Among the noticeable updates were adjustments to Famous and Wolves, and he would go on to make three more rounds of changes to the album, some more obvious than others.
Spurred on by a combination of listener feedback and his own creative whims, a month later he made modifications to the then-exclusively digital product, defending his right to do so by declaring the project a “living breathing changing creative expression” via Twitter. That record was 2016’s The Life of Pablo. Twelve years after Madvillainy, Kanye West garnered attention for his approach towards updating a previously released album. While previous record Operation: Doomsday had introduced MF Doom’s supervillain persona, it took Madlib’s wildly inventive production style on Madvillainy to make the character iconic, echoing the work of revered comic book writers Frank Miller and Alan Moore. An unlikely highlight, track Accordion evokes the titular instrument as a melodic device over which Doom delivered his comic book baddie bars. Springboarding off the respective strengths of the former’s Blue Note Records reworks and the latter’s multi-monikered post-KMD efforts, the duo – aptly named Madvillain – got together and made something greater than the sum of its parts an undisputed hip-hop classic for the new millennium.Ĭommercially successful and critically adored, Madvillainy merged esoteric interests with broader themes, both insider nods and approachable punchlines folded into the mix. The seismic team-up between Oxnard producer Madlib and New York polymath MF Doom gave underground rap the kind of album that changed the course of the genre forever.
When Madlib and MF Doom dropped Madvillainy in 2004, hip-hop shook.