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The news came on New Year’s Eve, but the death occurred two months earlier. In some ways it’s appropriate for MF Doom, an artist who was always mysterious, elusive, and elusive. He turned 49 years old. But he had already died several times before.
Daniel Dumile was born in 1971 in London but grew up on Long Island in New York. During his teens, he formed the graffiti group KMD together with his two-year-old younger brother Dingilizwe and his friend Rodan. They also brokedancing and soon started making music: Daniel became rapper Zev Love X, his little brother became DJ Subroc.
In the wake of the native Tongue’s Playful Hits In the early 1990s, KMD landed a record deal and released the sympathetic debut album “Mr. Hood ”1991. But two years later, just after the group finished working on the sequel “Black Bastards,” DJ Subroc died in a car accident. As if that wasn’t enough, the record company decided not to release “Black Bastards” due to the controversial album cover (think Makode Linde’s art but two decades earlier) and the non-commercial music.
Daniel Dumile not only buried his brother, but let Zev Love X die. He fell into a depression and for several years stayed away from the world of music. But around 1998, he began to appear on underground stages and perform anonymously with a sock on his head, which was soon replaced by an iron mask. Now he called himself MF Doom, a nod to the Marvel Comics character Doctor Doom, the supervillain who, after suffering family tragedies, vows revenge on the world.
MF Doom during a performance in London 2012.
Photo: James Green / Alamy Stock Photo
Playing with identities has always been a part of hip hop. But no one took it further than MF Doom. He never made public appearances without his mask, and was not content with an alias, but also released records with names like King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn and Metal Fingers. For him, role-playing games had an emotional dimension: escape and transformation had an end in themselves, they could never end, identity could never solidify, no one should be able to nail it and define it.
The music that MF Doom created he was as strange and peculiar as his character as an artist. His rap style was reminiscent of the beat poets’ stream of consciousness – a missing link between Bob Dylan’s “Okay, ma (I’m just bleeding)” and Ghostface Killah’s “Nutmeg” – with surprising metaphors and puns. strangers. Making a themed album about food (“Mm … food”, 2004) was as obvious to him as doing it without an ironic distance. Everything was game, everything was serious, everything was experiment. His rhythms, which he used to produce himself, were based on bizarre samples of dark and exotic jazz combined with raw drums and samples from old movies. His live performances were also avant-garde: he often had an unknown person perform dressed for himself, with his mask, and imitating pre-recorded music. As if to force the confused audience to ask the questions: what is an artist and what is a concert?
That MF Doom was deeply interested in the purely musical became clear when he released a bunch of instrumental albums, the “Special plants” series. Still, it is his collaborations with other producers that have created his most famous albums, especially “Madvillainy”, the majestic kaleidoscopic album he made with Madlib in 2004 (under the group name Madvillain), one of the best albums of the 00 of All Categories. During his last decade as an artist, MF Doom devoted himself exclusively to collaborations.
2017 however MF Dooms 14 years son, King Malachi Ezekiel Dumile. The cause of death was not reported, but it was clear that this tragedy was a severe blow to the father. He basically stopped creating music – a couple of collaborations were released in 2018, but then it went quiet.
Once again, the cloak of pain fell on Daniel Dumile’s shoulders. And three years later, his own life ended. The cause of death has not been identified and it is unknown whether he suffered from any illness. In any case, it is a heartbreaking ending to one of the strongest accounts in the hip hop history book.
Read more texts by Nicholas Ringskog Ferrada-Noli.
