Own It or Disown It #17: Madvillain, Madvillainy

There are the essential albums that need to be in everyone's collection. There are the personal favorites, the ones that aren't highly acclaimed but still get played every once in a while. And then there are the albums that you stick in the back of your collection because you want to forget that you spent money on them. "Own It or Disown It" gives the writer the opportunity to look at such discarded albums and determine if they are diamonds in the rough or if they deserve to be used as mini-frisbees.

This is the fourth week of Owning Metacritic, and…oy. This is not going to be pretty. First, though, the numbers: Madvillainy holds a Metacritic score of 93, Pitchfork named it the 25th best album of the 00’s, and Rhapsody called it the best hip-hop album of the past decade. All of this praise reminds me of how people think of E.T.—people say it is good, but when was the last time they looked at it?

Madvillain is/was a collaboration between MF Doom/Viktor Vaughn/DOOM (dude smokes weed, wears a mask and makes a lot of corny jokes) and Madlib/Quasimoto (dude smokes weed and…um, that’s it), and remains their best-known project. The album was hailed for its unconventional structure and quality beats, though I don’t see how Madvillainy could be considered unique. Many critics praised Madvillainy specifically because it was 46 minutes long and split into 22 tracks, claiming that a hip-hop album with no choruses and short songs was something unheard of. Thing is, though, MF Doom and Madlib had been making this kind of music for quite some time, so the only way that I can see any person claiming that Madvillainy’s structure is unique is if they hadn’t heard any of the other music made by the artists whose work they were reviewing. In fact, Madlib released a very similar album only a year after this one, The Further Adventures of Lord Quas, which isn’t nearly as acclaimed as Madvillainy despite being so similar. (Funny story about that album: it had a higher Metacritic score than Madvillainy for about a week before the negative reviews came in. And yes, I bought it in the first week.) Also, Madvillainy was praised for not having any R&B choruses (the album was released in 2004, when Usher and Alicia Keys were tearing up the charts), which is stupid because (1) Stacy Epps sings on “Eye” and (2) that’s praising an album for something it doesn’t have. “Yeah, Tree of Life sucked, but at least it didn’t have someone getting their head cut off!”



That’s not to say that Madvillainy doesn’t stand on its own merits at times. It starts well, and it ends well. Tracks like “Accordion”, “America’s Most Blunted”, “Shadows of Tomorrow”, and “All Caps” could be considered landmarks in the genre. It is Madvillainy’s disastrous midsection that bugs me the most. “Sickfit” isn’t a bad instrumental by itself (even if it is 30 seconds too long), but paired with “Rainbows”, in which MF Doom sings about some guy who drinks Drain-O, the album comes to a complete halt and struggles to get its footing. “Curls” is half of a good song, but “Do Not Fire!” throws the album complete off its rails, and so it goes for much of this album’s midsection. It gets to the point where I can’t tell if there are any great songs in the middle of the album since everything bleeds together into a confusing mess.

I should take some time to bring up a manufacturing problem with Madvillany—it always skips a few times around tracks like “Rainbows” and “Do Not Fire!” despite having no scratches. I’ve checked with other people who also own this CD, and they confirmed problems with playing those songs straight from the CD as well, and I had similar problems with The Further Adventures, so I’m pretty sure this was Stones Throws’s fault. The album plays fine after burning it onto another CD or a computer, but I shouldn’t have to take these steps in order to enjoy an artist’s work.



I’ll give credit where it’s due and admit that Madvillainy is a high-wire project. The album’s structure leaves very little room for weak tracks or filler, something that this album, unfortunately, has in abundance, and while filler tracks in a 75-minute long album are understandable and excusable (to an extent), there is no excuse for filler tracks on an album this short. It certainly isn’t helped by MF Doom, who spends much of his time throwing out pop culture references and bragging about himself—not bad by itself, but it has no place in this kind of project. Listening to Madvillainy isn’t as rewarding as claiming that you’ve listened to Madvillainy. It’s a hipster prop—having the album’s liner notes in your music collection makes you special. Screw that noise—the album is a mess and the artist who made it have done better work before and since this album’s release. You know where this is going…

VERDICT: DISOWN

Oh, by the way, Happy Holidays. Next time, I'll be going over the worst-best album of all time. The album that made it onto everyone's year-end list in 2005 and was never spoken of again. The album that both "saved" and significantly hurt folk-rock for a long time.

That's right...I'm talking about this...



I need bourbon.