Madvillainy Review

Madvillainy should not work. Madlib built most of the instrumentals on a trip to Brazil with a Boss SP-303, a turntable and a tape deck, an unfinished version leaked fourteen months before release, and the two of them walked away from it before coming back. What they finished is twenty two tracks in forty six minutes, most of them under three minutes, many with no hook at all.

It works because the two halves fit exactly. Madlib's loops are dusty, warped and restless, lifted from soul, jazz and old television and cut off the moment they have made their point. MF Doom raps across them in dense, sideways rhymes, jokes folded inside jokes, and the missing choruses stop mattering because every line is the hook. Accordion, Figaro and Rhinestone Cowboy are as good as the form gets.

It peaked at number 179 on the Billboard 200 and sold slowly for years, then found its way into the New Yorker and onto every serious list: 18 on Rolling Stone's greatest hip-hop albums, 365 on its greatest albums of all time. It is Doom's masterpiece, and the second record on this site where Madlib's production earns an S.