Here is my  MF DOOM CONCERT REVIEW. I wrote this last night when I got home. It’s the morning after, and I still can’t believe what happened yesterday was real. I’ve seen lots and lots of crazy rap shit in my life, but this tops them all, in so many ways. Peace to Rome, Natasha, Zera, Jonathan Ramos, D-Sisive, Darryl Rodway, Kyle, Philip, the Mindbender fans I saw, and all the other people there. And I hope Linx and Taktiks rest well today. Shit was FUCKED UP @ Kool Haus last night. To be there was to witness history and hell collide.

Enjoy the review. I hope you feel what I felt there. And I hope we all never feel it again. MF DOOM is doing something that nobody else on the planet is doing. Shit is beyond insane or genius, it’s a whole new dimension of art and music and performance and… sonic suicide.

This is what I wrote when I got home.

In love,

Mindbender

“It’s is 4:00 AM.
I am now coming home from one of the most bizarre rap concerts I have ever seen in my motherfucking life.
One day, I will look back and say “now it makes sense.”
and either there will be music to explain tonight, or Doom will have done something so unthinkably insane that his story just implodes into…
fuck if i know
FUCK IF DOOM KNOWS!

i’ve never seen such chaos. creative chaos, but unchained chaos molotov cocktails of songs nevertheless.
let it be known, I love the guy, I rocked with him in NYC in 2000, I saw him at Madvillain a few years ago, I jammed to KMD as a youth. i’m truly no hater. but what DOOM did tonight was beyond rational explanation. i will never be able to find the range of words needed to describe the extremes of emotion and intensity that were manifested at the Kool Haus tonight. cause he was there. the REAL DOOM. and then some.
i’ve been wracking my brain walking home trying to figure out where all this is going. and i question if he knows. cause to manipulate and frustrate and instigate what went down in Toronto honesty crossed multiple boundaries, probably legal, illegal, and certainly professional… and ethical, to be honest.

i have never felt like my head was being so fucked with. EVER in my life.

this has to be emphasized to understand the night. DOOM is truly an insane psychopathic genius… VILLAIN. is he quietly (cause he doesn’t advertise much, his new music just kinda appears, sporadically) campaigning to become the most HATED yet loved man in hip hop? this DOOMPOSTER shit needs clarification. REALLY FUCKING SOON. Mos Def did not perform here, NY was cancelled, and this email goes out this evening:

Quote: We want to let everyone know that the real Doom is in Canada. His identity has been confirmed by Canada Customs. Get down to the Kool Haus and don’t miss this rare chance to check out DOOM.

He took a bit longer than expected to clear immigration, but we hope to have him on stage in about an hour.

Spread the word!

people are STILL skeptical. this is the same cursed venue as the first ‘Rock the Bells’ in Toronto 4 years ago, where only EPMD showed up, as Raekwon, Smif N Wessun and Redman, among others all got -cancelled-, and right before the show started, someone in the crowd threw a bottle of Heineken in DJ Scratch’s face, hitting his nose first, then spilling onto his laptop, ruining the computer and killing the show.everyone paid 50 bucks to see ONE group now, whose DJ just walked off stage covered in beer and disrespected harshly. the show must go on, right? so a local DJ played EPMD instrumentals. Erick and Parrish did 3 songs, said ‘fuck this’ and threw their mics down. SHOW OVER. that place was one swear word away from a full on MURDER RIOT.

just want you to know that… the same hate was in the air, times five tonight. No Mos Def. So, one opening act: D-Sisive. Finishes at 10:30 to a calm crowd. I just get in. DJs are playing music, spin at one of the biggest college radio shows in town. playing mostly 90’s rap music. time elapses. i hear quiet boos. meh. talk to friends. DJs keep playing… but people KEEP booing. start chanting for DOOM. then… start throwing beer cans. plastic cups. beer. random shit. within 30 minutes, the stage is littered. barbacks are cleaning it every few minutes. motherfuckers start SHOUTING for the show to start. and something i may have never seen in my life happened: the president of REMG, biggest promoter in town comes on the mic and declares: “The real DOOM IS here. He made it in the border. Relax. He will be on in 15 minutes.” People scream and boo as beer is thrown at the guy on the mic. (extremely disrespectful, considering who the guy is: Jonathan Ramos)

and then the college DJs, Taktiks and Linx, start playing music… and crowd starts BOOING EVERYTHING they play, demanding Doom. They scream so loud for the DJs to stop playing, one DJ gets off the turntables and challenges the crowd “you come do it better!” and people throw crazy shit. Stage is a mess. Doom is nowhere to be found. Doesn’t feel good.

