Could Be The Iron Mask Or The Cosby Sweater: A Thank You Letter To MF DOOM, The Musician Who Made Me Proud To Be A Nerd

TW: Suicide.

By Jacob Cordas — It’s hard to explain hating yourself over being a nerd in today’s culture. It’s amazing that the same things I was bullied over when I was a child are now mandatory cultural consumption. People now gossip about the possibly-still-happening Flash movie and share their theories from the latest Helstrom episode. You got a one in three chance of bringing up The Runaways and people knowing what the fuck you are talking about. It’s the fluidity of time, things change and people you needed die. But culture continues its steady pace forward.

I write all this to say I spent most of middle school and high school years hating myself for being a nerd. My depression predates this with the oldest moment of suicidal ideation I can remember having was wanting to kill myself when I was eight on a ride home from a soccer tournament. But, that self-hate over nerd shit came a little later. It was the realization that everybody wasn’t into this - I grew up in a nerdy household and had been insulated to some degree. People would look down on you. Our representation in culture was just a punchline. Even a nerd that seemed to be serious was a joke in and of themselves. You barely needed to elaborate.

They are a nerd. They suck. Everybody laughs.

You can’t help but internalize that. What you love is a joke so that means you must be too. You are culture’s failure, something to be pointed at with jeers. I responded by supposedly accepting that I was unlovable (like some kind of fucking incel) and doubling down (exactly like a fucking incel). I would know the histories of the characters you don’t care about. I would gatekeep because at least that way I had something to protect. You don’t have to respect me. I don’t even respect me. But I want you to respect the effort.

It’s toxic and awful but it’s the trap that so many people like me fell into. Self-hate when framed right is just a shield.

It was around this time (as I was about 16) that DOOM came into my life. I hadn’t really been listening to rap music yet. I was a supposedly politically active (I was not) white kid so I did own Flobot’s Fight With Tools and I did have a semi-joking Pandora station dedicated to Jedi Mind Tricks. But I wasn’t listening to rap music regularly. I had grown up in a household that made the stupid joke that “Rap is just one letter away from “crap” for a reason.”*

But one day I was in a record store with my father and I stumbled across an album that just stood out to me. The cover art was cool and pop arty, a mouse wearing some kind of metal mask. The track names were silly. I distinctly remember finding songs called Vats Of Urine and Space Ho’s hilarious. Thinking I was getting a gag gift for myself, I talked my dad into getting it for me.

Except I listened to it. And then I listened to it again and again. And I listened to it so many times my family must’ve hated me even more than they already. Dangerdoom was unlike anything I had ever heard. Over Danger Mouse’s precise beats, DOOM was spitting with a confidence, swagger and silliness I never knew was possible. Surrounded by samples of cartoons that I was embarrassed to admit I liked, he was confident. He never faltered or slipped. His lyrics were complex, layering rhymes on top of rhymes, but all in the service of the album.

But more important than that, he was a villain. He didn’t care if you liked him or not. DOOM spit about what he liked and demanded you accept him. He didn’t need you to care because he knew you would. It was too damn good. He wasn’t ashamed of his nerdiness but embraced it.

I memorized every lyric on that album before I proceeded to torrent the entirety of his work. I’m still excruciatingly lonely at this point in my life. I hated my family and hated the people I was around. I hated myself more, which probably fed into the first two as well. It was awful. But here was DOOM who seemed to have more persona’s than I had fingers spitting with confidence and swagger while he referenced the cartoons I woke up at five to watch on Cartoon Network because that was easier than self-work.

The interplay between the personas fascinated me. King Geedorah was a god of sorts who had other villains working for him, so even on his album he barely spits. He leaves that to lesser beings. Viktor Vaughn was an upcoming rapper that I sem-imagined myself as, a hungry and ready to prove himself young man. DOOM was the villain, the centerpiece, the title character. Metal Fingers produced some of the beats, that’s at least when DOOM didn’t go off and do a team-up with some other villains.

Somewhere in this, I listened to Madvilliany, the single greatest album ever made by two supervillains teaming up. The sound collages throughout are perfectly composed. Madlib’s beats are chill but focused. But DOOM, DOOM had never been better. Every bar on that album is perfect, dropping lyric after lyrics that I still think about today. He had a track purely dedicated to just listing off his and Madlib’s different personas (bringing me back to a sample on Dangerdoom: “Sometimes even adopting a different person’s persona.”). It silly while still being demanding. It was smart without ever being condescending. With an album almost exclusively made out of two-minute songs, it was more punk rock than almost anything I had ever heard.

It was like the comic books I loved except it wasn’t playacting at adulthood. DOOM was DOOM, simple and pure. You didn’t need to beat around the bush. He was too good for that. Hell, he almost never refused to refer to himself in the first person because he was just that important. I was too small a word for him.

But the song I came back to the most on that album was Rhinestone Cowboy. With possibly the simplest beat on the whole album, DOOM spits a top ten verse. And then cuts off the applause to perform probably the best verse of his career. It was confident and show-offy. On a track meant to be a victory lap, instead I was teated to a slaughtering. “Oh, my aching hands/ From raking in grands/ And breaking in mic stands.” It was bragging as highest art. He was better than you and he goddamn knew it. He worked his ass off to make something perfect, something nerdy and something true. And he did it.

This was the first song I played when I found out he died.

It’s a hard thing to know what is appropriate to say at this point. I could go through the tracks I listened to. But thinking about everything DOOM did for me and for nerds like me, I keep coming back to that self-hate. DOOM was DOOM. It didn’t matter who was behind the mask. It mattered that there was DOOM, a man confident in who he was who demanded to be taken seriously, even when he ended a masterpiece album on an internet porn joke.

DOOM was the rapper for anyone who watched too many Kaiju movies and didn’t have enough friends. He was The Illest Villian for those of us who tried to find every excuse to go to a comic book shop only to be disappointed by the latest run of Static Shock.

I know I wrote far too many words already but it is so important to me that I specify this: thank you. Your music actively made me more confident in who I was. You made me proud to be a nerd. I didn’t need to be ashamed. I didn’t need to hide it. I am who I am. And you were who you were.

I am so thankful I got the chance to listen to your music. I am so appreciative you made it. And I am so honored I got a chance to exist at the same time as the worst villain this world has ever seen.

Instead of trying to come up with a clever endline, I’m going to end on one of my favorite lyrics DOOM wrote, “I wrote this note around New Year's/ Off a couple a shots and a few beers, but who cares?/ Enough about me, it's about the beats/ Not about the streets and who food he 'bout to eat/ A rhyming cannibal who's dressed to kill and cynical/ Whether is it animal, vegetable or mineral/ It's a miracle how he get so lyrical/ And proceed to move the crowd like a old negro spiritual.”

Thank you once again.

*Albeit that didn’t stop my dad from playing Beastie Boys. I wonder what possibly separated them from most rappers.

My name is Jacob Cordas (@jacweasel) and I am starting to think I may in fact be qualified to write this.