MF DOOM

Daniel Dumile was born on the ninth of January 1971 at London, the elder of two sons of a Trinidadian father and a Zimbabwean mother. The family emigrated to the Long Island, New York, town of Long Beach in 1974. He was raised in the Long Beach district with his younger brother Dingilizwe — subsequently known as DJ Subroc.

He attended the Long Beach High School and formed in 1988 at sixteen the rap group KMD with his brother Subroc and the rapper Onyx the Birthstone Kid. The group took the name KMD as an acronym for Kausing Much Damage and the alternative Cause it's a Positive Kause in a Much Damaged Society. They signed with Elektra Records on the strength of a 1988 demonstration and released the album Mr. Hood in May 1991. The album sold modestly and produced the singles Peachfuzz and Who Me?

Dingilizwe was struck and killed by a car on the Long Island Expressway on the twenty-third of April 1993. Daniel withdrew from public performance and from the New York hip-hop economy across the following five years. The KMD second album Black Bastards — recorded across 1993 — was shelved by Elektra following the cover art's depiction of a lynched golliwog figure and Daniel's brother's death.

Daniel re-emerged in 1997 wearing the silver Doctor Doom mask he would across the following twenty-three years never publicly remove. The masked persona was based on the Marvel Comics supervillain Doctor Doom and was operationalised under the stage name MF DOOM. He released the album Operation: Doomsday for the small Fondle 'Em Records label in April 1999. The album was bootlegged across the late-1990s underground hip-hop economy and the masked-MF-DOOM persona acquired the cult following that would across the next two decades define his career.

He recorded across the following sixteen years the albums Take Me to Your Leader (2003, as King Geedorah), Vaudeville Villain (2003, as Viktor Vaughn), Madvillainy (2004, with Madlib as Madvillain), Mm..Food (2004) and Born Like This (2009).

He died of unspecified causes at Leeds, England, on the thirty-first of October 2020, at forty-nine. The death was not made public until the thirty-first of December 2020.

He is honored here as the masked villain of underground hip-hop.