Strange Days: Remembering MF DOOM

In the beginning it was about spreading knowledge. By the time he was in junior high school in the late 80s, Daniel Dumile, the London-born, Long Island-bred son of a teacher, had grown perturbed that his peers didn’t know about Elijah Muhammed and Marcus Garvey. So he and his brother, Dingilizwe, formed a rap group with a mutual friend, the idea being to tap the vein of consciousness-raising hip-hop that was becoming popular in New York. The group was called KMD; Daniel went by Zev Love X and his brother became DJ Subroc. Things moved quickly. There was the 3rd Bass cameo, then the deal with Elektra; soon they would tour with Big Daddy Kane and Queen Latifah. A debut album, Mr. Hood, spawned a minor hit.

Then KMD dug deeper. They planned to call their second album Bl_ck B_st_rds, the missing letters a reference to the game of hangman and a nod to the cover art they commissioned of a Sambo figure being hanged. The music was a revelation: the rhymes more caustic, the beats heavier, sometimes nearly apocalyptic. Bl_ck B_st_rds suggested a group with an unshakable perspective and the will to adapt in step with––or ahead of––aesthetic trends. In other words, a group primed for a long career.

This was 1993. But late that summer, Subroc was struck by a car and killed while trying to cross a freeway. Elektra balked at the cover art. B_st_rds was shelved and KMD was dropped from the label. And Daniel Dumile, barely out of his teens, disappeared.

Nearly half a decade is lost here. Dumile would later say in interviews that during this period he flirted with homelessness. He also became a father. “Each day was basically the same,” he told the writer Alex Pappademas for a 2004 profile in Spin. “I’d put my son on the bus in the morning, send him off to school. I might have 50 cents to get a beer, or a can of O.E. If I had a dollar, I might get two.” Dumile described how his wife, who was the one working, would come home on her lunch break, bring him a sandwich, and try to “cheer [him] up.” He did little but sit around, listen to records, and write. He also spent at least a bit of time locked up in Maryland—a one-line record of his being at the Baltimore City Detention Center lists no charge.

But he did reemerge. At some point, he started crashing on Stretch Armstrong’s couch in New York, thumbing through the famous radio DJ’s record collection, laying hitch-step drums over quiet storm samples and barely sleeping. The LP that came out of this three-week stretch, 1999’s Operation: Doomsday, remains astonishing for the way its verses rip at the seams with internal rhymes, and also with wit, venom, and the kinds of slang you might find on Rikers or, alternately, in 1950s radio plays. Dumile had fashioned himself a new persona of boom bap precision mixed with ruggedness and mystique, the cartoon devil on Rakim’s shoulder guzzling malt liquor.

The album feels handmade. Dumile adopted the moniker MF Doom and stitched it together with clips from comic-book cartoons: he was a supervillain, iconic but anonymized. And yet traces of real life bled in. He rhymed, over a Sade flip, of that stretch in Baltimore:

“I wrote this one in BCDC, O-section

If you don’t believe me, go get bagged and check then

Cell number 17, up under the top bunk.”

On the same song, he imagines his grave––“either unmarked or engraved, hey, who’s to say?”––and muses about going “back where my brother went.” Dumile’s last verse on the album is a tear-jerking remembrance of the prayers and expensive leather-goods purchases the pair made together. “I keep a flick of you with the machete sword in your hand,” it ends, “everything is going according to plan.”

When Dumile debuted this new style in performance, first at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on East 3rd Street, he covered his face with a ski mask. Soon he had upgraded to an unmistakable metal piece modeled after the Russell Crowe movie Gladiator. The mask would become central to his identity, and Dumile spoke at length about what it meant to him: his goal of splitting the work from the cult of celebrity, his yearning to go to the grocery store unbothered. Doom was a character, he explained, just like Zev Love X (or the half-dozen other aliases he used: Viktor Vaughn, King Geedorah…) It’s also easy to imagine the pain he might associate with the fleeting fame of his youth.

