Happy 30th Anniversary to KMD’s debut album Mr. Hood, originally released May 14, 1991.
Daniel “MF DOOM” Dumile, hip-hop’s supervillain, was something truly special. Both he and his music were revered during his life, helping define the 21st century’s underground hip-hop scene. After his death was announced on December 31, 2020, he received even more accolades from music fans of all stripes. He was as great and original of an artist as this genre has ever seen, and he had the discography to back it up.
One thing that DOOM was known for is having one of the most impressive second acts in music history. Spurned by the industry, he reinvented himself and built a new career that thrived for over two decades. However, much to my continued chagrin, his overshadowed first act doesn’t receive the attention that it deserves.
Personally, I was a huge fan of MF DOOM back when he was Zev Love X. More than three decades ago, he emerged as one-third of the group KMD a.k.a. Kausing Much Damage a.k.a. “A positive Kause in a Much Damaged society.” Along with his brother, Dingilizwe “DJ Subroc” Dumile Thompson, and Alonzo “Onyx the Birthstone Kid” Hodge, he recorded Mr. Hood, their debut album, which hit shelves 30 years ago. And I can say without reservation that Zev Love X, KMD, and Mr. Hood both mean just as much to me and my love of hip-hop as MF DOOM and all his associated projects.
In fact, I can tell you the exact moment that KMD’s Mr. Hood changed my life.
Thirty years ago, on an early spring Tuesday evening during my sophomore year of high school, I went to Leopold Records in Berkeley, CA. I had gone there to purchase Ice-T’s O.G. Original Gangster on cassette, which I had been anticipating for months.
I knew that De La Soul’s sophomore album De La Soul Is Dead was also going to be on the shelves, but I wasn’t planning to buy it. I had an informal agreement with Joe, a friend of mine in his senior year: I bought certain albums and he’d buy others. We’d listen to the tape that night, then trade the following morning so we could each dub what the other bought.
What I didn’t realize was that De La Soul Is Dead and O.G. Original Gangster weren’t the only new albums in the hip-hop section. There was Son of Bazerk’s Bazerk, Bazerk, Bazerk and Mr. Hood. Neither of us had known that either of those was going to be available that faithful Tuesday, so I decided to scoop up both as well.
For the uninitiated, Zev and Subroc had formed KMD in the late 1980s, along with Jade 1 (who’d go on to become Rodan of the Monsta Island Czars a decade later) while they were all still in high school. After Jade 1 left the group, Onyx took his place in the lineup. They eventually linked up with MC Serch, then in 3rd Bass, who helped jumpstart their career.
Like most hip-hop fans, I’d become aware of Zev Love X and KMD after Zev contributed the final verse on 3rd Bass’ “The Gas Face.” I was suitably impressed with his slick delivery and youthful exuberance. He nimbly bent syllables and used obscure slang, but had an undeniable energy.
About a year later, while watching Yo! MTV Raps, I caught the video for “Peachfuzz,” KMD’s first proper single. “Peachfuzz” was a fun song about teenagers dealing with growing up and becoming interested in the opposite sex. Zev Love still shone bright, as did Onyx, who delivered the song’s second verse. The beat is pretty understated, composed from sprinklings of piano and a “funky xylophone tone.” Soon after, I bought the maxi-single and kept it in rotation for months.
This all led me to take notice the day Mr. Hood dropped. When I got home, after listening to O.G Original Gangster, I popped in KMD’s debut. I remember sitting my room, listening to the cassette with my brother, and being continually bugged out by what I heard. The members of the crew had conversations with “Mr. Hood,” who’s voice was constructed through snippets of instructional language records (more on that later). They later sought advice from Bert from Sesame Street. I don’t know what I was expecting to hear when I bought Mr. Hood, but it wasn’t any of that.
Then, somewhere around the midway point of “Subrocs Mission,” it was like everything stopped at once as a sped-up cartoon voice came through the speakers: “I like to dance and tap my feet but they won't keep in rhythm!”
To this day, I can’t exactly articulate why hearing that sample from “The Silly Song” from Disney’s Snow White affected me so much. But it definitely flipped a switch in my brain. I hate to be so corny, but it really was like the proverbial third eye opened up.
