No. 089 - MF DOOM’s “Rhymes Like Dimes” changed my life
From Yorkshire to London and back again, Kambi Thandi reinvents himself and finds his people
This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.
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• 6 min read •
Why did my bedroom look so… small?
Standing there, fresh from my second year of university, my mind was reeling with the potent culture shock of coming home. It felt beyond weird; it was unquietly mocking. My parents had laughed at me traipsing home to do laundry, and now the wallpaper was gleefully joining in.
I’d returned from East London University on the crest of a personal-awakening tidal wave. For 18 life-changing months I’d been reveling in finally meeting my own people (a task much harder for an Asian guy in a small white Yorkshire village in 1996), and I had done things that would have blown my previously much narrower mind.
Yes I could now make a half-decent pasta bake, yes I could top up the electric meter, and yes I was going to my first hip hop gigs at dubious venues (this may or may not be the last pasta-slash-chores-slash-rap comparison I make).
So maybe that’s why it looked tiny. I mean, how could such a small space in a flat above our shop really harness my ego at this point? I knew it all. I was living in the best city in the world, fully participating in the culture I’d fallen in love with at 13. Hitting up cyphers, attempting to rap, failing at attempting to rap, supporting friends who could rap, and expounding, to anyone who would listen, the bible of rap.
Me, going backwards in life?
No thank you.
I’ll have the resplendent future that lies ahead and an ice cream please.
As the bedroom distress waned, I cracked open that month’s Hip Hop Connection magazine.
And I saw it.
The mask.
Life-shaping events morph with importance over time, but MF DOOM’s mask’s monolithic importance was immediately, well, monolithic. The iconography of his veil has since rocketed past his music, as well as Daniel Dumile himself, who had disappeared from the rap scene for almost a decade after his brother’s death. It’s now a bat signal for alternative lifestylers across the globe, but for me it’s become more about reinvention.
The bolt of lightning had struck, and I devoured the article with the onset of lifelong enrapturement creeping in. A few days later I sat in that room listening to Operation: Doomsday.
And I heard “Rhymes Like Dimes.”
And then everything changed again.
This jaunty and whimsical time-traveling song checked all the boxes — a heavy lean into an ‘80s sonic bent (I love the ‘80s, what can I say), complex bars laced with screwball comedy (“tally-ho!”), and a fiercely independent ethos at the heart of it.
And I was confused. I’d been told by hip hop to NOT sell out, but here he was bragging about selling his art for money?! My moral and ethical understanding had flipped, with lines like these embedding themselves into my brain like rap shrapnel:
Only in America could you find a way to earn a healthy buck
And still keep your attitude on self-destruct
My understanding of art and capitalism widened all at once, with my world taking on a new shape filled with colour, soundtracked by an unprecedented rhyming flow with a voice that sounded like a freshly-baked loaf of bread.
Crucially, “Rhymes” managed to tick my ultimate nerd-out bingo card — it was an original song from an original artist (with an incredible origin story) who nobody I knew had heard before. It was the ultimate hidden gem.
Now, a tricky self-confession. I’ve always had an inherent need to be the first to discover something. It’s not attractive and it’s not smart, I know this now. But in 2000… yep, I was that guy at the house party. Hidden gems were my stimulant.
But just as powerful as that need to be first was another — the need to share the experience. This is something I got from my father, who loved music with such a hard passion that he and his brother wouldn’t let a Sunday go by without setting up the video camera in the lounge, bumping the Bhangra mixtape from Walsall up to eleven, and having a massive family dance session for three hours.
He taught me that music is incredible to experience on your own, but with others who share your tastes? It may be one of the best lived experiences you can have. So, with this song swirling around my head, I returned to the bright lights of London, ready to spread the MF DOOM gospel.
Except… nobody really got it.
Here I was again, on my own, thinking “my people” should be with me. The quiet desperation to find a home from home had resulted in another moral quandary, all because of that masked man in that rap magazine. My personal reinvention had hit a road bump, and MF DOOM and my dad helped me navigate it.
Through them both, I found that I always did this. If I couldn’t share my experience, I always reinvented my home until I could. We all reinvent. Bob Dylan once said we don’t find ourselves, we create ourselves. He and MF DOOM may be history’s biggest musical examples of it. So yet again I went to find “my people.” And I did. And it was glorious. We even made DOOM’s Mac & Cheeze in between hoovering together.
It may be as tenuous as that pasta-slash-chores-slash-rap comparison, but I can’t help thinking reinventing is how my dad must’ve handled settling in the United Kingdom from India.
Watching that man enjoy music changed me, and his enthusiasm for life is reflected not just in me, but also in his grandson. Like DOOM, he was an artist of reinvention. I saw him do it everywhere with such ease and comfort. With his big turban, shaggy beard, and thick English accent, he reinvented himself and helped reshape the mindsets of people who would assume something totally different about him until he spoke.
Yes, comparing my father to MF DOOM may not land wholeheartedly, and I’m not sure what it says about my mental state, but the mooring they’ve both given me in life shows itself in funny ways still to this day.
For example, DOOM’s bar “the one who mostly keep cash, but brag about the broker times” hits me right in the soul chakra. My father had a healthy routine of telling stories of our three families living under one roof, kids sharing beds, and parents working at factories, us growing up with poor backgrounds… whilst also running a host of successful businesses. Aspirational reimaginings of your home from home are a family staple.
I miss that man. And I miss MF DOOM. And I miss university.
“Rhymes Like Dimes” was MF DOOM’s reinvention, meeting me at the height of my own reinvention, which was made possible by my father’s reinventions.
Life can be a trip like that.
Enjoy the ride. ◆
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About Kambi
Kambi Thandi has worked at the BBC and Bleacher Report in news, sports, podcasts and production. He also runs a ‘90s hip hop podcast with an eye on current underground rap culture, and aims to still be banging on about the unheralded nature of Kool Keith well into his 70s.
Instagram @crate_808
Website crate808.com
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What if you’re wrong?
What if you could be a fan of someone’s music but you never find out because you assume you wouldn’t like it so you avoid listening? You hear one or two songs ~it’s not for me~ and never go back for another bite.
On a grouchy day, you might even say “I don’t like her” if she comes up in conversation or her music comes on. Curating taste by what we dislike. Not a super uncool and unfun thing to do but definitely not actively cool and fun.
(I’d rather be actively cool and fun.)
As an experiment
I’m going to listen to artists whose music I think I would not like. Musicians I’m not naturally drawn to, people I assume aren’t for me. I’m committed to listening to full albums, to really give them a fair chance and see what I think.
Maybe I’ll listen and won’t end up a fan, but what if I do?
What if I do!
I’ve been wrong before…
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