more time goes by. shit is feeling grim. (no pun intended). it got so bad, the DJs were booed off the turntables, so they just put in the Cuban Linx 2 disc. you know how it’s all eq’ed kinda crazy, right? all the random extra loud overdubs and ~gunshots~ just irritate the anxious people more and more. it’s just kinda close to Doom music, but not, and it’s been nearly 2 hours since the last performer was rapping. tickets were like 45 if not 50 bucks. maybe 900-1000 people, a strong turnout…. of people whose emotions were getting played with like i’ve never seen.

nobody knows what’s going on. i’m talking to people backstage who are telling me how “Doom is at the hotel, not even at the venue yet, but… getting in a cab now”… holy headfuck, Batman! really? no, really? this is past the point of insanity now. nobody believes anybody. the crowd is booing hell between every single song on Raekwon. shit is chaos. bouncers are wrestling pissed off people. what the fuck??

at some future moment that felt way past eternity, a DJ gets on the tables. kinda feels like it might happen. he sets up, and…

‘Accordion’ drops. YEEEEAH! Rap-like dudes are backstage, coming on! Word up!!

Okay: a DOOM runs out.

short guy. in a mask.

who didn’t say nothing during the spoken intro. WTF!!! lip synching!

DOOMPOSTER sighting. Grrrr! people start BOOOOOOOING VICIOUSLY.

THEN ANOTHER DOOM runs out! Rapping!! And it sounds like the real DOOM! Praise Rakim Allah, it’s the real thing now!

Show’s on. Doom starts rapping. Loud. Crazy. Non-stop.

And… it was one of the most erratic, confusing, headbanging, off balance, crowd pleasing? experiences i have ever been to in my life. it was about 45 minutes. i heard some random Dangerdoom shit. He did some Madvillain songs. shit off ‘Mmm… Food’, ‘Ballskin’, then like 30 minutes into the non-stop assault of un-mic-checked rap bangers, he let some new ‘King Geedorah’ stuff play, as he talked over it. He had a humongous black dude with a tied-back afro as a hype man, as the other fake Doom stood beside the DJ all night with a camoflage stocking on his face (hype mime?). it was the real Doom, rocking rhymes crazy, but… it was CRAZY. something was off. many things were, actually.
the timing with the DJ: off.
crowd interaction (until the end): off.
show structure: off.
lights of logic: off
i had no idea what i was seeing. it wasn’t wack, but holy fuck… Doom is self-destructing just a fraction less than he’s creating.
the crowd was mostly satiated, but a few things got thrown at Doom still.
one was a t-shirt, that he caught perfectly, and incorporated into his show.
another recurring moment of surreality was when someone kept punching two blue balloons towards Doom’s face while he was rapping… and he kept punching them back. over and over. without missing a word. just zany. Doom rhyming and punching and kicking balloons while he says “go pop like snot bubbles.”
but why no ‘Operation: Doomsday’?
and… why did your DJ’s solitary laptop shut off in the middle of one of your songs, while you spit acapella… then started kinda rambling to the crowd, with the hype man backing it up… then why did the DJ -leave the stage- after failing to drop any new music in about 3 minutes (of dead air) with Doom completely unaware his DJ has left. It kinda spun out of all control at this point, and Doom started up random beats playing minutes later, with no DJ, just rocking whatever. There was no continuous thread through the show, it was just one unpredictable musical moment after another. Then it ended?

This was the point in the night where abruptly Doom left the stage. We all wondered if it was over… then after a minute, you overhear him say “yo, i just had to go take a piss, i’ll be back!”. It was kinda doubtful if he would be, you could feel it. But, he returned. And started rocking the show. Truly odd.

Then the DJ came back and they did another song or two. Doom left again, barely saying peace or even looking at the crowd when he left (but honestly, during 2/3rds of the show, he was pretty energetic and interactive with the crowd. Dousing them with water at one point, then himself, then his huge hype man. Nutty.) But he just kinda disappeared.

