MF Doom & the Endless Personal
A reading I gave at Bold Tendencies
Last week I found time to delve into the back catalogue of rap legend MF DOOM. I was asked to think about him by Bold Tendencies for a night celebrating his first album (as DOOM, see below), Operation Doomsday, because he relies on food as metaphor and signifier in his lyrics. It was a really wonderful thing, to delve deeply into an artist, and I emerged ever-more convinced that we need not fear AI’s influence on writing as long as young people are making rap music, the 21st century’s great art form.
I didn’t get it in the reading, but as I was going through Daniel Dumile’s ouvre I was put in mind, again and again, of John Wilmot, Earl Rochester’s equally irreverent wordplay. See ‘Signor Dildo’ or ‘A Ramble in St James’ Park’ for a taste of Restoration London’s baddest boy – “Much wine had passed, with grave discourse / Of who fucks who, and who does worse”.
I am currently editing my book, To Entertain, which will be released by Little, Brown & Co in February 2026, so my output here is a little spotty. Still… On Friday there’ll be an interview with Lexie Smith of Bread on Earth, which will include a scoop! And Monday will see pt.2 of my NYC guide… And then I’m off to Rome, an old flame, and will have much to say about that.
Finally, a note to my sister, who reads this Substack. My emphasis on my relationship with our brother is purely because of the echo it has with Dumile’s own brother. You know you’re my fav x
In his obituary of Daniel Dumile – aka MF DOOM, Zev Love X, Viktor Vaughn, King Geedorah, Madvillain, and so on – Hua Hsu remembers asking the star about KMD, which stands for (Positive) Kause (in a) Much Damaged (Society). This was Dumile’s first musical venture, and one which Hsu loved, so he was surprised that Dumile hadn’t been listening to it and didn’t have much to say. Looking back, Hsu mocks his youthful surprise – Dumile’s reticence was not simply the shedding of a previous iteration, but a distancing from joyful boyhood and the exquisite pain it held.
When my brother and I take long walks, we verbally co-write (that is, co-speak) episodes of our ‘sitcom’ – an entirely unwritten piece of media, resplendent with familial jokes and references. If anyone tries to join in, it’s ruined. They don’t get it and did not share our boyhood, or the stories our mother’d tell us as we walked to school – they lack our canon, gleaned from the same TV, the same shelves.
In KMD, Dumile was Zev Love X and his brother Dingilizwe was DJ Subroc. Their first album, Mr Hood, is a sweet piece of art, two brothers performing a gentle sort of masculinity, inflected with joy, innocence, humour. Dumile lisps beguilingly, the smart charming kid, while his brother’s a little brasher, the straight man. It’s replete with samples from TV shows, cartoons, comic strips – their canon – from the same TV and the same shelves. That it’s interspersed with racial epithets, often in a stern white voice, reminds anyone who might not realise – like me, I guess – that such japesing happens in this world, in America. For those without my luxurious innocence, it is a nod of recognition, a whistle past the graveyard, an interrogation.
If I’m described as a writer at all, I’m described as a food writer. That's mostly the topic, but I’ve little interest in food itself, and think of it as a vehicle for, I hope, a nudging exploration of history – my secret history and my country’s public history. While exploring food I write a narrative, draw together the many strings that make me and like all historians, personal or otherwise, I fall constantly upon a sort of half invention, a fudging of fact, some emphasis here, some skipping there. And so I return to the beginning, over and over, to family, place, childhood.
Dumile’s particulars swerved sharply. KMD didn’t last. Dingilizwe was killed by a car just before their second album, Black Bastards, was panned after controversy around its cover – which depicted a ‘black sambo’ being lynched. It’s as funny as Mr Hood, but the humour is tempered by something like claustrophobia. Before recording, both young men – one still a teen, one just twenty – had become fathers and both were facing the staggering fact of manhood, so quickly placed upon working-class men, black men especially, from inside, from outside. Dumile said that’s when “you get hit with a lot of traps.” America, already pressing hard, pressed harder still.
