Transformers
More Than Mete the ‘I’
“Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible than that.”
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
A literary pseudonym is merely a mask –– think Mark Twain = Samuel Clemens. The heteronyms of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa amount to a more radical project, producing not only literature, but also a literature, an internal ecology of interrelated and contrasting poetic and philosophical voices. Of the seventy or so invented selves this lifelong project comprises, each with his own biography, aesthetic, and philosophy, a few stand out: the autodidact shepherd-poet, Alberto Caeiro; the neoclassical formalist, Ricardo Reis; the futurist pupil of Caeiro and follower of Whitman, Álvaro de Campos; and the “semi-heteronym” flâneur, Bernardo Soares. The latter is responsible for the second phase of the kaleidoscopic Book of Disquiet, a “factless autobiography” discovered in Pessoa’s Lisbon flat following his death in 1935: hundreds of scribbled texts, each attributed to a heteronymic author, in a trunk. Somewhere there, a scrap would state, “I myself don’t know if the ‘I’ I am setting before you in these serpentine pages really exists or is merely a false, self-created aesthetic concept of who I am.” In this uncertainty, he produced an astonishing body of work that could justify an assessment that the greatest Portuguese poets are, in order, Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa…
A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip famously called MF DOOM “your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper.” Born Daniel Dumile, he might well be your favourite rapper’s five favourite rappers: Zev Love X, King Gheedorah, Viktor Vaughn, Supervillain, and DOOM. Depending on context (or whimsy), “MF” stands for “Metal Face,” “Metal Fingers,” “Money Folder,” while slyly critiquing, with the slip of a consonant, the many clichéd MCs lamely repeating the word “motherfucker” in pursuit of fame and a full money folder. Of course, pseudonyms and alter egos are common in black music history and especially in hip hop, and these can change as careers unfold: Sean Combs as Puff Daddy, then P. Diddy, then just Diddy. Unlike such a linear process, DOOM’s more radical renaming strategies suggest a heteronymy comparable to Pessoa’s.
Broadly, both projects seem rooted in the interpenetration of three forces: personal pain, critiquing their milieux, and sheer playfulness. Pessoa was a master stylist and formalist, capable of working in myriad poetic forms and voices in three languages, and his multivocal writing reads like a critique of any discourse of ‘purity’ of authorial voice. Through the heteronyms, he deployed his stylistic virtuosity in a wildly creative and playful iteration of a key modernist ethic, to question the unitary nature of the artistic subject, comparable to other contemporary movements like cubism and surrealism. Reading Disquiet, however, one also acutely senses how Pessoa sought to escape painful realities, to reside in a literary one instead.
In the early 1990s, Daniel Dumile was Zev Love X, one of a trio of young black Muslims, KMD, producing brilliantly edgy hip hop full of political and spiritual subtext. (Zev Love X is [Malcolm] X Evolvez.) In the days before completing what much later would be their landmark second release, Black Bastards, X’s brother and bandmate DJ Subroc was tragically killed. Amid his grief, X finished the record, only to have Elektra Records refuse to release it and unceremoniously drop the group. His album art, a hanged Sambo caricature in a game of hangman, was too controversial for the hip hop business. The distraught rapper spent the following years in an artistic wilderness, often homeless, only to return to public eyes and ears in the late nineties, a genesis of his heteronyms and their attendant critical thrust.
If Fernando Pessoa, through his heteronyms, sought to create his own interior literary culture, then MF DOOM, with his work from 1997 until his death in 2020, did something similar, producing not just hip hop, but a hip hop, an imaginal intertextual world at a critical distance from an industry that crushed KMD while promoting and making bank on much clichéd work instead. Returning to the stage with his new name, DOOM would obscure his face, eventually donning his trademark metal mask, evoking the Marvel Comics supervillain, Doctor Doom. (In an official bio, his hiatus is posited as a period when he was “recovering from his wounds” and vowing revenge “against the industry that so badly deformed him,” a direct echo of the Doctor Doom origin story.) The mask evokes the universe he had started to create, a fictional one whose tensions and violence play out in a stylised, surreal space of comics and cartoons. (A signature of his music is the playfully ironic interpellation of sampled dialogue from cartoon superhero film and television.) DOOM’s is a world away from the clichéd violent, misogynist, ‘keep it real’ street tropes of conventional hip hop, as he enacts his own playful critique of them.
