Vaudeville Villain

Vaudeville Villain is an MF DOOM album in disguise, and its cover introduces the disguise. The sleeve presents Viktor Vaughn, the masked alter ego DOOM created for the record, with art direction credited to M. McDonald and layout and design to Ralph Borland. It was released by the small New York label Sound-Ink, a long way from the major-label machinery of most rap covers of the time.

The name is a comic-book pun. Viktor Vaughn is a play on Victor Von Doom, the Marvel villain whose metal face inspired DOOM's own mask, and the album casts him as a young, time-travelling hustler stranded in early-1990s New York, scheming to raise money to fix his broken machine. Glide Magazine called him "the most colorful and innovative alter-ego" of DOOM's career. The cover had to do a strange job: sell a new character played by a man who never showed his face. The title adds a second layer, borrowing the language of old variety theatre, where performers played stock villains for a paying crowd, a fair description of DOOM's whole approach to persona.

The album arrived in the same busy run that produced Madvillainy and MM..Food, and it has since been reissued on coloured vinyl, keeping its cover in record shops two decades on. Vaudeville Villain was released on 16 September 2003.