The Missing Notebook Rhymes (partially found cancelled MF DOOM compilation album; 2017)

Album cover

Status: Partially Found

The Missing Notebook Rhymes is a compilation album created by experimental New York rapper, MF DOOM in collaboration with Adult Swim. The album was intended to be 15-song compilation of lost and unreleased MF DOOM songs that would be released on Adult Swim with one song per week. It wasn't until September 2017, when Adult Swim announces its abrupt cancellation, with only seven songs being released.

Background

The Missing Notebook Rhymes was announced in August 2017 on both DOOM and Adult Swim's website. It was announced after DOOM sent Adult Swim a folder of 15 rare, lost, and unreleased songs. The first track was also released onto Adult Swim's site after the announcement. Jason DeMarco, in a interview, talks about the reason for the album being made, quote:

"They’re tracks that DOOM either doesn’t have a home for, or they are part of other projects which aren’t necessarily complete, but we can sort of tease them . . . It’s sort of a peek at everything he has going on right now."

Cancellation

On September 2017, following the release of "Notebook 06 - Pause Tape (Remix)", Adult Swim removed The Missing Notebook Rhymes from their website. It wasn't until Adult Swim's spokeperson came out about MF DOOM and Adult Swims relationship has came to an end, making the remaining songs from the album become unreleased and lost to the general public. No reason was given for abrupt cancellation, with both DOOM and Adult Swim declining to comment on the cancellation.

On December 31st, 2020, when MF DOOM was announced to be dead, Jason DeMarco made a thread on Twitter, revealing why the album was abruptly cancelled after three years of silence, quote:

Flash forward to like a decade later and I hear DOOM really wants to work with me again. After several talks with his management we came up with the idea of the Missing Notebook Rhymes. Of course, once we [Adult Swim] start releasing them, we find two things out: A) DOOM hadn’t paid the producers who made these songs or cleared the other vocalists or samples (of course he told us he had it all cleared). B) DOOM owed music to a record label. Literally anything he released he owed to them. He didn’t tell us this. So the label came after us[.] It was, in short, a total boondoggle and of course we had to shut it down and apologize to a lot of people and pay a ton of money to a bunch of others.

Missing Tracks and The METALFACE Theory

The Missing Notebook Rhymes was cancelled with eight of the 15 songs being unreleased. This led to fans start scouring the internet to find the remaining tracks. Three weeks after the cancellation, it was revealed that DOOM's unused soundcloud, METALFACE started uploading 8 new tracks, one of them being a Young Guru remix of Notebook 2. It has been theorized that the eight songs METALFACE uploaded are the lost tracks from the album, although this has been unconfirmed if it is the missing tracks.

Availability

As of 2024, seven out of the 15 tracks has been released online, the other eight has not resurfaced, with the METALFACE tracks still being unconfirmed if it's the missing tracks.

Videos

Promo for The Missing Notebook Rhymes

An Absurd Existence's video on the subject

External Links

• Wikipedia Article for The Missing Notebook Rhymes
• DOOM's unused soundcloud page with the eight songs being theorized to be the missing tracks