13. MadvillainMadvillainy
I wondered if it was a bit too much of a cliched hip hop album to be your favourite, but I never got into 90s rap, in its heyday I was too busy listening to grunge and jungle and I missed out on that and then I always felt like hip hop was one of those genres that I found hard to get into. I didn’t know how to do it, I needed to find a door. Some genres are a bit like that. I think jazz is probably the same, in a way, sometimes you just need one human being to open that door and then you can build everything off it. Doom was that for me. Once I’d discovered Doom, I felt that I could find my way around the good-time world of hip hop on his back.
Madvillainy is very accessible, the samples and the cuts on it are all very lively, they’re immediately infectious, joyous little things. There are all these tiny little interludes, all these amazing one-minute interludes all the time. Every time you stop paying attention, they jump out and pick you up and drag you back into the record and it’s amazing, it’s completely relentless. It hasn’t aged at all, it’s still very much ahead of its time. I love the way it came together and how Madlib made most of it on a tiny little machine in a hotel in Brazil and wandering around buying whole crates of records and coming back and just making hundreds and hundreds of little clips and loops and things and some of them went on to other records. I believe some of them went on to J Dilla records. They made this huge body of work in a hotel room in Brazil and allocated it later on and the idea that anybody can do that blows my mind really.
