A couple of years ago, he allegedly sent "fake" Dooms to perform on his behalf at gigs. People, he says, miss the humour in his work, and the delight in mischief-making. The mask is a slight theme, for people to enjoy, and it adds mystery."ĭoom's music has always been murky, his samples dusty from all those crates, his voice gruff, his raps torrential bursts of elliptical wordplay too dense and jerkily delivered to be described as "flow", but it's not as forbidding as the metal face suggests. "It's not about revenge so much as like: 'I'm back – now watch this!' It all boils down to the music. "Doom is a classic supervillain, akin to the Phantom of the Opera," he explains. "About how you can come from the bottom and be raised to the highest levels you can imagine." As for the idea of the avenging angel confronting an industry that mistreated him, and a world that robbed him of his sibling, this is a journalistic conceit, not a carefully cultivated persona. "I don't think it's a sad story at all – it's really a story of success," he says. By this point Dumile had accrued near-mythic status, to the extent that he was featured on the cover of a magazine alongside the title The Mask of Sorrow, the attendant interview trailed as "the saddest hip-hop story ever told".
#JJ DOOM SERIES#
A series of critically acclaimed albums, either as MF Doom or under other guises including King Geedorah and Viktor Vaughn, culminated in Madvillainy, and DangerDoom, a 2005 collaboration with Brian Burton, alias Danger Mouse. He re-emerged in 1999 for the album Operation: Doomsday as MF Doom, a character based on Marvel comics supervillain Dr Doom, sporting a metal-face (hence "MF") mask.
After run-ins with his record company over the title and sleeve of their second album Black Bastards, he went to ground, apparently spending the next five years living rough in New York. His early career, as a member of New York trio KMD, peers of the Native Tongues posse, foundered when his brother – KMD's Dingilizwe "Subroc" Dumile – was killed in a traffic accident in 1993. He plays down his heavy reputation, saying: "Really, it's about the wordplay, the beat choices and the songwriting skills." But he can see how he acquired it. He is the only Golden Age rapper to have figured high in lists of albums of the noughties – his team-up with producer Madlib for 2004's Madvillainy was considered by many to be the decade's best. The high-profile guests are a sign of the regard in which he's held: unusually for someone who has been in the game for more than two decades, his current work is as eagerly lapped up as his "classics". There are cameos from Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn and Beth Gibbons of Portishead on his latest album, Key to the Kuffs, a superb collaboration with experimental producer Jneiro Jarel. The rap outsider does have some friends in the capital.
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