IIt makes strange sense that we are only aware of the death of Daniel Dumile, better known as MF Doom, two months after his death, with few details that accompany him. An artist who thrived in the shadows, Dumile’s backstory was a chimera of creating real-life myths and tragedies. Even his face was a mystery – he acted for much of his career behind a metal mask and later explored this concept to an absurd degree, sending masked imposters on tour in his name (“I am the writer, I I’m the director, ”he told Ta-Nahesi Coates of the New Yorker in 2009).
Dumile made his recorded debut in 1989 as a fresh-faced 18-year-old, delivering the final verse of 3rd Base’s classic diss anthem, The Gas Face (MC Pete Nice’s verse testifies that Dumile really coined the title slang). Londoner Dumile moved with his family to Long Island in the 1970s, and was now a third of the New York rap trio KMD, performing under the nickname Zev Love X alongside his younger brother Dingilizwe, known as a DJ Subroc. Their debut, Mr Hood, from 1991, signaled the trio worthy of descent from the golden age of rap – witty and tirelessly happy like the Native Tongues group, with a steel political hangover, evidenced by the bitter and anti-racist Who Me?
KMD’s second album was a darker and denser beast, juggling samples from Pharoah Sanders and black nationalist lyrics, but his label Elektra opposed his austere title, Black Bastards, and a controversial album cover that showed a racist caricature “Sambo” hanging by the neck. Rejecting the album, Elektra freed Dumile from the label with a $ 25,000 reward and ownership of the master tapes. But KMD was done; just before the completion of the Black Bastards, Subroc was hit by a car and killed, and Zev Love X disappeared from the scene.
Dumile was down, but he was not, however, and – after several years in obscurity, licking his wounds and developing his idiosyncratic voice – he resurfaced before the end of the decade, taking on his final form: MF Doom. For his first appearances at the Lower East Side boho hangout, the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe, Doom performed wearing pantyhose over his face. Soon, however, he traded this disguise for his trademark mask, shaped after the Fantastic Four’s enemy, Doctor Doom. The evildoer at Marvel Comics displayed his fake face to hide the disfigurement that inspired his villainy; MF Doom, however, wore his tragic origin story on his sleeve, the title track of his debut album, Operation: Doomsday 1999, signaling his commitment to rap “until I get back to where my brother went”.
Sampling Sade, superhero cartoons and Steely Dan, Operation: Doomsday was characterized by unsteady and brilliantly disorienting beats, while Dumile’s new alter ego rapped with a deeper, more harsh cadence, its eccentric rhymes, bleakly comical and threatening (although, as Coates noted, “other MCs are obsessed with machismo; Dumile is obsessed with Star Trek”). Coming to an underground hip-hop that has been redefined by names like Wu-Tang Clan, Dr Octagon and Company Flow, Operation: Doomsday proved that Dumile’s time had come. Obtaining critical acclaim and from his fellow MCs, Dumile entered a laborious period, releasing instrumental CDs (the Special Herbs series) that featured a fearless invention, cutting Gojira soundtracks into Hermann-esque horrorscapes (Star Anis) and developing new aliases by Viktor Vaughn and King Geedorah (whose Godzilla-style concept album, Take Me to Your Leader, is one of Dumile’s best).
His collaboration with West Coast producer / MC and soul mate Madlib gave Dumile his first commercial success. Madvillain’s only album, Madvillainy from 2004, was fueled by beer, Thai food, grass and mushrooms, and saw Doom rhyme about immaculately stoned Madlib beats that emerged from the cartoons Mothers of Invention, Sun Ra and Tex Avery, leaving conventions hip-hop artists destroyed. your wake. Dumile showed himself up to the occasion, his lyrics inspired and elliptical, his willful, masterful and wildly unpredictable flow, spitting unshakable worms like “stumbling out of the middle beat / slipping from the meat grinder” on the hawaiian guitar and declaring “the worst hated God who perpetrated strange favors”.
In fact, this drug-soaked masterpiece may be the best Madlib or Dumile album ever recorded. Taking advantage of his success as Quasimoto, Madlib’s productions favored his sensitivity to dubby, spaced and abstract funk, but in Dumile he discovered a foil that could deliver a weight and darkness that he had not achieved. If names like America’s Most Blunted threatened to fall into drastic comedy, Dumile pulled them in more convincing and provocative directions, his voice low and harsh, his words slipping from brooding grumbles to staccato staccato, his lines sounding casual, but on closer inspection next, proving to be densely built and complex. His dizzy singing and menacing boom lent Rainbows its sparkling noir, and skillfully inhabited Fancy Clown’s tale of sad betrayal.
In a genre where the ego was everything, Dumile remained relaxed, but still dominated by breaking rhythms and rules. His lines contained black humor and cultural references friendly to the potheads, but the mind that assembled them was extremely sharp, accumulating multiple rhymes like Super Mario power-ups and enjoying metatextual intrigue. Check out MM’s discreet arrogance. Food’s Beef Rap, the way Dumile minimizes the effort he puts into his work (“I wrote this note in the New Year / I hung up a few shots and a few beers / But who cares? / Enough of me, it’s about the beats ”) moments before cutting a block of pure bluster (“ A rhyming cannibal who is dressed to kill / Is cynical / Be animal, vegetable or mineral / It’s a miracle how it gets so lyrical / And continues to move the crowd like an old spiritual black man ”), which is an exemplary proof of the very skills he is praising.
Or That Is That, off Born Like This, where he puts so many internal rhymes on some lines that he must be doing it for a bet, but the huddle of rhymes from “Already woke up / Spared a poke / Mal spoke / Rarely smoked / Looking fixedly to people when provoked / The mirror broke “is the perfect evocation of his sad rap-Rodney-Dangerfield persona. The fact that he presents these lines in such an unpretentious way only makes him bold and – let’s call him here – genius even more audacious rhyme schemes.
Madvillainy scored Dumile’s first entry into the Billboard Top 200, although a frequently promised streak never materialized, Madlib suggesting the ball was firmly in Doom’s side. Instead, Dumile edited other collaborative albums with names like Danger Mouse, Jneiro Janel, Bishop Nehru and Czarface. There was also a final solo album, Born Like This, from 2009, which was inspired by Charles Bukowski and brought together Doom with names like Raekwon and Ghostface Killah from Wu Tang.
Dumile also had guest appearances on tracks by Gorillaz, The Avalanches and BadBadNotGood, along with promising ones like Your Old Droog and Wilma Archer (and was working on an EP with Flying Lotus when he died). In all of these appearances, his voice was always unmistakable: that of an obstinate and unique Mingus-like genius who always used his minutes in the spotlight to steal the show, but never sounded like he was trying too hard, which only made his lines more effective. Your absence will be deeply felt.