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Danger Doom hooks up with cartoons

By SEAN DALY
Published October 25, 2005

	Bemasked rapper MF Doom, producer Danger Mouse and various critters from the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim series join forces on the album.

CD REVIEW

Danger Doom, The Mouse and the Mask (Epitaph) Grade: A

When it comes to music, my 2-year-old daughter is hopeless. A slave to simplicity, she tends to lean Wiggles-ward, while her wise old man prefers those trenchant philosophers in AC/DC. We tried dancing to the Bee Gees once, but I could tell that if she actually had the ability to form sentences, she would have mocked me. I could see it in her wee shifty eyes.

But I sensed mutual musical admiration when we listened to Danger Doom's The Mouse and the Mask, a trippy hip-hop side project featuring white-hot producer Danger Mouse, bemasked rapper MF Doom and various critters from the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim series.

Now stay with me, peeps. Don't jump to Jumble just yet. On the surface, The Mouse and the Mask sure looks like the kind of record you'd never think of buying: a couple of avant-garde hip-hoppers indulging their bizarro animation fetish.

But even if you don't listen to hip-hop or watch Adult Swim, I'm betting $9.99 you'll enjoy The Mouse and the Mask as one of 2005's best chill-out discs, futuristic cocktail cool for urban gangstas, suburban dads AND that hard-to-reach diaper set.

This is jazzy, funky mood music first - the percolating raps, 'tween-song 'toons and screwy sound effects only enhance the mellow vibe.

(By the way, if you are Danger Doom's target audience that enjoys both weirdo hip-hop and the late-night absurdity of Adult Swim, you'll be thrilled to know that Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force has mad flow. Commence stoner giggling.)

(Oh, and one more thing: In no way am I endorsing this album as a family-friendly experience. I'm not your typical dad. If you're looking for something to sing with the tykes on the way to preschool, stick with Kidz Bop.)

Danger Mouse, aka L.A. whiz-kid Brian Burton, is the newsmaker behind 2004's much-discussed The Grey Album, if not the first "mash-up" (two songs blended into one) then definitely the most influential. Using a digital editing program, Danger Mouse managed to splice together songs from the Beatles' White Album and cuts from rapper Jay-Z's Black Album. He then used the Internet to post his bootleg masterwork, which "mashed" such songs as the Fab Four's While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Jay's What More Can I Say.

The result was downright brilliant; Entertainment Weekly named it Album of the Year. It was also downright illegal. Nevertheless, copies of The Grey Album made the underground rounds from city clubs to college campuses, making Danger Mouse a cult hero.

Earlier this year, British pop star Damon Albarn invited Danger Mouse to go legit and co-produce new music for the Gorillaz, who are sort of like the anti-Archies, a cartoon band of demonic simian rock stars who scored a hit with the funky frenzy of Feel Good Inc., which you might remember from a popular iTunes ad.

MF Doom, a.k.a. Daniel Dumile, a disguised rapper who cops his look from steel-faced Marvel Comics villain Dr. Doom, also appeared on the Gorillaz disc. But whereas that "cartoon" album was stuffed with apocalyptic imagery and related intensity, The Mouse and the Mask is about as scary as a pillow fight . . . and just as fun.

It's a relaxed, relaxing combo of Danger Mouse's puckish production skills and Doom's loopy rhymes, which are rife not with blood and shotgun shells but nods to Scooby Doo, Superfly Snuka and Scatman Crothers.

Is it weird? Heck yeah, it's weird. After all, a cartoon character named Meatwad (yes, literally a talking ball of ground chuck) gets mike time. But it's also incredibly cozy, relatively PG-rated and wildly inventive. On the song Old School, even normally intense rhymer Talib Kweli lightens up, rhyming about innocent Saturday morning rituals over a swirling melange of After School Special horns and Charlie Brown-ish piano.

Of course, there's no doubt who the real star is. Tapping into his silly inner-child is Danger Mouse's strength, not to mention the reason why my daughter was shaking her lil' rump.

The producer has a quirky ear for sure, whether it's looping low G-funk keyboards and creepy haunted-house noises on the infectious Doom theme song Benzie Box. On The Mask, Danger Mouse opens with a found snippet from a late-'60s garage-pop band, then about-faces with a street-strutting funk beat, militant saxophones and Atari-era bleeps and bloops.

It's all wild, wacky stuff, and each new listen reveals some new twisted weirdness. Have an itch to try out something completely different? The Mouse and the Mask is waiting.

By the way, Aaron McGruder's daily comic strip The Boondocks, which appears daily in the St. Petersburg Times, gets the Adult Swim treatment starting Nov. 6. That begs the question: Will Huey and Riley appear in a sequel to The Mouse and the Mask? Poor Meatwad wouldn't stand a chance.

-- Sean Daly can be reached at sdaly@sptimes.com or 727 893-8467. His blog is at www.sptimes.com/blogs/popmusic.com

[Last modified October 24, 2005, 16:47:03]