No Majesty Music Profiles takes a look at artists’ careers from start to present, with the aim of documenting their impact on music culture.
His mysterious history is one of thorough study and discussion by his fans and followers, though DOOM is rarely forthcoming about anything. We’ve unmasked one of rap’s most successful characters by deconstructing his varied art.
His loves are clear: comic books, science fiction, and characters of his own design. He was born in London, but raised in Long Island, with two brothers, one of whom he’d form Kausing Much Damage (KMD) with in 1988. DOOM was not DOOM then, wearing no mask, appearing instead as Zev Love X, the first persona he’d become through his two-year stint with Elektra Records.
In 1991 KMD would release Mr. Hood, which became an MTV rap favourite. But when his brother DJ Subroc was struck and killed by a car as he attempted to cross the Nassau Expressway in 1993, and KMD was subsequently dropped, their second album Black Bastards shelved, and the world as he knew it crashing down, Zev Love X was homeless, wandering the streets of Manhattan completely destitute.
For three years, DOOM lived this way. He all but lost his passion for the New York City music scene, but gave it his last try in 1997 when he performed, for the first time, as the masked MF Doom, on open mic nights at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café. He wore a woman’s stocking over his head – the first of many masks. His success continued through the early 2000s. Bobbito Garcia’s Fondle ‘Em Records picked him up and formed the tripartite Monsta Island Czars collective (M.I.C.), where he became King Geedorah, the three-headed monster from the Godzilla mythos.
The true face of Doom
DOOM’s story seems perfect: making music in many genres, under many names, with many other different artists. But his path is rocky and unruly; he eventually settled in Atlanta because he felt so betrayed and hurt by the way he was treated by Elektra. It isn’t by any means a romantic tale. DOOM has built up a strong music career since 1988, and he is rightfully lauded, yet so many still don’t know his repertoire.
In any case, we can utilize his story as one of someone who fell out of love with music, but was able to find his footing back to that rocky and unruly path through the music industry. It was American DJ and music producer Madlib who in 2004 aided DOOM’s commercial success with their collab project entitled Madvillainy. The two became a coalition called Madvillain, which rap fans now recognize as nothing short of a classic duo.
It’s actually quite impossible to follow a pattern in DOOM’s discography; when he wasn’t working on his own music, he was doing collaborations with some of rap’s most iconic names, and when he was working on his own music, he was likely choosing a different moniker. His collaborations with non-rappers are also essential listening – check out Danger Doom – The Mouse and The Mask, a creation from Danger Mouse and MF Doom.
Is it much, too much to ask. Not to hide behind the mask?
The fluidity of MF DOOM’s identity and the many faces and voices he appropriates over his career have elevated him to something more than just a favourite rapper. He becomes something much more abstract, something less tangible. And for this reason, we are fascinated by him; it is more than just the mask. His elusivity is contagious and addictive, from the long-lost Sound-Ink collective to the few clips of grainy footage of him without the mask.
From MF DOOM he became Metal Face, Metal Fingers, Viktor Vaughn, and at times just The Super Villain. His current Gladiator mask serves him as a token of his successes, much more refined than the stocking-over-the-face in 1997. Like DOOM, his physical mask and visceral façade have undergone changes before our very eyes.
In fact, DOOM barely recognizes himself as a single entity. He is infamous using stand-ins for performances, due to insecurities about his weight, appearance, and voice, and an ‘impostor’ of his was once booed off the stage and then replaced with the true DOOM. “I might send a white dude next,” DOOM told journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2009, “Whoever plays the character plays the character.”
What DOOM does is take the traditional, archetypal ‘musician’ or ‘celebrity’ fantasy and multiply it. It’s not just a steel helmet — these ‘characters’ operate, then, in a multifold artist; our general support and like for a rapper becoming a deep, decades-long drama in which we follow this singular man, Daniel Dumile, through his personas. If DOOM can make it out of the trenches after the loss of his brother, and return with his armor on as MF DOOM, he can do anything.
