Operation: Doomsday

Daniel Dumile performed as Zev Love X in KMD until 1993, when his brother Subroc was killed by a car while crossing a highway on Long Island. The label dropped the group. Dumile disappeared from music for several years, and when he came back he was wearing an iron mask modelled on Marvel’s Doctor Doom — a supervillain who had disfigured his own face with a piece of armour he put on too soon after surgery, too impatient to wait for it to cool. Operation: Doomsday (1999) is the document of that return: self-released, hand-distributed to record shops, built on a Casio and stolen cable television samples, narrated by a character who has decided that since the world already treats him as a villain, he might as well excel at it.

The mask carries real weight. RZA’s Wu-Tang gave DOOM the frame — Marvel universe, collective aliases, the idea that a rap group could be a mythology with internal rules — and what DOOM did differently was make the mythology entirely solitary. The Villain operates alone, with grievances and bars and a sampler, which turns out to be enough.