Artist – Album: Madvillian – Madvillainy
Label: Stones Throw Records
Release Date: 2004
For Fans Of: A Tribe Called Quest, Flying Lotus, Open Mike Eagle
Back in the early 2000s, one of the most genius collaborations in hip-hop’s long history was produced.
In the years following his brother’s death, Daniel Dumile —more known by his primary pseudonym, MF Doom — disappeared between New York and Georgia’s Kennesaw neighborhood.
With a friend near Atlanta, Stones Throw Records’ manager got on the phone, contacting his friend to feed some beats through to Doom, who was produced then by locally-known turntablist Madlib.
After Doom’s debut solo album Operation Doomsday — released in 1999 — Madlib stated in a Los Angeles Times interview the two artists he wished to collaborate with were the then-alive beatsmith J Dilla and the masked British-born lyricist himself.
So, it was penned, and in the years following 2001, this dream became a reality between beats produced in Brazil hotel rooms and studio recording sessions in Los Angeles.
Jumping forward into the past, even 14 years after its release, the collaborative album, Madvillainy, is still a crucial underground gem in the abstract hip-hop scene and has inspired artists from BadBadNotGood to Earl Sweatshirt to BROCKHAMPTON.
As a group, Madvillain proved two low B-list melodious celebrities could combine and create a capstone cooperative effort without the glamourous 128-track recording consoles and major music label allowances.
Songs like “Fancy Clown” or “Rainbows,” whose jazz/soul samples allow Doom to flow effortlessly over the polyrhythms of sampled variations, had an original chance of not coming to fruition.
The introduction between Madlib and Doom was an unconventional one at its minimum — the $1,500 price tag to fly from the peach state to the city of angels was too much for the label to afford, and the Stones Throw contract Doom signed was written on a paper plate.
But even through these unusual practices, which may have sparked the relationship between the Madvillain, the studio sessions were where this musical friendship truly catalyzed.
After sessions of psychedelic trips and Thai food gluttony in the Stones Throw bomb shelter studio, album staples, such as the vocally dense “Figaro” or the gangster medley “Meat Grinder,” were recorded between the two in this self-served buffet of hallucinogenic sonic proficiency.
After all, this is the main attribute of Madvillainy — the unforeseen combination of two like-minded musicians collaborating in a self-indulging display of genre-bending hip-hop trailblazing.
Through 22 tracks and 46 minutes of raving showcases of musical eclecticism, the listener finds itself with little to compare all of this to.
The album inspired the modern path of hip-hop and defined the underground rap scene in the United States when the bling era was in full swing.
Underneath the Iraq War, blowbacks and the diamond-studded pie-sized clocks hanging from Flava Flav’s neck, we had Madlib and MF Doom cementing the foundation for lo-fi avant-garde rap with a collaboration that extended past dreams and into reality.