The co-owner of San Francisco club the Independent got a call from underground rapper MF Doom’s agent mid-afternoon on August 15, saying the masked MC was likely too sick to make his scheduled performance that evening. Later, though, the agent called back and reversed course: Doom was good to go. But when the rapper finally took the stage at 11:45 that night, many in the audience did a double take. That’s Doom?
“The first thing out of my mouth to my buddy was, ‘Wow, that doesn’t even look like him,’ ” says concertgoer Dan Schwab, a buyer for Adidas who flew down from Portland, Oregon, with his girlfriend to see the show. “He looked way skinnier—at least 30 or 40 pounds lighter than the guy I’ve seen before. The guy who was up onstage was just walking back and forth, doing a little bit of the ‘rapper hands’ action and giving high-fives.”
Though unverified accounts of “fake” Doom shows have been swirling for a couple years, the critically beloved rapper usually does justice to his brilliant studio catalog in concert. Schwab, for one, says Doom’s performance on the same stage two years earlier was one of the best he’d seen.
But this guy was a joke.
“I went up to the sound guy about two songs deep and said, ‘No one can hear Doom’s mic.’ He looked at me and said straight-up, ‘I know. His mic’s not on, and that’s not MF Doom.’ ”
Excerpted from ‘From Madvillain to Milli Vanilli’ by Ben Westhoff. Appearing in The Village Voice, August 28, 2007.