That one of those traps is your label refusing to honour your description of history is of note. Black Bastards was panned in 1992, a year after images of another young man, Rodney King, crumpled beneath police batons and boots, had run through America, impossible to ignore and logically impossible to excuse, but excused nonetheless. And so, after death and rejection, Dumile drifted. I haven’t yet experienced insurmountable grief, though it’s human and will likely come, but you need little empathy to understand his break from work. Two lines from Keats’ poem To my Brothers kept flickering into focus “And while for rhymes I search around the poles, / Your eyes are fixed, as in poetic sleep”. Luckily, Black Bastards was ruthlessly bootlegged and KMD lived on in rap’s cavernous underground, an island for Dumile to reclaim.
My friend Faye Wei Wei, an Anglo-Cantonese painter, has recently returned to school for an MA, a refresher for an already successful artist. She complained to me that the other students criticise her for making art that doesn’t converse with her identity – her immigrant identity. Her art does, just not obviously, but that’s not the point. It’s hardly a new thing to note – fetishisation of race is as old as race itself, and the ways in which art mines history are complex – but it’s got me thinking about my work, which is, in many ways, though it has never been described as such, a project of exploring white, middle-class identity. The only person who ever pointed this out is the artist Precious Okoyomon, who calls me her “charming English prince” in the Nigeria accent she saves for her mother. I’m glad no one else has remarked on this, since I despise much of my history, personal or otherwise – the almost aristocratic note to my accent, the empire behind my position in society, the exploitation stuffed into every cranny. My exploration is rarely for love, it’s simply what’s there, what I have, but it does reveal secrets, contradictions, and even reasons. It gives definition.
DOOMSDAY came out in 1999. Dumile had been flitting around America, sometimes sleeping on park benches with only records beside him, a rap Ulysses. The album’s self-consciously old school, as if gathering the thread dropped after Black Bastards. Or the thread snatched away. Here Dumile presents himself as DOOM, a masked villain. Before the mask, he used a stocking to cover his face. He’d been moving, shaking, finding. Early on as DOOM, he’d walk around the bar or venue he was playing at, unnoticed by his fans. Later he’d send a comrade on stage in his stead, a DOOMposter, masked up, lip-syncing. Asked about this – after his fans’ indignation became apparent – he explained he was a “a writer, … a director” and expressed a desire to send a white DOOM or a Chinese DOOM or The Blue Man group as a collection of DOOMs. Masks allow you to move easy.
To move easy is my greatest wish, to swim with a warm embracing current. Mostly I can – there’s rarely friction for me – and when I was thinking of DOOM’s mask I wondered what mask I’d put on. When I was eighteen I changed my name, angry, wanting new things, just arrived in London. My twenties were a lazy refining of the self, spent doing odd jobs, caring for someone sick, reading, watching films, obliviating myself with drink. I began to always wear a white T-shirt when I was twenty-four, always a suit a year or so later. Cloth trappings for some internal solidification – like everyone, I forged, and the world forged, a costume. “Would it conform to my twisted features in comfort?” asks Dr Doom of his mask.
My favourite song on DOOMSDAY is simply given a question mark for its title. It’s ruminative, thoughtful, a back and forth, about self-making and history, history giving lie to the idea of the villain as individual, giving lie to the idea of self-creation. It is when Dumile gets to his brother that everything clicks for me. He calls him his twin, names the clothes they used to wear, recalls praying salat together – DOOM grew up a member of the loosely Muslim black nationalist Nuwaubian Nation, whose founder claimed to be an extraterrestrial, which surely had some later influence. The song is sharp, striking, soft, and vastly descriptive in so few words, the way I’d want my own brother to remember me, ending with a promise – finally – kept: “Truly the illest dynamic duo on the whole block / I keep a flick of you with the machete sword in your hand / Everything is going according to plan, man.”
The click is Dumile’s double move, the mask that does not quite obscure, the confessions that illuminate only a little. This is not elision but the emphasis of a spotlight. Everything else is there in the murk, ready to be selected for art made majestic by the endless personal. It's all allowed by the movement of a butterfly, the indecorous freedom of the face’s absence, the sting of the lyrics; possible because the mask is not a mask at all, but an exclamation point. Dumile never disappears into DOOM, his metal face allowing a new solidity. “Livin' hell, can't explain it, inhale, confuse it more / Cop the .44, contemplate, meditate, dictate / I direct my direct fate, coming of late,” and also, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players”.