There is no wrong way to get into a musician. Still, I got into MF Doom the wrong way – via MC Paul Barman…

I make def tunes, steal from MF Doom and Jeff Koons

But put that aside for now. MF Doom has a track “Cellz” which starts with an extended spoken word sample of Bukowski reading Dinosauria, We, an apocalyptic vision.

Good old fashioned investigative journalism reveals that the sample on Cellz is not the full text of the poem. Here’s a diff of the version in Cellz against the original. Lines (and a single word) omitted from the version on Cellz are in red.

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.

When I started this post, it was going to be about the choices Doom or his producer had made in cutting down the full sample. But in hunting down references, I found this clip from the film Born Like This, which is the same Bukowski reading of the poem, and already omits the lines (and word) in red.

It seems as though Bukowski himself made the cuts; the clearer audio on the clip from Born Like This (without the ominous background loop) seems to show that it’s not a full reading of the poem that’s been cut down. So now I’m interested to know when and why he made the cuts, exactly. Anyone?

After this little nugget of sub-par digital curation, I’d like to make a few points:

• “The rotting bodies of men and animals” in the Doom version is amazing. The beat brings out the sinuous-ness-ness of that line (and Bukowski’s reading of it).
• “Still” got chopped, huh? A conscious decision? I prefer the line without.
• “Radiated robot men”, huh? That’s so 1960’s it’s 1950’s.

Two great examples of the way visuals can reflect a tune.

“Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, animation by Michal Levy: http://michalevy.com/gs_download.html

“Gantz Graf” by Autechre, animation by Alex Rutterford: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfwD05XA2YQ

here's every impression that occurs to me now before i go to sleep opening and closing white sheet silhouettes bass player and jonssi's silhouettes superimposed first guy iota good voice diesel like charming, tough job, second band string section lots of percussion koto like plucky string instruments that sometimes were bent to make twangy uneasy sounds fingers rubbing wet glasses to hum, some strings, vibrophone, sequenced ibook, fairy dresses, saw with astonishing virtuosity but hard to use live because the bowing/hitting with a mallet is far louder than the actual resonating saw blade first song massive impact hadn't heard it before, real rocking stuff with gloss and polish and perfection but substance i thought i was going to pass out head spin and tight chest feelings, got really nervous, didn't want to miss it, drummer front stage right, then bass player then jonssi then bank of manual-y instruments behind which keyboard player/guitarist hid, with string girls up the back last song (encore) was banging again with the curtain and overwhelming there were visuals but not remarkable except during a really pretty tinkly song which ended with violin trills and the imagery was black with white 70's style sparkles coming off water or something gradually falling down the screen at a low frame rate and another good bit of imagery was all black and darting white shapes that gradually multipled and curved as they flew and you eventually realised it was moths everywhere and the contrast increased over five minutes until you could see a light patch of sky or an illuminated tree (hard to tell) behind the moths and it just looked like something from summer when you were a kid and the song with the violin trills at the end reminds me that every time they played a song that trailed off into silence i found myself aching for the crowd to keep the fuck shut up at the end of the track so that we all could just bathe in it, but their enthusiasm got the better and clapping started like a noise gate as soon as volume dropped below 0.5% or something which was very frustrating, but later on sigur ros made my dreams come true because in the middle of a song they paused (as you do) but the pause was utterly silent and went on... and on... and on... for about 10 seconds (which i bet is a long time when you're standing in a spotlight in front of 5000 utterly silent people) and i thought "fuck me, they know _EVERYTHING_" and talking to carly the thing about them is that you get subcurrent feelings of bad things happening or sad feelings but the main theme is "it's all gonna be okay" or as carly put it "it's okay, because how can it be all bad when there are such beautiful things in the world" which i think pretty much sums up how i didn't yet know i thought of it and there were more tracks than i expected where the keyboardist played guitar and he was quite good and there was a track i hadn't heard with quite intricate fast guitar and piano work by him which caused a fat ol groove to be got on by the overall band and i want to find a recording of that and jonssi didn't play hardly any regular style fingerpicking/plectrum guitar, just bowing mostly and he blew out a bow completely while playing a fun song in which the bass player rhythmically banged his strings using what looked to me like a lummy stick like they taught us music with in prep except he was very precise and very rapid and consistent, and it formed the basis for this driving driving song where in the end the strings were all doing this pizzicato very short high riff which ultimately turned into a bowed version of same with a rapid frenzy note to fill the gaps between run-throughs of the riff and jonssi was singing major scale very simple lines and it just drove and drove and drove and i think that was second last song before the encore and i watched the drummer tapping a pad of some kind at the start of repetitions of a progression which i guess was coordinating some samples or something and the lighting was clever and at the very end they turned on a fat-ass burnt dull orange spot pointing out from the centre of thes tage into the audience while a muffled sample played and they came out and bowed twice and the various guys walked on and off stage many times and whenever jonssi did and walked past the drum kit you could hear his footsteps coming through on the bass drum mic and he looked frustrated a few times as if he couldn't hit notes he wanted when singing quietly and did i mention that there just aren't any other singers like him? and also he's an incredible singer and by the way i like his voice a lot? and he sang through his guitar for about 30 seconds but with no effects just his voice and it was almost identical to normal singing through a microphone and when the first band played they had a trestle table with all their percussion and it had a frilly lacy white table cloth and they were all wearing fairy-type dresses and the keyboardist's voice is actually extremely good too when he was harmonising in the encore, he just stood up there and hit those notes bang on and was old faithful to jonssi's high low-throated tidal wave and hamer hall's sound is pretty fucking good and that's all i can think of for now.