The Mouse and the Mask
Label: Epitaph
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Mouse and the Mask, The
Previously mild dinner-table chats across the hip-hop nation were abuzz last year over a ubiquitous iron-mask-clad MC called MF Doom and his four-star collaboration with Madlib. Similarly, non-underground hip-hop heads were also discussing a producer by the name of Danger Mouse, who spent 200 hours in his bedroom re-creating a Jay-Z record with borrowed Beatles beats. The Mouse and the Mask will probably wind up as bus stop dialogue, too. They’ll say a Doom and Danger Mouse team-up was inevitable, that it should have happened years ago and that yes, there are too many skits.
On The Mouse and the Mask – a partnership with the Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” programming block – we have MF Doom calling out some of his best pop-culture quips. Doom’s frequently comical allusions don’t fall short of his many quirky achievements, and Danger Mouse’s array of campy spy-TV beats, porno-film swing and crusty drum loops are the expectedly premium launchpad for the masked villain’s scatterbrained flow. A quaint brass-and-flutes combo lands noddingly over laptop drumrolls on closer “Bada Bing,” while Doom spins several hundred viewpoints and unfinished sentences into one of his strongest cuts. Guests are just as welcome, with jubilant boyhood recountings from Talib Kweli on “Old School” and a slap from Ghostface on Danger’s chopped strings in “The Mask.”
The downside is a consequence of the record’s origin. Song-wise, The Mask’s “Adult Swim” connection is only evident to fans of the actual cartoons, but the overt relationship with the program and the album’s segues is absolutely irritating. Getting around the multitude of skits is a matter of iTunes maintenance and nothing more, though; the obvious playfulness on The Mouse and the Mask is that which occurs successfully through a master wordsmith and a meticulous bedroom beat-maker, not in the record’s in-between moments.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.