Black Bastards

KMD's Black Bastards (sometimes stylized as Bl_ck B_st_rds) has become one of the more storied albums in hip-hop, and with good reason—its route to consumer ears was at first barred, then clandestine, then piecemeal and underground. But before the album was even semi-properly released, it, by all accounts, birthed MF DOOM, who is perhaps the most revered, enigmatic popular underground rapper of the past twenty years. It's not conjecture or a stretch to say that the Black Bastards story is DOOM's origin story, and without it there's no Madvillainy, no Special Herbs, no reason for Mos Def to make seven cover videos, no metal-faced Villain getting barred from all bars and kicked out the Carvel.

Originally scheduled for a 1994 release, Black Bastards was shelved by Elektra Records—ostensibly due to the album's incendiary and controversial artwork—less than a month before it was set to be in stores. The shuttling itself was reportedly low on ceremony and dialogue, but the conversation around the album was not. Billboard columnists Terri Rossi and Havelock Nelson had taken offense to the Black Bastards project in separate columns; The Source magazine editor Jon Shecter, meanwhile, rebutted with an editorial titled "Corporate Hysteria", writing, "[A]s we've seen over the years, it doesn't take much for the bottom-line bigwigs of big business to flip on hip-hop. It seems inevitable that the raw honesty of many rap records would offend enough of mainstream America to put the product at odds with the company selling it."

Elektra's decision was based in both fiscal and political realities. Much like Epic Records has abandoned Bobby Shmurda in wake of their sister company Sony Pictures Entertainment's email hack, Elektra washed their hands of KMD in no small part because of their sister label and distributor's troubles. Warner Bros. had already suffered a stinging blow in 1992, when shareholders voted to remove Ice-T's "Cop Killer" from his metal side-project Body Count after protracted finger-pointing and naysaying from then-President George H. W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, and co-founder of the Parents Music Resource Center (and future Second Lady) Tipper Gore. This was the struggle that birthed the current version of the black-and-white Parental Advisory label; one that included Dan Quayle pressuring Time Warner to pull 2Pacalypse Now off shelves.

The shelving was the second blow that the group would suffer. A year before, KMD—which had whittled down to a duo, losing Onyx The Birthstone Kid, who performed on their masterful 1991 debut, Mr. Hood—had effectively ceased to exist as a group when Dingilizwe Dumile, aka DJ Subroc, was struck by a car and killed while crossing the Long Island Expressway. Subroc's brother, Daniel Dumile—then known as Zev Love X, now known as MF DOOM—was left to finish the album. It was these twin tragedies that led to Daniel becoming the man in the iron mask; and it's the legend that defines Black Bastards, which is now getting its most glamorous re-release yet, some twenty-one years later.

Given the backstory, it's no wonder that Black Bastards is being treated like a plot device from the Star Wars reboot. This latest reissue fetishizes the album to the extreme—it's a children's pop-up book. (Rare advance copies and copies of copies have existed since the '90s; in 2001 and 2008, it was made available, respectively by Sub Verse and DOOM's own Metalface Records, the latter who is also responsible for this version.) Black Bastards is often hailed as the best rap album that you've never heard, and this newest reintroduction is not likely to change that: It's targeted exclusively towards collectors and archivists—most of whom would already have the music.

Still, it's apropos, given KMD's tone—they released their first album as teenagers and it featured wide-eyed gazes on heady topics, all delivered with the help of excerpts from foreign language tapes, children's audios, Malcolm X and "Sesame Street" characters. 

Mr. Hood was whimsical and pointed and prescient—"Bananapeel Blues" hosted a spoken-word mediation on race with a sped-up Gil Scott-Heron sample (from "H2Ogate Blues": "How much more evidence do the citizens need?") that is still embarrassingly poignant today when the cultural spectacle of Black men being murdered by police has become social media snuff porn.

But Black Bastards was so much more and less than its predecessor. It was always a very good record, a promising one—but not a great one. Musically, it sounds like a mid-'90s rap record—copious samples of jazz and R&B over big, dirty drums. It's more angry and less fun that what came before it, but also more intimate and less expansive. Where Mr. Hood focused on the big themes out there, Black Bastards turned inward, dealing with the personal coming-of-age revelations. It's largely the story of two devout followers of Dr. York's Nuwaubianism struggling with the vices of the carnal world. "Sweet Premium Wine" is about their newfound love of alcohol—"I don't drink, I guzzle 'til I'm distorted." On "Contact Blitt", they treat smoking weed the way "Game of Thrones" treats magic— something wondrous but common, like dragons.

At the time of Black Bastards, corporate rap was still in its infancy, and the music industry was deeply entrenched as a trickle-down gerontocracy, one where the voices of power were largely disconnected from the street-level youth that it fed upon. Harder songs on the album, like "Get-U-Now" and "Gimme!", can be seen not only as a response to self and label expectations, but also a document of rap's darkening tone and the rites of passage that both entail. When the album deals with women on "Plumskinzz", it's deeply lascivious: "Damned, I wouldn't want my plum to turn prune/ Unless it be all that, be all that/ It won't matter 'cause black sweet ones come fatter/ I'm kinda, kinda picky with my fruit mix." It's a far cry from the jingly innocence of Mr. Hood's "Peach Fuzz" and as genuinely awkward as burgeoning sexual awareness.

Despite the album's title and artwork, Black Bastards is much less direct about racial politics than Mr. Hood. Where Mr. Hood was incisive and righteous, Black Bastards is searching and confused. 

None of this makes it any less worthy of a listen—there's something that's still very real and new about hearing the group move through their emotional spaces. Moreso than listening to the birth of MF DOOM, it's the death of KMD, not just the group, but of both of the guys who made Mr. Hood. And for all of its darkness, there's the unbridled brightness of growing artists still exploring the limits of their medium and textures of their own voices. There's a glee in Subroc's voice when he begins rapping on "It Sounded Like a Roc!": "It's my thing/ Yo, it's my thing/ The way I swing, not even an orangutan can hang/ On my ding! ding!/ Saved by the bell rang/ I talk, yell, whisper, mumble street slang." It's like wacky Nicki Minaj meets To Pimp a Butterfly and it's the kind of rap that just couldn't be released today. Or rather it can. But only in a pop-up book.