MF Doom was so taken with the Charles Bukowski documentary Born Into This, he used it as a jumping off point for his new record and named the album Born Like This, the first line in Bukowski’s “Dinosauria, We.” In an interview with HipHopDX, Doom talks about how reading inspires his music and that he identifies with Bukowski as someone who is born to be a writer.
“I always read a book when I’m doing a record,” he said. “When I get stuck it gets my stuff going. Bukowski was for this record. I’m reading the Bukowski shit and getting into that dude and his plight and his whole mission as a writer… He really inspired me, just from how he just did his craft without worrying about [standards]. There’s no standards to what we do, we just do it.”
It’s a brilliant move for MF Doom to evoke Bukowski’s “Dinosauria, We” amid the current political and economic climate. I hadn’t read that poem in years, but looking at it now I realize how prescient it was:
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
Bukowski’s foreboding talk about the doom (no pun intended) of human civilization isn’t really a harbinger of the actual events we’re faced with currently, but it eerily contains all the tone and substance we’ve come to expect from cable news. I can’t wait to hear MF Doom’s new record.
For his full interview with HipHopDX, click here.