MF DOOM: Living Off Borrowed Time

My obituary from 1 January 2021

This week, I finished reading S.H. Fernando Jr.’s The Chronicles of Doom: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast (Penguin Random House, 2024).

I’ve been a fan of indie rap maverick MF DOOM for more than 25 years. Still, this biography uncovered so much new information previously unavailable to me.

The man born Daniel Dumile was a notoriously private person – he kept the people around him informed on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.

This book tells his story from his early days as a young artist with a major label deal at the tail end of hip-hop’s golden age, through a period of grief and disorientation after the tragic loss of his brother, to his artistic resurrection in the late 1990s and his ongoing presence as elusive godfather of the indie rap movement.

S.H. Fernando Jr., who wrote this first book-length biography on DOOM, is an experienced writer who’s been a key figure in New York City’s underground hip-hop scene himself. In the early 1990s, he started reporting for publications like The Source and Rolling Stone. Since 1994, he ran the indie label WordSound out of his Brooklyn apartment and produced dark and psychedelic, mostly instrumental beats as Spectre. These days, he resides in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and works as a freelance writer and journalist.

The Chronicles of DOOM is essential reading for anyone remotely interested in hip-hop culture. While you’re at it, pair this with Dan Charnas’ brilliant book Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (Picador, 2022). DOOM, Dilla and Madlib were the most important musicians that kept my love for hip-hop burning after the initial indie rap wave was over.

I want to share the obituary I wrote on 1 January 2021, a few hours after MF DOOM’s untimely passing at age 49 was made public. The cause of death remained unknown at first. It was later revealed that the rapper had suffered from health complications including high blood pressure and kidney disease for some years, and apparently died from a rare overreaction to his medication on 31 October 2020 at a hospital in Leeds, UK.

At the time, I hadn’t published any music writings for a while. After 15 years in music journalism, I’d taken a job in music editorial and playlist curation at a big streaming service (yes, that one). During lockdown, my writing energy returned but went straight into my first non-fiction book, Zen Style.

Upon the announcement of DOOM’s death, I sat down and wrote an obituary. I reached out to a friend and former colleague who co-ran the German hip-hop site ALL GOOD; I’d written for the site previously, before entering the streaming world. They’d continued to ask me for contributions, and I’d always turned them down, due to a lack of time and motivation.

Not now though – I was devastated by the loss, and the paragraphs below were published on the very same day. I finished my book a few months later, and started sending out the first iteration of zensounds at the end of that year. In some weird way, I believe publishing this short article got me back into writing about music and culture. (Thanks, DOOM. Thanks, Alex.)

This translated and edited English version of the obituary was never published before. At the bottom, you will also find a little artist primer containing 5+1 of my favorite DOOM albums.

MF DOOM (1971-2020)

Living Off Borrowed Time

On New Year’s Eve of this god-damned pandemic year, a friend sent me a link to an Instagram post from MF DOOM’s wife Jasmine Dumile. Apparently, the iconic rapper and producer has passed away – not today, not yesterday, but two months ago already, on 31 October 2020. Jasmine doesn’t mention a cause of death, but her emotional words must be read as a goodbye note to her late husband.

I remember how in early 2009, when I was still the editor of Juice magazine, we were discussing coverage of DOOM’s upcoming solo album Born Like This in the team meeting. Even though we didn’t have much of a story except a few press images and the loose prospect of a phone interview, we unanimously decided to put him on the cover.

Of course we knew that this record had limited commercial potential, but DOOM’s cultural impact was way bigger than some boring numbers could express. Together with two of his most important collaborators, Madlib and J Dilla, he’d revived the idea of hip-hop in a time when the industry of hip-hop often gave me headaches.

As a young rapper, Daniel Dumile called himself Zev Love X – those were the early 1990s in New York City, when the teachings of the Five Percent Nation were ubiquituous. Later he would slip into characters like the youthful gangster Viktor Vaughn or the alien reptile King Geedorah. Some of his biggest successes were collaborations with other producers on album length – 2004’s Madvillainy with Madlib, or 2005’s The Mouse and the Mask with Danger Mouse as DangerDOOM. Publishing his self-produced lo-fi beats through his instrumental series Special Herbs, he inspired a generation of young rappers from Joey Bada$$ to Earl Sweatshirt.

Daniel Dumile died at age 49. Little details are known about his biography, because he always protected his privacy. As a young man, he lost his brother Dingilizwe “Subroc” Dumile in an accident; with him, he’d founded the hip-hop crew KMD out in Long Island, New York City, where they grew up.

After Subroc’s death, Zev Love X disappeared underground, only to return as the masked villain MF DOOM on stage at Nuyorican Poets Café, where New York’s progressive hip-hop scene convened in the late 1990s.

Assembling his new artistic universe from the Marvel cartoons, Blaxploitation flicks and radio programmes of his childhood, he created lo-fi collages resembling audioplays, knitting together samples of largely forgotten jazz, funk and soul records. His artful, complex rhyme style would inspire hordes of imitators due to his unorthodox flows and ambiguous metaphors.

As one of the first artists, Dumile broke the authenticity dogma of hip-hop culture. Instead of telling his own story in linear first-person narrative, he used various fantasy characters for his storytelling. In this parallel world, populated by the superheroes and supervillains of his childhood, Dumile might have processed his pain and his loss – a popular reading of his work that very much suggests itself.

