How Kurious Put Together an Introspective New Album With Help From His Late Friend MF DOOM
There’s pacing yourself, and then there’s being Kurious, the New York rapper who’s put out five albums in 30 years. On Oct. 18, he’ll reveal his latest act by dropping an album called Majician. Crafted over three years from 2016 to 2019, it’s a testament to his decades-long friendship with the late MF DOOM — Majician’s executive producer and a collaborator who Kurious calls his truest “creative partner.”
The two met at the Def Jam offices in 1989 through Kurious’ connection with the group 3rd Bass, who had recently scored a hit with “The Gas Face” (featuring DOOM in his early persona of Zev Love X). “From the first time we met, we were peoples,” Kurious recalls. “We’re at each other’s cribs, inseparable, hitting clubs, drinking forties, all that.” And “all that” included making music: They collaborated on numerous songs over the years, from “?” (on 1999’s Operation: Doomsday, the first album his friend released after resurfacing as MF DOOM) to “Supervillainz” (on 2009’s Born Like This, DOOM’s final album).
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Kurious, 54, has sped up his tempo recently — Majician, dropping on Metalface Records and Rhymesayers Entertainment, is his third album since 2021. He says over Zoom that he’s making up for lost time. “It’s almost a Tupac sense of urgency,” he says. “For all the time I felt that I lost, that I wasted, I’m trying to make up for decades.”
Born Jorge Alvarez, Kurious grew up in Manhattan Valley, a New York neighborhood right below the west side of Harlem. “I loved it,” he says of the corner of the Upper West Side where he grew up with his mother. “Now it’s a luxury neighborhood. Coming up, it was the hood. In Harlem and East Harlem, it was more segregated back then. But UWS, that was more Black and Puerto Rican, all mixed together.” Kurious was exposed to the formative years of hip-hop, watching the Rock Steady and Zulu Nation crews hold rhyming and breaking events near him.
Eventually, Kurious began rapping himself, appearing on tracks with the New York hip-hop trio Powerule and on former 3rd Bass members Pete Nice and Daddy Rich’s Dust to Dust album. He signed to Sony Records and dropped his debut, A Constipated Monkey, in 1993. It’s a time capsule of early-Nineties New York rap, down to the colorful cadences he unfurls through the 14-track album. Though he says now that he “can’t even listen” to the project because it reflects him as a kid who was “all over the place,” his fans might argue that it shows off his thematic range. He’s storytelling on “I’m Kurious” and “Jorge of the Projects,” while showing off his playful side on “Baby Bust It” and “Walk Like a Duck.” Kurious says it was “so exciting” to hear DJ Red Alert play the latter song on the radio. But all wasn’t well with his rap career. “The situation was so bad monetarily, in terms of paying bills and taking care of stuff, that I never had that comfortable feeling as an MC,” he reflects.
After A Constipated Monkey’s release, Kurious says he had what he called a “find God moment,” spurred by mushrooms. “[I got] an awareness of a connection to everything,” he says. “You don’t feel like a separate entity. You connecting with people, with life, with everything. When you come at things from that perspective, not only are you more powerful, but you’re also more understanding and more considerate.” He says people around him were expecting him to start writing a second album, but “it was almost like I was in a new reality,” which made his writing process akin to “a baby trying to walk again.”
He continues: “I couldn’t write the same way that I was before. Everything was more serious. Everything was more powerful. My words meant more. I was trying to get this new footing and everybody’s like, ‘What’s up?’ Because I had a little momentum off of my first record. They’re like, ‘Come on, let’s do it.’ And they just don’t understand what’s going on inside of me.”
After his awakening, Kurious left the industry, and its expectations, behind for the most part. He says he began “working regular jobs,” occasionally “hustling” to pay the bills. He still wrote raps, but was “overthinking” what a new project should sound like. Even with analysis paralysis hindering his solo career, he always had the bandwidth to come through for friends like DOOM and MF Grimm when they sought features. “I’d always have [a verse] for one of my boys,” he says.
Wearing an MF DOOM mask chain over a black Stakes Is High tee, he tells me about his old friend’s kindness, which often came through at unexpected times. “He could be overseas, I won’t see him. I could be getting a new apartment or something and need the security deposit. I’m talking to my girl, like, ‘All right, I got to get this.’ All of a sudden, here comes a beat from DOOM and a check for $2,000.” Kurious adds that though they didn’t spend much time around each other, “we were talking through music, through the verses.” That dynamic is felt on “?,” where Kurious delivers an introspective verse, then pays homage to their fallen mutual friends. DOOM jumps in to split the last two bars before Kurious rhymes, “Only we save we.”