While the mask might have been conceived as a comment on celebrity and authorship, Doom donned it at a moment when various forms of surveillance became more prevalent. I came to see Dumile’s performance of anonymity (after all, he was open about his real name and personal history: the pose was the point) as a small rejection of retina scanning, random screening, and police departments with facial-recognition databases. And while critics like to highlight the way MF Doom songs can seem unmoored from the world the rest of us inhabit, the most overtly political ones are among the most incisive. When the Bush administration was frothing at the mouth for another war in Iraq, Dumile––who never got American citizenship, and who was permanently denied re-entry to the United States following a 2010 European tour––wrote the following verse:

“They pray four times a day, they pray five

Who ways is strange when it’s time to survive?

Some will go of their own free will to die

Others take ‘em with you when they blow sky high

What’s the difference? All you get is lost children

While the bosses sit up behind their desks

It costs billions to blast humans in half, into calves and arms

Only one side is allowed to have bombs

That song, “Strange Ways,” appeared on Madvillainy, Dumile’s full-length collaboration with the reclusive producer Madlib. The production, which began in 2002 in Los Angeles, was an odyssey. A near-complete version was leaked when Madlib lost a demo CD while on vacation in Brazil. Fearing that the bootleg would decimate sales, they let it lie. But a year later, inspired by internet fervor, unfulfilled contracts, or something stranger, they reconvened; Dumile not only wrote a handful of new songs, but re-recorded the entire thing in a deeper, gruffer monotone. (For comparison.)

Madvillainy became a cult sensation and critical darling. It came out the same year as Mm… Food, an album of equal eccentricity and unequaled hilarity, and only months after Vaudeville Villain and Take Me To Your Leader. The six-year run that begins with Doomsday is one of the strangest and most staggering any rapper has had, this century or last. Dumile earned the undying respect of his most virtuosic peers and could see, if he cared to look, his vast influence over later generations of rappers and producers––from the flat affects that mirror his on Madvillainy, to caps-locked stage names, to the integration of kitschy audio clips. But like the best stylists, he wrote songs that are nearly impossible to mimic in any meaningful way.

Shortly after Madvillain and Mm… Food, Doom’s popularity tipped in a strange way. He became something of a meme; the mask ended up on lunchboxes, the songs on cartoon channels. This was dispiriting to some longtime followers, but buoyed Dumile’s career during a period that yielded little major work (an announced but never realized collaborative album with Ghostface Killah remains one of the great missed opportunities in hip-hop). In fact, the only true solo album he would release after 2004 was Born Like This, a strange and at times astonishing effort that lacks much of the finesse and soft touch of his earlier records, but includes some of his most exhilaratingly free-associative verses and sharpest political commentary.

It was also during this time that Dumile developed a reputation for shiftiness in business dealings. There are countless stories of missed deadlines and advances that vanished into thin air, but the most infamous anecdotes are the ones about so-called Doomposters, stand-ins whom Dumile would send to don the mask and lip-synch in his stead at live shows. Speaking in 2009 to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was shadowing him for The New Yorker, Dumile claimed––probably half-jokingly, though only half––that the imposters were a key philosophical part of his larger project. “I’m the writer, I’m the director,” he said, not necessarily the star. He might send a white guy next, he joked, or a Chinese person. Hell, “I might send the Blue Man Group.” This understandably enraged many ticket-buying fans; it was also exactly in line with the character he had created, the grinning ne’er-do-well hired gun who you could never take at his word.

For all his creative success, Dumile’s life was marked by tragedy. In 2017, he announced that his 14-year-old son, King Malachi Ezekiel Dumile, had passed away. Yesterday, it was revealed by his family that Daniel Dumile died––not recently, but two months prior, on October 31, at the age of 49. That we all walked around for two months not knowing this is surreal. But it seems fitting for a man who valued the separation between his private life and the public one, the person and the work, the reality and the myth.

Originally Appeared on GQ