, there is still nothing else that sounds quite like it.
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Though the album begins with an eerie excerpt of dialogue from the 1965 movie Invasion of Astro-Monster (far from the last Godzilla sample to appear on this record), the one-two of stuttered organ chords is the real hook here, segueing perfectly into the blissful melody that defines one of DOOM’s finest compositions. Fazers, like much of the record, is indebted to retro kaiju films the same way that Enter the Wu-Tang is to martial arts flicks (or other DOOM projects are to comic books and supervillains); here Dumile takes on the persona of King Geedorah, the three-headed monster that represents Godzilla’s most pernicious archrival, and this opening track serves effectively as an introduction for the larger-than-life antagonist: “King Geedorah, take me to your leader/Quick to claim that he not no snake like ‘Me neither'”. Take Me to Your Leader captures a raw, unrefined version of DOOM, an era when the burgeoning talent showcased on Operation: Doomsday was still being smoothed out in preparation for the genre-defining performances that would grace the tracks of Madvillainy and MM..FOOD in the not-so-distant future. Albums like this and Vaudeville Villain (which dropped a mere three months later) are brimming with a familiar brand of offbeat and self-deprecating humour that, as crude as it is at this stage of DOOM’s career, cannot help but captivate: “If he ain’t the best, he’s the best in/The top three out of myself, I, and me/Put on your thinking caps/Or act like you had a slight inkling perhaps”.
Like Operation: Doomsday before it, Take Me to Your Leader was produced entirely by DOOM himself, with many of the instrumentals taken from his Special Herbs series of beat tapes released under the name Metal Fingers (credited here as The Metal Fingered Villain). Conversely, the masked MC himself is largely absent in a lyrical capacity, only rapping on five tracks in total, including one interlude that doesn’t even reach a minute in length. The bulk of the verses are provided by a motley crew known collectively as the Monster Island Czars, including prominent DOOM collaborator MF Grimm who appears under the pseudonym Jet Jaguar (taken from a robot that appeared in the 1973 film Godzilla vs. Megalon). Donning similar kaiju-themed personas, the eccentric and multifarious Czars wreak havoc over DOOM’s menagerie of old-school samples and terse drum loops; bringing in this many untested names could have easily ended in disaster, but early highlights like Fastlane and Krazy World prove that the ersatz supergroup can more than hold their own with one of underground hip hop’s brightest prodigies. The former track races by in a furor of wailing guitars and impeccably shrewd bars from Biolante (“Blaze trails that haven’t been travelled in a while/Scatter clues for those who equate the style”), while the latter spins an obscure snippet of psychedelic soul into a wonderfully indulgent platform for Gigan’s cynical drawl and lurid rhymes.
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DOOM’s beats largely bring out the best in his associates on every track here, be it a morose self-reflection of youthful mistakes from Hassan Chop on the theatrical I Wonder or the blistering pace of Trunks’ hubris over the warped instrumental of Lockjaw: “Before I rock raps, I drink a keg of Listerine/Then I spit the freshest lines you’ll ever hear for centuries”. The velvety jazz loops of Next Levels are an unusual aesthetic choice for DOOM, but the guest rappers more than make it work between the exuberant charisma of Stahhr and Lil’ Sci (“Disaster cataclysmic, mystic natural/It’s about time we hit y’all with some substance that’s actual”) and the intricate rhymes from ID 4 Winds (“Fascist through the atlas, first class diplomatic status”). Most intriguing of all, the elusive Mr. Fantastik shows up to trade bars with the metal-faced villain on Anti-Matter, delivering the first of the only two verses he would ever pen before vanishing into the abyss of hip hop urban legend. As timeless as his later appearance on MM..FOOD would later become, here the slick guitar line provides an equally compelling platform for the faceless rapper’s irreverent drawl: “Lyrically unorthodox, I flow continuous/Never on a straight path, I’m known to bend and twist”.
