MUSIC
Supergroup in Reverse: The Afterlife of cLOUDDEAD
/ Ben Bush
11.13.07
DOSEONE
Adam Drucker
cLOUDDEAD’s single “Dead Dogs Two” was marked “cLOUDDEAD 9 of 10” and the final album appropriately titled Ten. “For 20 days we were going to call the album Eminem,” Doseone said in a 2004 interview with 'Sup Magazine. “This was our last record and I was all like, ‘Fuck it, man, let’s do that shit. It would be intense! Just think about what that speaks to, even if it’s a mistake and thousands of people buy it incorrectly! And they [Why? and Nosdam] were like, ‘They’ll sue us!’ and I was like, ‘No, just turn the E the other way!”
More than just a jab at the mainstream, Mr. Mathers played an inadvertent role in the formation of cLOUDDEAD. Yoni Wolf first approached Doseone after watching him battle Eminem in the second annual Scribble Jam freestyle competition held in Cincinnati in 1997. Wolf was as struck by Dose’s performance as he had been by that first transgressive blast of David Bowie a few years earlier.
“Despite all the meanmugging, [Eminem] and I had a beer between the semis and the finals,” Doseone said in an interview with cokemachineglow. “We were all cordial, both us respecting the other’s moxy. We were the two unknowns in the whole thing and I guess there was camaraderie in that.” Both competitors lost out to Chicago’s freestyle champ, JUICE, in a competition that Dose claims was weighted in favor of the marquee names and overly permissive of pre-written battle rhymes. He and Eminem exchanged phone numbers and CDs, although afterwards when Dose listened to Mather’s demo he was disappointed to hear the best of his competitor’s “freestyle” lines already recorded.
A magnetic and show-stealing performer, Doseone has said his original attraction to rap was as much about the “persona/ego projection” as a love of words, but this chance encounter with Yoni Wolf and the resulting friendship initiated his transition from the solitary bravado of battle rhymes into the collaborative ethos of Anticon.
Doseone’s most consistent collaboration has been with producer Jel as Themselves. The duo has joined forces with German indie rockers The Notwist as “13 & God” and with other musicians in their current project Subtle. Between 2004 and 2007, Doseone, solo and in these collective permutations, released six studio albums, two remix EPs, a spoken word CD, a book of poetry and a board game. Doseone is prolific, strange and onto something big. Two standout albums are his solo Ha (2005) and Subtle’s For Hero: For Fool (2006).
While Doseone’s early recordings feature a calmly taunting persona not unlike his freestyle battles, in his more recent albums this is just one of many characters elbowing their way to the forefront of his voice. On Ha’s “The Tale of the Private Mind,” Dose uses different vocal styles, microphones and filters to play the parts of a narrator, a scientist and a nine-year-old girl, describing the plight of an enormous brain (4’ x 5’) held against its will in a glass tank and, through chemical and psychological reinforcements, induced to think about nothing but finances. The track showcases his skill at arranging complex, seemingly cumbersome ideas and lyrics into tight pop phrasings.
On “By Horoscope Light I & II” from the same album, Dose disassembles his earlier rap battle persona. “Thank you, you’re too kind,” he shouts to an obviously canned loop of crowd cheers and then raps an apocalyptically bad newspaper astrology forecast: “My horoscope today was 1500 pages long/and in bullet form it read:/bad person, last chance/bad choice, no change.” After another rapid-fire verse, the production stops abruptly and Dose summarizes into the microphone of what sounds like a handheld tape recorder what the rap would have said if he’d bothered to finish it: “And the rest goes something like ‘In my vomit there was a last meal, a tin can, an old boot and a bunch of other stuff I never knew I had in me,” audibly crumpling the paper as he reads it. Layers of artifice are peeled back and arena rap collapses when faced with nauseating foreknowledge of one’s own doom.
On Subtle’s album For Hero: For Fool, Dose literalizes this vivisection of rappers in the song “Midas Gutz” about an ESPN reality TV show in which rappers, supervised and anesthetized by attendant doctors, cut open their own stomachs to determine which contestant has the most hardcore lengths of intestines. The panel of judges includes “Charles Bronson’s angry and gay only daughter/Ice Cube back from when he was hard/and a framed 8 x 10 of Joe Namath’s kneecaps.” The winner is set free in the Ozarks with a buck knife to test their survival skills.
