The final afternoon of 2020 brought an announcement from the wife of MF Doom that the 49-year-old rapper, born Daniel Dumile, had been dead since Halloween. That friends, family, and professional acquaintances succeeded in keeping the death of one of the most significant figures in 21st-century music a secret for two months added to MF Doom’s already considerable air of mystery: He only appeared in public in a thick metallic mask, recorded an early 2010s collaborative album with Ghostface Killah that somehow still hasn’t seen daylight, and had not released a solo album since the acclaimed Born Like This in 2009. But MF Doom wasn’t a vaguely unearthly figure because of his persona (really, personas) or his reclusion. With the sad benefit of full hindsight on a completed career, it’s now obvious his mystique came from talent alone.
There are a few dozen rappers who were arguably greater than MF Doom but none that matched him as a pure lyricist. MF Doom didn’t have the hitmaking prowess or melodic instincts of his other, more famous peers, but they also couldn’t string words together nearly as well as he could. That’s no knock on the Jay-Zs of the world. MF Doom’s abilities went beyond not just those of other rappers but those of nearly every other writer working in any medium.
One must look outside music for figures whose command of the English language was as total as MF Doom’s. Certain great poets, your Audens or your Shakespeares, wrote as if they thought and breathed in iambs, free of the typical mortal’s intimidation at the vastness of the language or their deafness to its limitless possibilities of rhythm, tone, and meaning. MF Doom dwelled on a similar plane as the master poets, the one where words can be made to do nearly anything. MF Doom had one of the largest vocabularies in the history of rap, a fact established in a widely cited 2014 survey by data journalist Matt Daniels, but this elevated diction often hides within blizzards of sounds and ideas. The internal rhymes and assonances in a line such as, “Sickest ninja injuries this century, enter plea/Lend sympathy to limper Simple Simon rhyming MCs,” multiply almost to infinity. Brain-twisters lurk in every verse: The ballet of short Is, double Ns, and -ers in, “Got a breadwinner style to get an inner child a thinner smile,” works both to announce and conceal an elusive statement of artistic purpose.
That line appears on Madvillainy, a 2004 collaborative album with producer Madlib that’s widely seen as one of the signal achievements in alternative hip-hop. But it’s hard to pick a masterpiece, in part because MF Doom’s output was enormous even by the standards of the genre. He recorded under a half-dozen names and identities — “If he ain’t the best, he’s the best in the top three out of myself, I, and me,” he once rapped of his King Geedorah persona. MF Doom’s discography includes a 2005 novelty release featuring characters from a half-dozen Adult Swim stoner comedies. Well, not such a novelty, actually: The Danger Mouse-produced The Mouse and the Mask, released under the name DANGERDOOM, is both a gimmick and a classic, a work of cheekiness and dizzying linguistic extravagance that is still bringing thinner smiles to inner children 15 years after its release.
It is reductive and indeed insulting to say that MF Doom proved hip-hop could be an art form on par with other, more established modes of expression — when he first emerged in the late ‘90s, rap no longer needed an MF Doom-level genius to legitimize itself, not in a world in which Nas’s Illmatic and most of the major Wu Tang-related projects were there to make skeptics look stodgy or worse. MF Doom was instead a shatterer of formal limitation, revealing the full potential latent within words spoken over a repeating six-bar beat.
For this exact reason, you are unlikely to hear MF Doom played in a bar, at a party, or in a club. He never got significant radio play. Even when listened to with full concentration, MF Doom’s verses often move too quickly to comprehend without a lyric sheet handy. Hip-hop took over United States and global culture through music that has little in common with MF Doom’s; Drake and Cardi B are essentially pop musicians, and it is unclear how much of their own lyrics they actually write. Dumile had a spell of near-homelessness in the mid-’90s and certainly wasn’t a snob (see also: that Adult Swim record), but the complexity of his rhymes and their demands on a listener were at variance with the unabashed populism of much of today’s culture-conquering hip-hop. This anti-populism was a crucial part of the package. Dumile first started wearing the mask as a marker of his rejection of the mainstream music industry — Electra Records mangled and then canceled the 1993 debut album of KMD, a group he had founded with his brother, the late DJ Subroc.
In an ego-saturated genre, the constant name changes, the mask, and even the mystery of the two-month gap between MF Doom’s death and its announcement spoke to a fantasy of self-effacement, which is the opposite of what most other rappers and seemingly every other musician seem to want. Hip-hop has become bracingly confessional in recent years: For much of 2020, it was possible to turn on a Top 40 radio station and hear the late Juice WRLD rap about the pill addiction that contributed to the circumstances of his death the previous year. Hidden behind a mask, scornful of the major label system, and seemingly uninterested in rap’s more drama- and personality-driven elements, MF Doom was a voice and a voice alone. Even the voice didn’t always help much in figuring out who he was: MF Doom rapped with an unmistakable New York lilt, but in a blow to America’s hip-hop nationalists, the British-born and U.S.-raised Dumile never obtained American citizenship (MF Doom had lived in London since 2010, when he was denied entry to the U.S. upon returning from a European tour).
Dumile made himself a mystery, but the mystery would have been meaningless if there weren’t a singular and likely irreplicable talent foregrounding it. The mystery was always a lot less interesting than MF Doom’s actual output, those hours and hours of the most gloriously labyrinthine rhymes ever rapped. You didn’t need to look at MF Doom’s face-devouring metal shield to know that he was different from every other rapper and from everyone else arrogant enough to believe the English language could be made to do their bidding. All you had to do was listen.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
