Who You Think I Am?
On MF DOOM's one question manifesto about defying so many categories all you can be is the villain
It’s come to my attention that I wear the mask. Make it last forever; its shrill but subdued metallic weather holding the face at bay, gatekeeping the heart that spills from the eyes in unruly shrugs. We carry the mask’s weight together with the subtlety of the mime’s invisible axis of neurotic vagueness, we boast about gaining skill from acts of deliberate withholding. The erotics of the mask, but also the desperation to be seen behind it. If you blink, the mask doubles, becoming the crisis orchids that never wilt so that the only warning that they might die is this sudden rebirth, this might as well be spring. God turns me into a blue market rose and the mask grins gold. Time examines space for cues and cures, finds their mutual cache inevitable, a blues fugue for the girls who love the mundane danger of the faceless. We’re charmed by that lazy narcissism. Even the desire to look away is charming and rehabilitates the soul behind the mask pretending to need it.
MF DOOM’s “Who you think I am? '' instrumental is what brings disguises to my attention and allows them to hover above the chasm where they normally cloak me like buzzards, flying serpents, drunk monarchs when I’m lucky. The distant surrealism of its austerity makes DOOM’s one question song a manifesto. Its peppy dejection is intoxicating, a curt venom that plots an alternate identity by holding the original hostage in the world of its resurrection. Dumile interjects between a cacophony of Yusef Lateef samples who you think I am? The flute bellows and builds false alibis with the stunted cheerfulness of eastern hymns going west. The thread of that slow wind, made slower for the sample, demands you snap it into the voyeur’s perspective, it sounds like somewhere I have never traveled. Like the dripping nostalgia for the future in the E.E Cummings poem, somewhere I have never traveled/gladly beyond any experience/your eyes have their silence. The question (who you think I am?) intervenes on the woodwinded daydream just one time, a lonely inquisition that once you hear it crackle and fold in DOOM’s deep and brooding voice, you hope he might loop. He withholds the circle for the hold, the void between who he is and how he’s seen. He is both asking and confirming that he knows about your projections and will undermine them by accepting them. Fine, I’ll be who you think I am, he promises, teases, leaves. He embodies Charlie Parker so Bird can become him. Revelations arrive brusk and flippant as a shape-shifting shaman pretending to be a regular man. He keeps flowers in his studio, takes mushrooms with his friends, only speaks when spoken to, absorbs those projections like swords that cut so well you can’t feel them slash until it comes to his attention that he wears the mask.
It does come to this, in the bout of emotional ennui before rebirth, there’s this dutiful surrender to villainy. It’s thrilling but it’s also the Nina Simone version of “I Loves you Porgy” in that it discards the part of you others refuse to see in order to teach them a lesson about who you’d really be if you were who they pretend you are. How the angels would cease to sing then. What are the cumulative damages of misunderstanding one another on purpose? What distortions of ourselves do we sanction in that spirit? I love Dumile because his confrontational mode is radiant and forgiving. He’s the emperor of the black backstage where performance ends and begins with that one question only he can cadence into a soothing premonition. Who (tf) do you think I am? Maybe he’s a thief of your perception, pillaging subconscious demons for the excitement of it, or maybe he’s a professional messiah. He’s willing to let the popular idea of him get lost, to abandon the aspects himself that have been stolen from him, before he loses everything. He’s Charlie Parker laughing himself to death in a moment of post-despair sweetness, rescuing himself from that thin and tragic precipice where ambition overtakes curiosity and the music one makes become accessible to everyone but your own soul can no longer feel it.
This lullaby for DOOM shy heroes, desolate and complete, makes my hidden places feel seen. My mask is a lattice of withheld messages and muffled screams. I learned it early alongside sun pearls and geomancy, I traced a replica of my reflection in the earth and was overcome with beauty and truth. I was covered in the honor and disgrace of inheritance right at the bullseye of my rejection of it. Stoicism became the ribbon that protected my ambivalence. Who you think I am? I would demand people tell me telepathically, they would always succumb, always wrong. Friends, associates, bitches, niggas, homies, close but really don’t know me, he assures in another song.
I would laugh behind the mask with Charlie and as he keeled over I would stand up and strike with so much authentic rage it seemed almost meek for its sudden inability to conceal itself any longer. Scripted catharsis. Hardly performance but hardly not. The unknown revealing itself from the perspective of the unknowable. At some point, DOOM’s mask and my own goes from playful to militant. Now it’s the body armor of war donned by a lady of the flowers. Now its casualness is so far past stunting it’s stunning, the beauty of that chrome and azure, it’s custody over the interior paramour, its habit and piety. Like donning the garments of a failed nun I take on the iron with wonder and discipline. I pray in it, dance in it, love in it. As if all heartbreak is misunderstanding the muse, I pretend that it is, I negotiate with my heart for a safer guardian between itself and its armor, one with no questions for it. I needed a happy purgatory as I waited for these nightly messages from the long dead like a radio. I wanted to become the sound of myself removing this mask as it obstructs my path home— one day it was lighting every road, the next it was a relentlessly thick cloud of broken daydreams seeking revenge on the shadow. The flute re-eneters, as the marketplace, where the mask is mandated and rewarded with trade, glad-handed until everyone craves the counterfeit self. Who you think I am? I’m not depraved enough to tell you in the transactional mode, or numb enough to show you in the informal disaffected mode of so many Americans lost in other people’s thoughts.
Getting too close to the villain in yourself is like decommissioning wonder so you can see God for what it is. That voice that will still be in your head making one question manifestos even after your body goes missing, goes to work, goes to decadence, goes on forever like the saxophone’s last laugh.
Listening to this instrumental while reading your poetic words is a VIBE 🔥