820 Madvillain - Madvillainy(2004)

Studio album - Alternative Hip Hop

About the Act:

(From Wikipedia): Madvillain was an American hip hop duo consisting of two MCs and producers, MF DOOM and Madlib. Their debut album Madvillainy was met with wide critical acclaim for its unique approach. Their short songs, obscure lyrics and lack of choruses made for a sound that was generally unfriendly to commercial radio, but was lauded as a key aspect of their identity as an underground act.

About the Album:

This was their only album, they spent years working on a second one which didn't get to release. This one had tapes leaked before release at which point they left it and did solo albums, then came back and revisited it somewhat. It is critically acclaimed but was not hugely commercially successful.

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

Critics loved it. I didn't. There are some good qualities to it, it's not gangsta rap, and doesn't seem particularly to be celebrating violence, gangs, criminality, misogyny, or drugs and is not sexually explicit. No, wait, drugs - it does do that, quite strongly at times, but that, to my mind, in isolation, is less of a problem. Point one in favour.

It is certainly eclectic in it's choice of samples (yes, this is hip-hop so it is largely reliant on looped samples, a few sound effects, rapping and snatches of spoken word). It's kind of an absurdist melange of sounds, almost surreal at times, and sometimes reminds me of Frank Zappa, not musically, but in terms of the kind of oddness it has. Point two in favour.

And there is a persistent theme about villains, repeated spoken snatches, which seem to have been taken from a 1950s TV documentary about fictional villains. Mildly interesting and point 3 in favour.

The lyrics didn't particularly inspire me, some are easier to follow than others, apparently a lot of it is "stream of consciousness" stuff, meaning it makes little direct sense. That's OK, but I didn't find myself buying into it. 

The rapping, well as I keep noting, I am far from expert. There is rhythm, there are rhymes, but on the whole it stutters rather than flows. Apparently it's clever both in rhythm and rhyme, but I didn't feel it. I'm happy to hold my hands up and say "if you say so" and for my ignorance to mean that I didn't enjoy it as a result, in the same way that my ignorance when it comes to free jazz might lead me to think of is as random notes, rather than being incredibly clever. 

I think, however, that I am finding that the samples and how the musical backing is composed, is one of the key things that determines my liking or disliking of hip-hop albums. With the whole world to go at, there could have been better choices, or better combinations. I find some textures less attractive than others, and they seemed to choose ones I don't like. Musically I found it at best dull, and at worst irritating (one guitar note repeated ad nauseum for example).

It's OK, I don't need to love everything I hear in this list. You might appreciate this much more than me, perhaps if you actually like hip-hop on principle. I feel more educated, but not particularly delighted.

5.5/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/01FCoGEQ3NFWF4fHJzdiax

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9dk_xtWpAkKs1-EKcvq-nKwdaaS-3czd

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madvillainy