At this point, the DJ goes “uh… should I go get him?”

everyone goes “YEAH! DOOM, DOOM!”

the DJ honestly looks like he’s not sure he can get Doom back out. this was the most hasty and unscripted encore i have ever seen… or these guys just don’t give a fuck on a new level. the DJ came back, put a song on, Doom came out, rapped on it, then bounced real quick, saying ‘love ya’ll, peace i’m out!’ before anyone could really hear what he was saying.

the stage was empty. the music stopped. show’s over now? uh, okay. guess that’s enough. but what a crazy ending. middle. and beginning.

there is video footage that will come. i got some but it’s late.
tomorrow’s a new day.

thing is, it wasn’t a bad show. and it was the real MF DOOM. AND he DID stand on stage with another fake DOOM, which is a sight i will always remember. (but he didn’t explain -nothing- about that whole shit, of course.) so, it wasn’t bad. but it was certainly kinda fucked up, to say the least.

i thought of dozens of reasons why this happened like this. is Doom trying to be the most hated MC of all-time, the slow-fashioned way? nobody will forget that night. i know i won’t. i was angry, but i was also happy. what is his masterplan? he’s not more famous than Mos Def. this tour went tits up, no disrespect, but it collapsed. Doom ain’t in movies with Diddy and Halle. can he afford to do this? yes, the show went on. looks like they made money. but the height of frustration that things went to make me question where things will go from here. he’s dope, but is he dope enough to keep doing this insane shit? can it all be forgiven with a really, REALLY dope DOOMPOSTER album? this shit is beyond anything i’ve ever seen. Doom is really off the deep end now. I just had to put this down cause I mean every word, this was one of the most insane shows of all time.

and all i know is rap is fucking out of control more than any of us know.

peace to Mos Def and to the Screwface Capital.

peace to rap rap rap

Doom is up to something diabolically, unbelievably, incomprehensibly sinister.

Sorry, all my pictures suck. I was mostly just listening and absorbing the experience, totally not believing it was real.

This is as close as I got to the man, the myth, the legend… the lunatic lyricist.

I have no idea what DOOM has planned for 2010, but… he better create the best album of all time. Cause he’s REALLY got some ‘splainin to do about what’s going on behind the mask…

Peace to the dreamers, the supporters, the faithful hopefuls…

What a bittersweet headfuck.

Peace from Adhimusic Stewart / Mindbender Supreme

Thank you for caring enough to read my words. Until the next time, create heaven.

I needed a week to decompress from that. Jeeeez.

Getting there was one thing. Being in Austin, Texas for SXSW was another thing.

Getting home? That beast of a bitch was a whole entire other insane monster to make love to. I didn’t even want to write this, because it was going to force me to remember the horrid emotions I felt on the journey back home to Toronto. But here I offer to you, for your reading amusement, the voyage of my pain and pleasure. Really though, there IS a silver lining to every dark cloud in the sky. You just have to live long enough to have the winds of change blow the cloud around so you can see the silver, and smile.

I’m in Dallas, Texas, and… there’s snow on the ground. Everyone’s going batshit crazy. Let me clarify that, from a Canadian perspective:

I’m in Dallas, Texas and THERE’S A LIGHT, 2 MILLIMETER DUSTING OF SNOWFLAKE-LIKE FROST ON THE GROUND. I mean, I didn’t expect to see nature’s little ice angels here in the land of the Cowboys, but there she was, covering tiny patches of grass, and sending Texans into frozen frenzies. Little did I know how much this mild headshaking of the dandruff of God would throw my entire journey home into hell. Buses are getting re-routed. Bus stations are filling with all sorts of social miscreats, from hula-hoop-sized afroed, Nigerian trans-sexuals to missing tooth Cletus the slack jawed yokels-slash-scam-artists (he got $84 in two minutes pleading his case to the bus station about his sister couldn’t get him… people came gushing money and sympathy… and when another guy said to me “watch to see if he gets in line to buy a ticket”… I watched, and waited… then saw the sob storyteller disappear out the side door, sans bus ticket. The foulness.), and (fake) pregnant women joking about smoking their boredom away (turns out it was just her jacket in her t-shirt. She sure LOOKED pregnant!). There I was, trapped in Dallas, Texas, wondering when the fuck I was going to get to Toronto, Ontario. I’m not taking a Greyhound for a LONG time, I tell you this much.

A good 6 hours later, a bus comes rolling in. FINALLY. Fuck! This is ridiculous! All my other TWELVE connecting busses HAVE to be fucked up by now. It’s gonna take me a week to get home! Why didn’t anyone tell me it was this crazy? The assumptions one can make about public services can really fuck up your plans and days. So you want to know why the bus was late?

