The unlikely rapper who influenced Playboi Carti: “He’s the king of anonymity”
When Playboi Carti called MF DOOM “the king of that”, he wasn’t referring to rhyme schemata or production gimmicks. He was referring to something much more rare in hip-hop in the modern era, to the art of disappearing.
The masked legend, Carti, who has created his own mythology in mystery, has cited DOOM as his biggest influence in a 2021 interview, when the world was still coming to terms with his death. The admission caught many of his fans off guard, but the correlation was completely logical. Both artists created worlds in which identity, rather than being displayed, was part of the performance.
Carti’s statement of appreciation for DOOM is more than imitation. He said his engineer didn’t even know who DOOM was before he played him the tracks and bragged, “He’s the king of that anonymity. I’m anonymous and he’s king of that,” To Carti, DOOM’s mask was no gimmick, but a visceral statement that the art should be louder than the artist. It was a testimony to the fact that an MC could wield mythic power while remaining faceless. That principle struck a chord with Carti, whose own music is often a blurring of the line between reality and persona.
Much like DOOM, Carti’s public figure is purposely mysterious. He dons hoods, hides behind lights and speaks in staccato sentences that leave the audience guessing. “Nobody can keep a leash on him. Nobody can hold me down”, he told Inked magazine, iterating the creativity that he borrowed from DOOM’s example. The sounds are so different, DOOM’s dusty loops vs. Carti’s gothic aggression, but the defiance is of the same stripe. Each man refuses to explain himself, and the refusal is an element of the art.
When Carti rapped “I just hit a lick with a mask, MF DOOM” on ‘Stop Breathing’, it was more than a punchline. It was an affirmation of bloodline. DOOM had taught him that a mask could be an weapon, that a character could tell a story of his own. After Whole Lotta Red released, Carti paid public condolences to DOOM’s death, claiming to have been a fan long before the headlines. Some fans were sceptical until they saw how earnestly he spoke of the man who, in Carti’s own words, “inspired a whole new way to exist”.
In the end, the relationship between the two rappers is poetic. One was behind a metal mask, the other behind red light and distortion. Both made mystery into magnetism and anonymity into a work of art. When Carti refers to MF DOOM as the king, it is not a compliment. It is the crowning of a successor who learnt the lesson well that the less you say, the greater the myth.