Songs like ‘Guv’nor’ and ‘Wash Your Hands’ are peerless - the latter parodies hook-laden hip-pop, detailing a hygiene OCD experienced at a pool party before brandishing an extraordinary payoff involving an attractive’s “ camel-toe”.
Perfectly on-brief is ‘Banished’, a thundering fucker that swerves in and out of Dumile’s gruff diatribe like a traffic-dodging Need for Speed mastermind. Jarel’s role in all this is to background his dense, FX-laden and bass-driven psych-outs wonky electronica’s hyperactivity translated to a language compatible with tightly-woven rhymes. Frequently you find that the timing lacks oomph the sentiments are recycled and occasionally the technique, so reliably gawp-inducing on MM FOOD and Madvillainy - the mad, unpredictable flow of water shooting back up Niagara - sputters and spurts like the leaky tap in a ghetto retirement community. So cushioned is the impact that, at times, Key to the Kuffs sounds less like a career on autopilot than a Phineas Gage-like feat of survival trademark ticks and tricks arranged into place, albeit with all the waning passion of a frontal lobotomy patient. But alarm bells ring when the most you can say for mid-album psycho-dirge ‘Dawg Friendly’ is 'nice outro'. Better is ‘Retarded Fren’, a rattling, helter-skelter journey through the twisting back-alleys of his planetary ego.
“ The Supervillain get kicked out your countryĪnd said the pledge of allegiance six times monthlyīut known to rock a party and do karate on a ghoul”Īs an album track it’s hardly end-of-days awful, but it remains a slightly stale take on DOOM’s consistently rewarding Supervillain persona. What doesn’t help is a faintly useless lyric such as the following, found on one of the snoozier cuts from Key to the Kuffs, ‘Borin’ Convo’: Conning fans out of paid-for live shows isn’t the sign of a performer atop his game, regardless of villainous alter-egos. Nowadays putting the rhymes before the crimes is slightly problematic. Take a song like 2009’s ‘Gazillion Ear’, his manifesto ringing loud and loquacious: to provide original, financially-demotivated music in a world of greedy bankers, and worse, bad rappers. Time was when the syntax gymnast’s verses spoke for themselves and none of that figured. Truth is, the more we learn about the JJ DOOM mainman - best known for a) wearing a cool mask, b) rolling exemplary L-skins, and c) sending ‘DOOMpostors’ to take the stage and mime along at his headline shows - the more it transpires he’s perhaps a bit of an arsehole. Six guest appearances, and for three of these, DOOM, aka vigilante rapman Daniel Dumile, doesn’t show face.
Fifteen collaborations between MF DOOM and psychedelic hip-hop producer Jneiro Jarel, aka JJ.
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