MF DOOM

Bio

Daniel Dumile is MF DOOM. He is one of the most influential underground rappers of the 2000s. He is also a study in how to vanish at the moment you are most famous: he stopped doing interviews, wore a metal mask in public, sent body doubles to his own shows, and was photographed without the mask probably fewer than ten times in his last fifteen years.

He was born Daniel Dumile on July 13, 1971, in London, England, to a Trinidadian father and a Zimbabwean mother. The family moved to Long Island when Daniel was a baby. He grew up in Long Beach. He started rapping in his late teens with his younger brother Dingilizwe (DJ Subroc) and a friend, as the group KMD. KMD got signed to Elektra in 1991. Their debut Mr. Hood (1991) was good. The follow-up, Black Bastards (recorded 1993), had a cover image of a Sambo cartoon character being lynched, which Elektra refused to release. Then, while the album was in label limbo, Subroc was killed crossing the Long Island Expressway. He was nineteen. Daniel was twenty-two.

Dumile disappeared for five years. He has said, in the few interviews he gave, that he was homeless for some of that time. When he came back, he came back as MF DOOM. The mask was a Marvel Doctor Doom prop he had modified. The persona was the supervillain. The voice was a slower, more drawled, comic-book-narration version of his KMD delivery. The first DOOM record, Operation: Doomsday (1999), came out on Fondle 'Em Records, an indie label run by Bobbito García.

The 2000s were the productive run. Take Me to Your Leader (2003) as King Geedorah. Madvillainy (2004) with Madlib. Mm..Food (2004). Born Like This (2009). Multiple side projects (Viktor Vaughn, Doomstarks with Ghostface). The Madvillain album especially has acquired the status of an undisputed-classic underground hip-hop record, the kind that people who do not otherwise know underground hip-hop still know.

DOOM's writing is the part to study. The bars are dense with internal rhyme, multi-syllable flexibility, comic-book references, food puns, and the occasional moment of unexpected vulnerability. He flips persona between verses. He talks about himself in third person, in first person, in cartoon-narrator voice. He samples old cartoons in the production. The whole project is a deliberate misuse of the standard rap-persona machinery.

He died on October 31, 2020. His wife Jasmine Dumile announced the death on December 31, 2020, two months later, long after most public assumption that he was alive. He was 49. The cause of death has never been publicly confirmed. He had been in the UK at the time, having been deported from the US in 2010 for visa issues.

If you want to know what underground rap of the 2000s sounded like at its most ambitious, you start with Madvillainy. You move to Operation: Doomsday. You stay as long as it takes. The mask is on. The catalog is everything.