MF Doom

Rapper and producer known as MF Doom and many other masked avatars, Daniel Dumile was born in London on July 13, 1971 and grew up on Long Island, New York. In 1988, with his brother Dingilizwe Dumile aka DJ Subroc, he formed the rap group KMD, whose career was launched with the album Mr. Hood (1991). The recording of Black Bastards and Subroc's accidental death put an end to the adventure in 1994, and this second album was not released until 2001. Wearing a mask as the anti-hero Doctor Doom, associated with the Marvel Comics series, Daniel Dumile appeared on the cover of his first solo album Operation: Domsday (1999), followed by a series of production jobs with MF Grimm. In 2003, he returned to solo work under the name King Geedorah for the album Take Me to Your Leader, followed by Viktor Vaughn on Vaudeville Villain (2003) and Venomous Villain (2004). Meanwhile, Dumile formed the duo Madvillain with producer Madlib for their landmark masterpiece Madvillainy (2004) and reappeared as MF Doom for the no less successful MM..Food (2004). The prolific rapper released a series of ten instrumental albums between 2001 and 2005, collected in the box set Special Herbs: The Box Sets, Vol. 0-9 (2006). His projects with other producers are credited to new names: Danger Doom with Danger Mouse for the album The Mouse and the Mask (2005), JJ Doom for Key to the Kuffs (2012) with Jneiro Jarel, or NehruvianDoom for his collaboration with Bishop Nehru (2014). His last solo album under the Doom name, Born Like This (2009), was followed by the Unexpected Gems compilation. In addition to further collaborations with Ghostface Killa for the Victory Laps EP (2011) under the name Doomstarks, then with Westside Gunn for the WestsideDoom EP (2017), MF Doom teams up with Czarface on the 2018 album Czarface Meets Metal Face. A British citizen living in New York, Daniel Dumile was turned away from the United States after the tour that followed his last album Born Like This. He therefore decided to retire to London for the last few years of his life. His death from angioedema on October 31, 2020, at the age of 49, was not announced until two months later. He had just completed a second album with Czarface, Super What? released in 2021. For his twentieth anniversary in 2024, his cult concept album MM...Food was reissued with ten new tracks.