His first record as MF DOOM, Operation: Doomsday (1999), introduced a very different rapper than Zev Love X, whose delivery was sharp and direct in a way that matched the urgency of his project. For the rest of his career, DOOM’s voice, lower, gruffer, and laying back on the beat, would deliver ridiculously subtle wordplay that activates the extended potential of rhyme to make ingeniously oblique, sometimes absurd, often very funny, connections: “Civil liberties, these little titties’ abilities riddle me, middle C. / Hmm, give an MC a rectal hysterectomy, lecture on removal of the bowels, foul, technically. / Don’t expect to see the recipe until we receive the check as well as the collection fee” (“That’s That” from Born Like This). It barely makes sense, so attenuated is the language, and yet insofar as it does make sense, it’s a brilliantly droll critique of stereotypical hip hop tropes –– in order, sexualised misogyny, cutting rivals, and getting paid –– and does so in fifteen seconds of rhythmically and rhymingly riveting music.
These would be hallmarks of DOOM’s –– as well as King Gheedorah’s and Viktor Vaughn’s –– rap style for the rest of his career. Compared to Pessoa, DOOM’s heteronomy was not so much about contrasting poetic voices, and more about contrasting personae in a field where persona is king.
Consider the following sequence of releases by the ‘same’ artist: King Gheedorah, Take Me to Your Leader (2003); Viktor Vaughn, Vaudeville Villain (2003); Madvillain (MF DOOM & Madlib), Madvillainy (2004); Viktor Vaughn, VV2 (2004); MF (Metal Fingers) DOOM, Special Herbs + Spices, Vol. 1 (2004); and MF DOOM, Mm…Food (2004). In this supercharged two-year creative period, I hear both a ‘faceless autobiography’ and a trickster’s critique of mainstream hip hop. DOOM the transformer deployed each persona to do as he pleases, gleefully flipping the bird at, and revealing the banality of, an industry that had fucked him.
The classic record in this purple patch is Madvillainy, DOOM’s sublime collaboration with another notorious transformer, Madlib (Otis Jackson). This richest of texts offers countless illuminating moments, and here I’ll delve into two: “Fancy Clown,” in the genre’s parlance, “feat.” a guest rapper, but here it’s none other than Viktor Vaughn. He raps his beef about DOOM, with whom his girlfriend has been cheating, warning “when you see tin-head, tell him ‘be ducking down,” presumably while wearing the very mask that makes his ‘rival’ a tin-head.
Then, there’s the mock-slick interlude, “Bistro,” little more than a minute long and almost toss-off in spirit. Over Madlib’s suitably loungey 70s RnB backing track, “your host, the Supervillain” welcomes the listener to a surreal place; like the original King Gheedora, it’s a multi-headed monster, but one of the service industry: “Welcome to the debut grand opening of Madvillain Bistro-Bed-and-Breakfast-Bar-and-Grill-Café-Lounge-on-the-Water,” with special guests on the bill: Madlib, Quasimoto, Yesterday’s New Quintet, King Gheedorah, and Viktor Vaughn.
Those that aren’t DOOM heteronyms are, of course, Madlib’s, further underscoring the artistic (and political) kinship that makes this ‘duo’ so special. Assembled as they are in an imaginal sphere, these heteronyms, like Fernando Pessoa’s, produce their own milieu, carving out the transformational contexts their makers need, for their art and for the iterations of ‘I’ it reveals and conceals.
Scott Thomson
Montreal, April 2025
Published in The Pit: A Plateau Periodical, Issue five (summer 2025)