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They, too, were making new music resting on the hits of yesteryear. It’s not that Doom - who first found success at the dawn of the 1990s under the name Zev Love X as part of the Native Tongues-adjacent group KMD - was working from a radically different playbook from those in the mainstream, many of whom were his generational peers. It was seismic in the true sense - a shift in terrain that exposed a fault line that had been developing for a while, and revealed a whole other realm of creative possibility, an opportunity for an alternate history. That made “Operation: Doomsday” one of the most idiosyncratic hip-hop albums of the 1990s, and one of the defining documents of the independent hip-hop explosion of that decade. It suggested that you could not so much reinterpret or borrow from history as become one with it, experience and memory all bleeding together into something that wasn’t quite present or past, but some ineffable other thing. This approach was a conceptual innovation beyond a simple sample or interpolation. The music was intimately, almost quixotically, personal.

In an era in which hip-hop was polishing its rough spots for mainstream acceptance, Doom was almost completely interior - he sounded like he was rapping to himself. He could sound like he was rambling, which belied his rather astonishing sense of craft. His vocals were slurred, almost dreamlike.

On “Operation: Doomsday,” Doom - whose October death was announced on New Year’s Eve - molded an approach to rapping and producing that was suffused with memory. The album served as a multilayered memorial - an act of grief for a lost loved one, a somber tribute to an approach to music that was becoming extinct, and an unassuming yet towering act of artistic recalcitrance. You felt drenched, drained, gut punched, short of breath.

Listening to the album was like standing outside in a summer rainstorm. But, even when he didn’t, the clouds still hung low above him. Sometimes on “Operation: Doomsday,” Doom rapped about death directly, and heavily.