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.