A significant amount of Operation Doomsday was created at Kurious’ home, where he observed DOOM’s voracious work ethic. “He could be on the MPC, with a half a bottle of Hennessy and a half a chicken cutlet sandwich, with cheese and Thousand Island dressing,” Kurious says. “He’ll be there for what seemed like 24 hours, just locking some drums to the right. You’ll hear this drum loop playing over this loop of music over and over.” He says DOOM was meticulous about making his percussion sound like it was being played by a human by shifting the programmed drums ever so slightly. “Everything is so raw and dirty, but it’s so specific and so subtle to a point that I don’t even think the normal human brain or ears could [pick up on it].”
In 2009, Kurious returned to music to drop II, his first album in 16 years. The first domino leading to the project fell when a then-co-worker whom he’d met while working at a Bronx aftercare center for kids made Kurious a MySpace page. His resurgence caught the attention of the independent record label Amalgam Digital, who offered him a deal. While A Constipated Monkey had its playful, rambunctious moments, II was a more serious excavation of where life had taken him. Response was mixed, but Kurious understood it.
“I didn’t feed them enough in between,” he says. “If you don’t come out with another record for 10 years or 12 years or whatever it is and people liked the first thing, you’re going to expect them to want something like that again. And if you take them off to the left, you’re going to lose a lot of them.”
Though there was another 12-year gap in between II and 2021’s Kurious Monkey, Kurious was working with more intent during that period. In 2016, he reconnected with DOOM and flew out to Grenada to hang out with him. He says they instantly rekindled their close bond. “It was like the early ’90s again,” Kurious fondly recalls. “We didn’t miss a beat. I got to have that time with my brother like we never left.” They worked on DOOM music that still hasn’t been released.
He laughingly tells me about the humorous juxtaposition of seeing DOOM in his mansion wearing broken glasses that were scotch-taped together. “‘I’d be like, ‘Dude, why you got tape on your glasses?’ And he’d be like, ‘Never showboat.’”
While in Grenada, Kurious played DOOM “Unknown Species,” a track from his studio sessions with New York producer Mono En Stereo. The jazzy song (with lines like “no use complainin’ with that hot breath”) impressed DOOM so much that he asked Kurious to license the song, and whatever else he and Mono were cooking up, to Metalface Records, the label he ran.
Over three years, Kurious crafted Majician via stateside studio sessions with Mono and periodic overseas listening sessions with DOOM. He says that only songs that particularly moved DOOM made Majician. “When we reconnected, we literally could communicate overseas,” he says. “I almost feel like I know what he’s feeling. We really be on the same page from far away — it’s a frequency.”
Kurious’ recollections reveal them as a pair of unconventional thinkers that just got each other. Sometimes, he says, DOOM would randomly tell him, “Jorge, look, there’s one right there” as he pointed toward the sky. “I’ll be like, ‘Whoa, word,’” Kurious says. “I’m open-minded, but I still can’t see exactly what he’s talking about. He’s not crazy. He’s super intelligent. So, you’re just like, ‘OK,’ never doubting him. I guess that’s why he liked to have me around. Maybe other motherfuckers will be like…” He laughs. “I don’t know, but I know [DOOM], and he’s different, man.”
Kurious almost released Majician without a name, recalling DOOM’s numerous alter-egos. He decided against going there, but decided to leave his name off the layered album cover, which displays imagery representative of his life and times. There’s a blade, an asthma inhaler, and a tarot-esque image of a holy figure holding a mic and (presumably) a rhyme book. He decided to put a “J” in Majician to reflect his given name, Jorge. He says the project is about “identifying with our eternal self.” He adds: “When you’re really doing something from the heart, it becomes bigger than you. And you tap into something that people maybe call magic. To me, it is just love.”
Though the project was initially birthed from a joyous reunion, Majician’s creative process wasn’t without trials. Kurious says he spent time in Toronto with DOOM while his friend grieved the December 2017 loss of his son. Kurious lost his own mother in July 2022, which he says imbued his voice with a sadness and fatigue you can hear on some of his work. He reflects that seeing his mother stay resilient as her health failed strengthened his lifelong admiration for her as the “real deal.” Everybody grieves differently. For Kurious, he decided to “lean on the creativity in the worst times. That machine was still cranking.”
The last time Kurious saw DOOM was in April of 2020. He was aware his friend’s health wasn’t the best, because he’d seen pictures of DOOM in the hospital, but it wasn’t apparent in person. “He was strong,” Kurious says. “I knew he couldn’t drink like usual. There were certain things, but in terms of his energy, his intensity, his sharpness, his vibe, he’s strong as an ox, looking great. You couldn’t tell it was something where you weren’t going to see him again.”
MF DOOM passed on Oct. 31, 2020, but most of the world didn’t find out until New Year’s Eve of that year. Kurious says he heard about it earlier: DOOM’s widow, Jasmine Dumile Thompson, told him DOOM was gone in November, roughly a week after it happened. She also told Kurious that one of DOOM’s wishes was the release of Majician. Kurious says he’s grateful for the consideration, and for DOOM in general. “That’s so DOOM, bro. He’s very present. Right now, he’s very present. And that’s my brother. That portal’s always open with me.”
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