As a Black man of African-American descent, Dumile had experienced oppression and discrimination, not least in the music industry. His own record company had tried to silence him; Elektra wouldn’t release the second KMD album Black Bastards due to its “offensive” cover and the militant anti-racist lyrics. This was shortly after the “Cop Killer” controversy around Ice-T and his band Body Count, and Elektra’s parent company, the Warner Music Group, wanted the label to drop KMD.

For the rest of his career, Dumile kept a safe distance to the major record business and worked predominantly with a small circle of associates as managers and independent labels as partners; it has to be said though that he also burned a few bridges due to his sometimes ‘villainous’ business behaviour, sending doppelgangers to perform at concerts and cashing in advances for never-to-be-released projects.

Dumile, who stayed away from social media for the longest time and rarely spoke to his fans or the public, spent the last decade of his life in London. He was actually born in the UK and had come to New York City as a child with his parents, but U.S. border officials hadn’t allowed him to re-enter the country after a European tour. He moved his family over to the UK and built up a new life there.

Much too early, one of the biggest musical visionaries of our time has left the planet. DOOM was no superstar, but a musician’s musician. He was deeply respected by his peers – for example, Moodymann, Flying Lotus or Diamond D all expressed their sorrow on social media today – and revered even by commercial big shots like Jay Z and Kanye West. Hip-hop fans will rediscover his work for generations to come.

Dumile leaves behind his wife and children; one of his sons, Malachi, passed away in 2017 at age 14. The circumstances are unclear, just like the cause of his own death. He possibly wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

In an interview from 2009 with Andrew Noz, originally published on HipHopDX (which has since disappeared from the internet, but is accessible through the Wayback Machine), DOOM spoke about his brother’s untimely death. Some words from that interview might be the best consolation in these hours.

“Energy can never be created or destroyed”, he said. “Anything that it changes to is just change. […] Connections never break. If you know how to tune into it, it's the same thing. So to me, any of my brothers that are on the other side, I can just still tune into them. If I'm thinking about them, I'm talking to them. I can hear them, I still laugh around them. It might look weird like I'm laughing in the room by myself, but I'm laughing with Bukowski, I'm asking his permission, I'm talking to [J] Dilla, I'm talking to Sub[roc].”

Stephan Kunze, 1 January 2021

The Primer: Top 5 MF DOOM Records

05 JJ DOOM – Key To The Kuffs (Lex, 2012)

This full-length collab with underrated producer Jneiro Jarel came into existence during DOOM’s early exile years in London. He’d been experimenting with more electronic-leaning sounds since the Viktor Vaughn project a decade earlier, but Jarel pushed him into further unknown territory. Like everyone else, I was slightly disappointed when it first came out, but it has aged surprisingly well (much better than, say, the DangerDOOM album). Definitely one to revisit!

04 MF DOOM – MM..Food (Rhymesayers, 2004)

This is the true successor to his debut Operation: Doomsday. A largely self-produced, completely food-themed album with a four-part instrumental sound collage at its heart. Contains some of his best beats and more of his own rap verses than any other project of the time. Not exactly a deep cut, but if you’ve just started getting into his catalogue through one of the classics below, this is the logical next step to take.

03 King Geedorah – Take Me To Your Leader (Big Dada, 2003)

Compilation-style crew album featuring a bunch of artists from DOOM’s wider circle in New York City and Atlanta: MF Grimm, Kurious, Scienz of Life, Monsta Island Czars, Empress Stahrr and the mysterious Mr. Fantastik. It was released under his crew alias, the name of a classic Japanese kaiju, a three-headed giant lizard from out of space. Doesn’t contain too many DOOM verses, but was completely produced by him. I find this more listenable and gratifying than the actual debut of his MIC crew that came out around the same time.

02 MF DOOM – Operation: Doomsday (Fondle Em 1999/Sub Verse 2000)

The body of work that started the whole movement. Remember this came out at a time when mainstream hip-hop had essentially turned into a minstrel show. This one collects all the legendary 12-inches released between 1997 and 1999 on Bobbito Garcia’s Fondle Em label, and then some. If you’re just getting into indie hip-hop and DOOM’s catalogue, you need this in your life.

01 Madvillain – Madvillainy (Stones Throw, 2004)

Time-tested classic that revitalized the whole indie rap movement. (Apparently it also single-handedly saved the legendary Stones Throw label from bankruptcy at the time.) This is simply one of the most creative hip-hop albums ever made – I’d actually rank this among records like Paid in Full, Fear of a Black Planet, Illmatic and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. Both Madlib’s and DOOM’s best album period, which a whole young generation of MCs and producers adopted as a foundation for building the post-boombap scene of the late 2010s.

Bonus Beats

Metal Fingers – Special Herbs: The Box Set Vol. 0-9 (Nature Sounds, 2006)

At the start of the 2000s, DOOM released the Special Herbs series of beat tapes on various independent labels. This box set collects all of them (72 tracks) in a non-stop DJ mix by the mighty metal-faced villain himself, plus 11 exclusive bonus instrumentals from the KMD era. These instrumentals contain the DNA of DOOM’s beat science – cheesy boogie and soul samples over wonky hip-hop drums, laced with cartoon snippets sampled from VHS recordings. Classic material that precedes the birth of the ‘lo-fi beats’ phenom by a good decade.