DOOM: "Cellz"

Maybe it’s that MF Doom hangs out with cartoon characters and got his name from a Fantastic Four villain, but I never really pegged the guy as much of a Charles Bukowski fanatic. I mean, yeah, he’s passingly sampled the skid row poet laureate before—on MM..Food? (2004)‘s “One Beer”—but now here’s “Cellz,” a full-on tribute to the man, from a record that also happens to take its name from one of his poems.

Bukowski’s own reading of that very poem, “Dinosauria, We,” comprises the first half of this track. It’s an overtly political poem, with its constant and explicit reference to social/economic decline (“As the political landscape dissolves / As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree”—that one really hits home, huh?) and then some kind of impending and inevitable apocalypse (“All vegetation will die / Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men”), so I suppose its resurfacing in 2009 was inevitable. That bit of poetry recontextualization lends idiosyncratic and typically-goofy DOOM a seriousness and credibility that he’s heretofore lacked, and considering his recent (re-)re-naming and -branding, it’s probably a good bet that this is precisely the image he is now looking to cultivate and project. Not a bad plan, actually: the masses will always value middle-brow seriousness and superficial political understanding over cartoons about talking fast-food, so rapping about popular literary figures and the economic crisis is probably a good career move. Here’s hoping, anyway.