By that spring of 1991, I’d been a committed hip-hop head for a decent portion of my life (I was 15 at the time). I’ve written A LOT of tributes to albums that I bumped during those formative years in my life, from the start of middle school into high school, for Albumism. Groups and artists like Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Ice-T, EPMD, Eric B. & Rakim were all my bread and butter.
But for some reason, I’d never really gotten into the more abstract hip-hop. About as way out as I got was Digital Underground, and I felt pre-disposed to like them due to their Bay Area connections. I even wrote in my tribute to De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) that it took me a few years to “get” that album. The thought process behind it was just so weird and alien to me. And I credit Mr. Hood for helping me understand it.
After hearing Mr. Hood, everything started to fall into place. KMD wasn’t the first group to integrate cartoons or other leftfield sample sources into their music, but something about what they were doing seemed so wild and creative. I fully appreciated the realm of possibilities as to what hip-hop could be. And it changed how I viewed and consumed the artform.
Which all amounts to my very long way of saying that KMD’s Mr. Hood is a GREAT alum. Caps-lock necessary. The trio of Long Island teenagers put together a debut project that was brimming with imagination, youthful enthusiasm, strong rhetoric, and quirkiness. Lots of quirkiness. The fun quirkiness of the album gives it its understated brilliance.
Stylistically, KMD were somewhat of a hybrid between Brand Nubian and De La Soul. They expressed messages of Black empowerment and decried the systemic oppression of the United States, but often used wit to convey their worldview while rapping over obscure soul, jazz, disco, and rock records. They switched gears with ease when necessary, never sounding forced and always keeping their sense of humor.
Though most of the rapping on Mr. Hood is handled by Zev Love X, both Onyx and Subroc make up essential parts of the group’s rhyming equation. On the production side, KMD as a unit is credited with producing most of the album. The SD50s, which included Dante Ross (the A&R at Elektra Records who signed the crew) in their ranks, produce a pair of tracks as well.
KMD’s enthusiastic creativity is built into the central conceit of the album, and the prominence of the “Mr. Hood” character. It must have taken massive patience to set that foreign language record, select the right vocals, and re-sequence it so that it sounds like a legitimate pattern of speech, but the group completely pull it off. They reconfigure the vocal tones of an anonymous thirty/fortysomething white guy into the voice of a local kid from the block, involved in various illicit activities.
Throughout the album, “Mr. Hood” converses with all three members of the group, meeting Zev in a jewelry store, playing the dozens with Onyx, and getting a haircut from Subroc. The skit with Onyx is my personal favorite, as I still crack up at the randomness of the insult “Your mother likes to visit the old churches!” Mr. Hood later shows up in the audience of “Preacher Porkchop” (Onyx doing a funny voice), catching the proverbial holy ghost as the pimp-strutting pastor whips his congregation into a frenzy.
The group’s second single “Who Me?” is considerably more serious than “Peachfuzz.” Throughout his three verses, Zev laments Black people being reduced to harmful stereotypes by popular culture, as well as the failure of the country’s education system to accurately teach Black history and culture in schools. Zev raps, “Holy smokes! I say it’s a joke / To make a mockery of the original folks / Okay, joke’s over, but still it cloaks over / Us with no luck from no clover.” The song ends with the first of their conversations with Sesame Street’s Bert, who provides them with the inspiration to create their controversial logo: a “Sambo” caricature being crossed out.
My brain broke yet again the first time I heard “Humrush,” in which Bert makes another appearance. This time, the SD50s loop a sample of the Muppet humming and add a piano to create a smooth groove. Although all three emcees come correct, Onyx has one of my favorite verses of all time. “You could have sworn I was a WHAT? A Penn Station penny-begger?” he raps. “I gots more songs than your neighborhood bootlegger.”
As a whole, Zev Love X dominates Mr. Hood. He holds down nearly half of the songs on the project by himself, and the middle portion of the album becomes a showcase of Zev’s skills. He demonstrates his versatility from both a stylistic standpoint and in terms of the subject matter that he tackles. He goes the more political route on songs like “Banana Peel Blues” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” targeting white oppressors and the system they’ve created to subjugate the Black population.
