MF DOOM

Daniel Dumile was born on the thirteenth of July 1971 in Hounslow, London, the elder of two sons of a Zimbabwean father and a Trinidadian mother. While his parents were living in the United States, he was born during a visit to Britain, and he would carry British citizenship for the whole of his life. In 1974 the family settled in Long Beach, on Long Island, New York, where he was raised in a Black-nationalist Muslim household influenced by the Five-Percent Nation.

He entered hip-hop in the late 1980s as Zev Love X, one third of the group KMD, alongside his younger brother, DJ Subroc. The sudden death of Subroc in 1993, and the shelving of KMD's second album, sent Dumile into years of grief and withdrawal from the industry that had cast him out.

He returned at the close of the decade transformed. Appearing at open-mic nights behind a metal mask modeled on the Marvel villain Doctor Doom, he built an anti-hero persona and a body of work of astonishing density and wit. Under names including MF DOOM, King Geedorah, and Viktor Vaughn, he released records such as Operation: Doomsday, Mm..Food, and the celebrated Madvillainy with producer Madlib, prizing intricate rhyme over spectacle.

Denied re-entry to the United States in 2010, he spent his final years in England, and he died in Leeds on the thirty-first of October 2020. Masked to the end, he let the words carry his face; his voice endures wherever the craft is honored.