![]() If anything, Doom is still in mourning here, and there's a palpable sense of loss that rears itself sporadically: Doom imagines rejoining his brother in a tomb "either unmarked or engraved" and holds a seance with Subroc on "?". In fact, for an album that introduced the Metal Face alter ego, it's his warmest and most benevolent work, almost entirely bled of the angrier material that would mark future releases. While the autumnal, twinkling backdrops of "Doomsday" or the Coral Sitar-laced "Red and Gold" wouldn't upset tables at your local coffee shop, they provide a truly symbiotic relationship with the paradoxically gruff and calm persona Doom manifests here, where the villainy is more implied than anything. That's mostly due to the sonic template established here, chunky and proudly un-quantized drums meeting samples you might hear at your dentist's office or on hold with your cable company: saxes, flutes, and smooth, vintage synths. On the title track, Doom announces his intent instead to "destroy rap." Operation: Doomsday doesn't sound like much of a manifesto, though: You may have come for the street cred, but you didn't stay for any hang-ups about authenticity or the state of the genre. This opened a lane for underground crews who often defined themselves in opposition of these artists: Anticon and Def Jux sought to completely dismantle hip-hop with abrasive sonics and intimidatingly dense lyrics, while Rawkus and Okayplayer had the magnetic personalities and smooth musicianship to be inside operatives potentially bringing mainstream rap to a more positive place. But soon after, rawer collectives like Ruff Ryders and Ca$h Money subsequently took hip-hop to a more hedonistic, nihilistic, and violent place, with Swizz Beatz, Mannie Fresh, the Neptunes, and Timbaland commandeering a clean break from traditionalist, sample-based production. Bad Boy's commercial reign was giving purists plenty to carp over, but it still had crate-digging production and New York rappers in its midst. Then, in 1999, after the release of a couple of singles on Bobbito's Fondle 'Em Records, came Operation: Doomsday, an instant cult classic that now gets a well-curated and altogether fun reissue courtesy of MF Doom's own Metal Face label.Äoomsday was birthed at a pivotal point in rap's trajectory- at the height of the record industry's boom years. This meant performing in lyricist lounges with his face completely obscured all the while, his legend grew as bootleg copies of Black Bastards make the rounds. Retreating from hip-hop completely, Dumile plotted his revenge on an industry that had broken him spiritually. were dropped from their label when the cover art of their Black Bastards LP proved controversial. Meanwhile, Dumile, then known as Zev Love X in early-90s rap group K.M.D., suffered the loss of his brother and musical partner DJ Subroc, who was hit by a car.
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