Adam Drucker
cLOUDDEAD’s single “Dead Dogs Two” was marked “cLOUDDEAD 9 of 10” and the final album appropriately titled Ten. “For 20 days we were going to call the album Eminem,” Doseone said in a 2004 interview with 'Sup Magazine. “This was our last record and I was all like, ‘Fuck it, man, let’s do that shit. It would be intense! Just think about what that speaks to, even if it’s a mistake and thousands of people buy it incorrectly! And they [Why? and Nosdam] were like, ‘They’ll sue us!’ and I was like, ‘No, just turn the E the other way!”
More than just a jab at the mainstream, Mr. Mathers played an inadvertent role in the formation of cLOUDDEAD. Yoni Wolf first approached Doseone after watching him battle Eminem in the second annual Scribble Jam freestyle competition held in Cincinnati in 1997. Wolf was as struck by Dose’s performance as he had been by that first transgressive blast of David Bowie a few years earlier.
“Despite all the meanmugging, [Eminem] and I had a beer between the semis and the finals,” Doseone said in an interview with cokemachineglow. “We were all cordial, both us respecting the other’s moxy. We were the two unknowns in the whole thing and I guess there was camaraderie in that.” Both competitors lost out to Chicago’s freestyle champ, JUICE, in a competition that Dose claims was weighted in favor of the marquee names and overly permissive of pre-written battle rhymes. He and Eminem exchanged phone numbers and CDs, although afterwards when Dose listened to Mather’s demo he was disappointed to hear the best of his competitor’s “freestyle” lines already recorded.
A magnetic and show-stealing performer, Doseone has said his original attraction to rap was as much about the “persona/ego projection” as a love of words, but this chance encounter with Yoni Wolf and the resulting friendship initiated his transition from the solitary bravado of battle rhymes into the collaborative ethos of Anticon.
Doseone’s most consistent collaboration has been with producer Jel as Themselves. The duo has joined forces with German indie rockers The Notwist as “13 & God” and with other musicians in their current project Subtle. Between 2004 and 2007, Doseone, solo and in these collective permutations, released six studio albums, two remix EPs, a spoken word CD, a book of poetry and a board game. Doseone is prolific, strange and onto something big. Two standout albums are his solo Ha (2005) and Subtle’s For Hero: For Fool (2006).
While Doseone’s early recordings feature a calmly taunting persona not unlike his freestyle battles, in his more recent albums this is just one of many characters elbowing their way to the forefront of his voice. On Ha’s “The Tale of the Private Mind,” Dose uses different vocal styles, microphones and filters to play the parts of a narrator, a scientist and a nine-year-old girl, describing the plight of an enormous brain (4’ x 5’) held against its will in a glass tank and, through chemical and psychological reinforcements, induced to think about nothing but finances. The track showcases his skill at arranging complex, seemingly cumbersome ideas and lyrics into tight pop phrasings.
On “By Horoscope Light I & II” from the same album, Dose disassembles his earlier rap battle persona. “Thank you, you’re too kind,” he shouts to an obviously canned loop of crowd cheers and then raps an apocalyptically bad newspaper astrology forecast: “My horoscope today was 1500 pages long/and in bullet form it read:/bad person, last chance/bad choice, no change.” After another rapid-fire verse, the production stops abruptly and Dose summarizes into the microphone of what sounds like a handheld tape recorder what the rap would have said if he’d bothered to finish it: “And the rest goes something like ‘In my vomit there was a last meal, a tin can, an old boot and a bunch of other stuff I never knew I had in me,” audibly crumpling the paper as he reads it. Layers of artifice are peeled back and arena rap collapses when faced with nauseating foreknowledge of one’s own doom.
On Subtle’s album For Hero: For Fool, Dose literalizes this vivisection of rappers in the song “Midas Gutz” about an ESPN reality TV show in which rappers, supervised and anesthetized by attendant doctors, cut open their own stomachs to determine which contestant has the most hardcore lengths of intestines. The panel of judges includes “Charles Bronson’s angry and gay only daughter/Ice Cube back from when he was hard/and a framed 8 x 10 of Joe Namath’s kneecaps.” The winner is set free in the Ozarks with a buck knife to test their survival skills.
