Conjured from Fragments: KMD's Mr. Hood and the Transformative Poetics of the Golden Age Rap Album

James G. McNally

doi:10.1017/S1752196321000298

Conjured from Fragments: KMD's Mr. Hood and the Transformative Poetics of the Golden Age Rap Album

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2021

James G. McNally

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James G. McNally*: Affiliation:
Department of Music, University College Cork, Ireland
*: Email: [email protected]

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Abstract

Between 1988 and 1991, the rap album took flight. Under the dual impetus of innovations in sampling, and of the album form itself, an explosion of youthful creativity ensured the rap album, mined for more self-consciously artistic potential, emerged as a multi-layered artform that revealed a similarly multi-layered Black genius. For innovators like the Bomb Squad (Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Son of Bazerk), Prince Paul (De La Soul) and others, the rap album was now often “more” than just a rap album. It could at once take on the characteristics of a radio show, a simulated game show, a talking comic book, a picaresque novel, an Afrofuturist vaudeville, or a visit to the movies—and, through any of these, invoke a multitude of stories and critiques from marginalized young Black perspectives.

Drawing on a variety of ideas from Black American cultural studies, particularly those focused on creative transformation as a form of transcendence, this article analyzes the multi-layered creativity of one of this period's most unsung, yet ultimately important albums: KMD's showpiece of sampling transformation and satiric narrative wit, Mr. Hood. Best known as the album that initiated the career of the MC/producer later known as MF DOOM (arguably the most revered figure in underground rap post-1999), it also initiated his surreal approach to sampling non-musical material from sources in popular culture and envisagement of rap as a kind of modern-day folklore. Attempting to find a new way of working across the layers of the rap album—the magical interplay of mood, beat, references, verbal samples, storytelling, etc.—the article argues that such sample-based flights of the imagination represent a continuation of the Afro-magical tradition Theophus Smith calls Conjuring Culture.

Type: Research Article
Information: Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 400 - 423

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000298 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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Footnotes

This work was supported by an AHRC Fellowship, Grant Ref AH/P005853/1, PI: Justin A. Williams. I would like to thank Justin Williams for his wise and generous mentorship at the University of Bristol, where this article was begun; Loren Kajikawa and Mark Katz, both of whom gave indispensable feedback on an earlier version; the delegates of the 2019 Hip-Hop in the Golden Age conference at the Jacobs School of Music, for which this work was initially developed; and the late brothers Daniel and Dingilizwe Dumile for the music that inspired it.

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