The snow in Dallas caused a bunch of busses to be re-routed. Our bus ended up having to drive to El Paso, Mexico because of its rerouting… and what did they find on the bus? A crazy, obnoxious girl drunk off Redbull and Vodka transporting TEN KILOGRAMS OF MARIJUANA AND FOUR KILOGRAMS OF COCAINE! Hey now!!

So yeah… buses diverted, chaos achieved. I’m going to just start going point form with the rest of the insanity, and detail the few moments of joy that occurred. It was mostly SHITE, but sometimes it was shining sweetness.

-While I was waiting at the Dallas bus station, I went to the site of JFK’s assassination (!!!) and saw the grassy knoll, the book depository and alll that crazy shit. They have a white X on the ground where it happened. Kinda creepy. It’s the same spot that Erykah Badu gets murked at in her new “Bus Seat” video. You feel the history there, you feel the corruption, and the conspiracy theories floating in the air hardcore. Felt real weird to be there, so I went back to the bus station… to wait another hour or two. Fuck.

FINALLY leave Dallas.

Go to some place called Texarkana. Small town.

Then I get to Little Rock, Arkansas. You can just feel the residue of Bill Clinton’s coke shipments lingering in the air. Something just doesn’t feel normal about Little Rock. For fuck sakes, on my way down there, I saw a fucking SUBMARINE coming out the water with a Turkish flag on the top, on some ‘Hunt For The Red October’ shit. There was an American flag too. Weird and unsettling.

So here’s where one of life’s enormous little lessons silently comes into play. You know when your instincts tell you one thing, scream at you, and beg you to listen? Well, you should kinda listen. Even in the face of blind and total ignorance, there’s a part of you that tells you to do something the opposite of what everyone else is saying? Well, I will always remember this moment as that lesson, and that sometimes, you really should follow your instincts, even blindly. I mean, I made the most of NOT following my instincts, but next time… I’m going to see where they take me. Cause where it took me this time was NOT what I wanted… for the most part.

It was in Memphis. Elvis-ville. Ha. I’m thinking pure Chuck D thoughts at this moment. I see a picture in the bus station that says “The King Meets The King: Elvis meets B.B.” and I’m like “one of these kings isn’t like the other.” Revisionist history hurts baby Mindbender. And life screams at you, but if you don’t listen, you are forced to hear all of the bad news you don’t want to hear.

Slight preface: the bus we were on that was driving to Memphis ALMOST BROKE DOWN AT A GAS STATION. There’s like 10 of us on this bus, it’s late at night, and… THE BUS IS NOT DRIVING FORWARD. It only drives backwards. We all can hear the bus gears grinding into depression, and it only moves… BACKWARD. I start thinking “are we going to have to drive backwards to get to the next bus station?! If so, then LET’S GET OUR DIDDY ON!” (I still don’t like that song “Hypnotize”, but that part of the video was crazy.)

So yeah. After a good five minutes of fear, he shuts the bus down, and starts ‘er up again. She starts driving forward. We all cheer. Little did I know how precious those five minutes would be to the rest of my journey home, and my life in general.

So yes: Memphis. We get there, and I’m like “I FUCKING CAN’T STAND THIS JOURNEY. I WANT TO BE HOME.” I ask the bus lady: “Scuse me, miss. But there is a bus that goes to Chicago from Memphis. I just want to go to Toronto. Shouldn’t I take this bus to Chicago, then get one straight to Toronto from here? I wouldn’t have to transfer these next ten times…” And she goes “Aw no, you really should be on time with this transfer schedule, you will get home on time. Your longest wait was in Dallas already.”

My instincts were chanting “Go to Chicago. GO TO CHICAGO, IDIOT!”. But I kind of believed this lady. She even threw in a “I used to take this route to Detroit all the time, you’ll be fine!” qualifier for me to doubt my own thoughts. I’d never been to this part of the States, what do I know about the fastest way to get to Canada? I knew more than I thought.

So the bus to Chicago leaves Memphis. I watch my instincts die. So I’m due to get on the bus to Nashville, which was supposed to get me home just as fast. I’m getting anxious as hell now, I really want to just be seeing Maple Leafs and multiculturalism. I’m done with seeing the weird pork products and the abject poverty in all these small American towns.

We get to Nashville… and as all of us get off the bus, the announcer says: DUE TO A DELAY IN SERVICE STARTING IN DALLAS, NO BUSES ARE LEAVING NASHVILLE UNTIL 1 PM TOMORROW AFTERNOON.

IT’S FUCKING 3 AM!!!

