Canonball: Writer, MC Skiz Fernando on MF Doom’s ‘Operation: Doomsday’

Episode notes

A great album is hard to come by. Fewer albums are so great that their significance impacts music, style, and culture. These are the albums that deserve to be enshrined in Bullseye’s Pop Music Canon. We induct them in a segment called Canonball.

This week, we will hear from Skiz Fernando. He’s a writer, MC, producer and record label owner. He’s written for The Source, The New York Times and Rolling Stone, to name a few. Skiz just wrote a new book, a biography of the late rapper MF Doom, one of the most revered MCs of all time. It’s called The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast. You can find it at your local book store or on bookshop.org.

(Courtesy of Astra Publishing House)

MF Doom released countless great records during his career: Madvillainy, Mm Food, and Vaudeville Villain, shaping the landscape of hip-hop with his enigmatic presence on the mic. It’s MF Doom’s first solo album Operation: Doomsday that started it all and we are acknowledging all of its glory. Track by track, Skiz keys us into the classic album, including songs like: “Tick Tick,” “Rhymes Like Dimes,” and “Go With the Flow.”