Throughout it all, DOOM sprinkles in an eclectic mix of vocal snippets that tie everything together around a conceptual narrative of monsters and malevolence, his appreciable ear for ambience serving to unite a diverse set of rappers and instrumentals under one thematic umbrella. Still, it’s often the tracks where he eschews the art of rap entirely that most impress, as the listener is treated instead to an extended odyssey of sound collage with all of the villain’s talent behind the boards on display (not to mention his impeccable taste). DOOM may have been bold enough to cram a full suite of culinary-themed skits into the middle of MM..FOOD a year later, but here the gimmick works to much greater effect, spread throughout the album and constructed with a more meticulous ear for congruity. Monster Zero pulls together all of Dumile’s sci-fi influences under one roof, splicing together clips from Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and (of course) multiple Godzilla movies to tell a fragmented tale of King Geedorah’s descent from the darkest regions of space, hell-bent on terrorizing the Earth (or the rap game, if you’ve been keeping up with the metaphors). What really sells the concept, though, is the instrumental: as its disjointed drums rumble with an exaggerated boom bap flair, the impossibly hypnotic melody stutters in and out of focus underneath, flickering and fluctuating with a life all its own.
The sampling on the title track, meanwhile, is much more esoteric; while the beat itself (laced with the eerie hum of a theremin) certainly sounds appropriate for a record about a three-headed monster from outer space, the dialogue peppered in is mainly sourced from the classic ‘80s action anime Fist of the North Star (with some Looney Tunes quips thrown in for good measure). No Snakes Alive takes things a step further, with DOOM lifting music directly from a Godzilla movie soundtrack and mutating it into a anxious fracas of crashing percussion. The energetic posse cut is perhaps the most impressive display of lyrical technique on the album, frantically oscillating in tempo as each verse crescendos alongside Geedorah’s offbeat punchlines (“Exact dough ‘til it stack high/White hoe, black guy, the rap game black eye”) or Jet Jaguar’s alliterative dexterity (“Illumination awesome, interpretation awkward/Alarm, ankle house arrest/Who’s best? Monster Island Czars”). If Rodan still manages to steal the show after all that, it’s only because his intimidating delivery is at once verbose, intense, and thought-provoking: “Syntax the sequence, arranging lessons so deliberate/Making wise words clear, but population stay illiterate/Consider it, gods refine power, fools get rid of it/Men build dreams on promises but lack the will to deliver it”. For DOOM, it really was a case of what you like as opposed to what you are like; while his villainous persona made Daniel Dumile’s love of comic books and Saturday morning cartoons self-evident, this album is a testament to hours spent scouring for imported monster movies and dubbed anime in the bowels of late-night television, and it’s hard to argue with the results.
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In addition to maintaining a metallic separation between his personal life and his career, MF DOOM was a notoriously reticent artist even while hidden behind the mask, a man who sat for only a handful of interviews throughout his lengthy career and whose rare communications to fans often took the form of all-caps broadcasts into the ether (his most famous Tweet, sent ten years and one day before his death: “DOOM IS NOT ON TWITTER”). What little we do know about Daniel Dumile largely had to be learned secondhand through his lyrics, which makes the existence of Take Me to Your Leader all the more important for showcasing a completely different side of one of hip hop’s most elusive icons. Amidst the blustering horns and muffled percussion of The Fine Print, DOOM outlines his final command to you, the awestruck listener of his proclamations: “Render unto Ghidra what is Ghidra’s”. Though the man himself has certainly received his share of accolades in the annals of underground hip hop, his most outlandish and unconventional album remains relegated to footnotes under the heel of Madvillainy, MM..FOOD, and Operation: Doomsday, a fate far worse than King Geedorah deserves. Render unto Take Me to Your Leader what it deserves: recognition for its singular creativity, its testament to DOOM’s talent as producer, rapper, and ringleader, and its status as one of the most densely intriguing rap records of the 2000s.