Are. You. Serious?! I have to wait here NINE HOURS because of your fuck-up? Your inability to handle a light dusting of snowflakes? Your failure to find ONE bus to re-route your services? Aye-yi-yi! This shit is fucking insanityville! I’m stuck in the middle of Nashville, Tennessee, and I have nowhere to go, nobody to talk to, and nothing to do. It was beyond logic.

Hours pass. I watch FOX News decimate Obama for trying to heal the nation with his healthcare plan. More hours pass. I get a food voucher for food I don’t eat (beef hamburgers, hot dogs, steak, etc.). So I get a breakfast: one biscuit, scrambled eggs (first time I ate them in years, but in Armageddon times, the resistance gotta eat), some hash browns, and some watery-ass grits that were disgusting (are grits supposed to be white? and pasty like oatmeal? cause I don’t eat grits, and if this is what they were always talking about, then EWWWW). I’m kinda full but my stomach knows it can’t take another one of these “meals”. More hours pass.  I see soldiers with experienced guns, poor people with petrified anger, and children with oblivious grins. America is a weird place. Everything is intense there, and so many worlds exist in one realm. It’s not for me. I like to visit, but I did not feel at home nearly anywhere on my trip. (Except in Austin, which feels more like Toronto than any other city I went to. And what’s the town motto? “Keep Austin Weird”. Of course.)

So I’m fucking STRANDED in Nashville. Ugh.

Weird thing was, so was this brotherman with a guitar. A guy who introduced himself to me as “Baby Monroe”. Kind eyes, black jean jacket, small dreadlocks. Feels like family to me. And he was the silver lining. Hell, he was the guy who said to me: “every dark cloud has a silver lining”, because he was on the same bus as me that missed the next trip out of Nashville.

So my life went from being trapped in a Nashville bus terminal, to wandering the streets of Nashville, stumbling into bars, drinking Yuengling beer for the first time (Obama’s favorite beer, the one he had to buy a case for Stephen Harper for over the Canada/U.S. hockey game), listening to some down home blue-eyed soul and blues music pour out the guitar of a local singer, and get some genuine Southern hospitality from some good ol’ folks down yonder. I’m a bit drunk, taking pictures, seeing beautiful Southern belles (they like to eat there), and wandering through Nashville, having a grand ole’ time. Both Baby Monroe and I even end off the trip in the bus station singing love songs to random women while he’s playing his guitar beautifully (he was mostly singing, I was just doing harmonies). Damn, it’s almost 1 PM? Time to go? Shit. I just started having fun!

So I get on the bus, back to Louisville (home of Muhammad Ali!), with a great new friend or two, and some really good new insight on life. Should I have gone to Chicago? Would I be in upper state New York if I followed my instincts? I wouldn’t have met Baby Monroe if I went to Chicago? No. Was I happy? Eventually, I got there. And the trip continued in such fashion.

Cincinatti. (Word to WKRP!)

Columbus. (Where I had to play ‘Crazy’ by Copywrite. That song is the shit.)

Cleveland. (I could only think about ‘The Cleveland Show’, ha ha. Stoolbend!)

Erie. (I dunno. Just another city on the way home.)

Buffalo. (They told me I’d be waiting for five hours when I got there. THANK GOD I only waited 45 minutes. It was Tuesday morning at 6 AM! I left Austin on Sunday morning at 7! I was on the bus for 48 fucking hours straight! Get me home!!)

And this is where I learned how wonderful of a city Toronto is. As soon as I got on the bus back to Canada, I saw two of the most beautiful women I saw on the entire trip. GOING TO CANADA. I could just smell the Canuck on these two beautiful women. I could just TELL. It was weird. Toronto is one of the thirteen cities I had been to in the past two days, and I could just -tell- these people were Canadian. And beautiful.

I met a bunch of AMAZING, generous, cute, hilarious, helpful (thanks to the two guys who lent me a phone charger for my Blackberry! you give me hope in humanity) people on this trip… but it was HARD to get home. And I’ve NEVER begged so badly to get back into my border, I never felt so patriotic. It was almost gross. I really learned a lot about myself, and others, and America. I saw a lot of suffering, and fear, and ignorance, and courage, and strength and resolve. I heard a lot of hilarious things, and I saw a lot more ridiculous stuff. And I survived to tell the story. Fuck, I’m glad I’m home.

Thank God for Toronto, for real. But one love to Austin.

Sincerely yours truly,

Adhimusic Stewart / Mindbender

Here’s the link to the pictures. Can’t seem to embed them here. Enjoy.

FUN TIMES