“Figures of Speech” and “Trial ‘N’ Error” feature Zev delivering clever rap braggadocio. The former song is a top-notch head-nodder, with Zev delivering his rhymes in a laid-back tone over elements from Le Pamplemousse’s “Monkey See, Monkey Do.” He raps that “sounds are booming / Emcees shout ‘DOOM is in the house!’ after one, two’in / ZL needs a Nuprin.” Later he encapsulates his life philosophy with, “The motto goes: sex, drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll / I prefer love, hugs and hip-hop soul!”
Zev is also an entertaining storyteller with a keen sense of humor. Mr. Hood’s two storytelling jams rank pretty high amongst my favorites on the album. “Hard Wit No Hoe” isn’t big on subtlety, as Zev “reads” the tale of neighbors Tom, Sam and Bo and their efforts to tend to their respective gardens with a “brand new hoe.” Over a sample of Samba Soul’s “Mambo No. 5,” he describes how the “hoe” in question mysteriously travels from home to home, with Zev concluding, “when you grow up to be a farmer keep an eye on your yard / ’Cause with no ho, it’s hard.”
“808 Man” is another amusing yarn, as Zev and crew educate a local kid on where they got their bass from. Oddly enough, the Roland TR-808 in this case is personified by a seven-foot cock diesel behemoth, mad that the group is talking to his girlfriend. The song lets Zev explore his goofier sensibilities and demonstrate his ability to not take himself too seriously.
Onyx and Subroc both shine on the respective solo cuts as well. I’ve already mentioned “Subroc’s Mission,” where he describes the various light-hearted misadventures he encounters during the day. Onyx’s solo track “Boogie Man” is a fast-paced winner produced by the SD50s. It covers similar thematic ground as “Who Me?”, railing against the portrayal of Blackness as “scary” by popular media.
It’s a little startling to consider how few songs on Mr. Hood feature verses from all three group members. Along with the aforementioned “Humrush,” there’s “Nitty Gritty,” the third single from the album and a masterful posse cut featuring Brand Nubian. Zev stated that he wished that Elektra had promoted this entry more aggressively, as he believed it most accurately reflected their sensibilities when Mr. Hood dropped. The song is a fierce and fiery screed dedicated to Black empowerment, and all three members of Brand Nubian (Grand Puba, Lord Jamar and Sadat X) do their part to bring the heat.
The song also features what was likely Grand Puba’s final verse delivered as a member of Brand Nubian before he left the crew in the early 1990s. The group would later release the “Dog In Reverse” remix, where Puba was replaced by Leaders of the New School’s Busta Rhymes. On either version of the song, Subroc and Sadat X’s verses are the highlights. Subroc throws some digs at Young Black Teenagers, the most unfortunately named group in hip-hop history (they were white), rapping, “You simple teenager, you thought you got the knack to be Black? / State of mind ain’t like mine, I got soul that you lack.”
Meanwhile, Sadat X brings some hard-edged ferocity on his verse, proclaiming, “Zig-zag-zig, watch the Black man get big and burst / The Black man is first / I drive a black hearse and I bury all the devils / With KMD, I can raise up my levels.”
Another thing that I’ve come to appreciate about Mr. Hood, years after the fact, is that you can discern the earliest inklings of the musical and lyrical leanings of MF DOOM throughout. “Subroc’s Mission,” built around a sped-up loop of The Hassles’ “5 O’Clock In the Morning,” sounds like a proto-DOOM beat, while Zev’s slurring drawl on “Figures of Speech” is the Genesis of DOOM’s drunken flow.
Sadly, two-thirds of KMD are no longer with us. Subroc died after being struck by a car in 1993 and Zev passed on due to undisclosed reasons back on October 31, 2020. Onyx doesn’t rap professionally anymore, leaving the group in the period between when Mr. Hood dropped and their never-released sophomore album Black Bastards was recorded; he now occasionally works as a DJ.
Mr. Hood doesn’t get discussed as much when examining the legend of KMD and MF DOOM. Personally, I think that’s a shame, because it’s vital to my development as a hip-hop head as any album by Ice Cube or Big Daddy Kane ever was. Hearing young men such as this trio unleash such masterful creations was inspiring. It has permanently shaped the type of hip-hop that I enjoy.
Note: As an Amazon affiliate partner, Albumism may earn commissions from purchases of vinyl records, CDs and digital music featured on our site.
LISTEN: