The Mask of Genius – MF DOOM: A Literary Review

Doom is still to receive the highbrow literary attention of his predecessors.

mfdoom

Though he gained a cult following in his lifetime, MF DOOM is still yet to receive the highbrow critical attention that his literary predecessors received, and that his extraordinary talents deserve.

New Year’s eve can be a depressing night. Given the events of 2020, last New Years was particularly gloomy. But the gloom of that milestone midnight chime was unexpectedly worsened by the shocking news that legendary rapper, MF Doom, had died. He actually passed away back in October but much like the rest of Daniel Dumile’s private life, it was kept secret. A manufactured and lingering mystery will always blur the biography of hip hop’s answer to Pablo Piccasso. Though his true identity is googleable, anonymity was his modus operandi. 

How can a villain expect to succeed, if they aren’t stealthily cloaked in secrecy? And he was a villain, but a villain more like us than most of the superheroes you see endlessly rocketing across our screens.

Anonymity was his modus operandi

Original, influential, unassuming and profound, Doom revolutionized rap for the better and reminded his listeners how vast the alternatives to the rhyming caprices of materialist morons really are. He was a consummate artist who adeptly explored the literary possibilities of his musical genre, an underground figure who furtively crafted a cultural reputation unlike any other.

By endearing his alter-egos and lesser aliases to a mystified audience, this masked maestro inspired hip hop lyricists and performers to such an extent that today he is near-universally regarded as ‘the rapper’s rapper’.

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If Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are due literary acclaim for their lyrical works, MF Doom undeniably deserves equal praise for his glorious writing. In an over-the-phone interview, Dumile admitted that he saw himself more as a writer than a rapper, more as an author of novels or comic books than as a composer of pop songs and chart-toppers.

The sophisticated devices and conceits Dumile used in the creation of Doom and his other personas certainly warrants serious critical appraisal. The extraordinary accomplishments of Dumile’s auspicious enterprise are unlikely to be trumped by his dedicated apostles and imitators anytime soon.

His sole interest was the production of significant content, not the lucrative promotion of a glorified profile.

The advertisement of lyrical prowess is the primary objective of rap, but a fixation on themes like wealth-accumulation and self-aggrandisement often undermines hip hop’s central entertainment. Dumile’s solution was to dispose of celebrity by inculcating a new kind of notoriety into the idea of anonymity. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the protagonist admires a painting hanging in his host’s sitting room. When he asks who the painter is, his host retorts ‘what does it matter? It was not created by some wonderful and well-advertised genius. It is an anonymous product. Anonymous and communal!’

The intention of Doom’s anonymity was to provide a communal artistic exponent for those unimpressed by prevailing styles and tastes. Ascribing Doom’s success to Dumile is not the point. He doesn’t want you to be like him. He wore the mask to make the point that he could be any of us and that any of us could be him. His sole interest was the production of significant content, not the lucrative promotion of a glorified profile.

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain

By breeding a troop of villainous guises who compellingly described their independent circumstances, incentives and aspirations, Dumile introduced audiences to a myriad of imagined scenarios, often simple situations where his characters praise food or TV shows, complain about domestic strife and social faux pas’s.

He expressed the everyday experiences of his dramatic inventions in juxtaposition to their villainous ambitions for world domination. The effect is comic, charming and unique. How many fictional supervillains have you heard lament their marital dynamic or how fat they’ve gotten in old age? Compared to the swanky, self-celebratory songs of more marketable rappers, Doom truly rhymed about the everyday, yet he did so through a prism of his own design, a prism wrought with pop cultural references and allusions to vintage kitsch.

How many fictional supervillains have you heard lament their marital dynamic or how fat they’ve gotten in old age?

The Portugese Modernist poet, Fernand Pessoa, formally developed the concept of ‘heteronyms’. ‘Heteronyms’ are when a writer uses false identities to articulate distinct points of view. Despite the solidifying of ‘heteronyms’ by Pessoa, the deployment of dramatic personae has been used effectively by poets and playwrights for centuries.

TS Eliot’s epics, The LoveSong of J Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland attest to the modern use of facade-identities and in fact, the original title of Eliot’s The Wasteland, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, as well as sounding like a Doom lyric, succinctly explains the purposes of Dumile’s foray as the masked villain.

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

After the death of his brother and his withdrawal from the hip hop scene in the late 90s, Dumile used the Marvel antagonist Dr Doom as inspiration for his return to music. Like Tom Stoppard thinking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have more to say than Shakespeare permitted or how Robert Graves grew his I,Claudius out of Suetonious’s incomplete history of the Roman emperor, Dumile believed another side to the masked madman had yet to be surveyed. He stole the Doctor’s metallic visage, but altered the prefix from Doctor to MF (Metal Face) to highlight this transgressor’s anonymity.

Dumile’s rapping style as Doom was uncompromising. His low, gruff and gravelly voice vaulted through exciting sequences of word play, obscure cultural citations and humorous self-effacements. Because he operated in a similar way creatively to a sketch writer, Dumile’s songs are perceptive expressions of imagined scenarios.

He stole the Doctor’s metallic visage, but altered the prefix from Doctor to MF

Being imagined and esoterically furnished, hearing Doom for the first time can be disconcerting and even confusing. Unlike his more commercially viable kin, his rap panders to no one.

It would take a heavy tome to adequately assess the intricate ingenuities of Daniel Dumile’s career. Suffice it to say, artists of a certain order who master so much of their medium, deserve applause from every critical corner available to them.

Though he gained a cult following in his lifetime, Doom is still yet to receive the highbrow critical attention that his extraordinary talents and accomplishments deserve.


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