I was 13 or 14 the first time I picked up an MF DOOM record. It was MM… FOOD, an album I regularly revisit to this day. It was a total departure from the rap I'd known until that point: musically rich, sonically dense, and delivered with an incomparable wit. It sparked a fascination I've never been able to satiate—I had to know, who was the man behind the mask?

If you've listened to MM… FOOD, you know that not only does it feature some of his most iconic and beloved tracks, including "Rap Snitches Knishes," "One Beer," and "Hoe Cakes," but almost all of DOOM's most notable skills are on display. The clever and often comical bars, his singularly memorable beats, the obscure but strangely pointed samples, and the epic collaborations we know and love are all over this one. It's still the first project I point people toward when they ask me where to start with his discography.

But MM… FOOD is deceptive. Beneath the eye-catching cover art and food-themed track names, there's a dark overarching theme, one that's tragically tethered to DOOM's own life—consumption. Behind the mask was a man battling grief beyond comprehension, who remained consumed by his art in times of great personal difficulty, and who faced horrific prejudices right up until the day of his death. MM... FOOD is sonically overwhelming—every line is loaded with meaning and subtext. DOOM presents us with a smorgasbord: he dares us to fully immerse ourselves in his music, to become consumed by it—an experience that mirrors how he was consumed by the creation of his art. "Beef Rap", the very first track of MM… FOOD, exemplifies this:

"Beef rap, could lead to getting teeth capped

Or even a wreath for mom dukes on some grief crap

I suggest you change your diet

It can lead to high blood pressure if you fry it

Or even a stroke, heart attack, heart disease

It ain't no starting back once arteries start to squeeze

Take the easy way out phony, until then

They know they wouldn't be talking that bologna in the bullpen"

By 2004, the phenomenon of rap beef —a public feud between hip-hop artists— had cemented itself firmly into the culture and history of hip-hop. Some of the most important beefs in the rap canon, notably that of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac, had come and gone, and others, like the decades-long conflict between 50 Cent and Ja Rule were very much in process. In this verse alone, DOOM comments on the phenomenon and its consequences but still invokes the classic rap motif of letting anyone who may want to instigate beef with him know what exactly they're getting themselves into.

Further, the metaphor of heart disease adds another layer for our interpreting pleasure: the disproportionate impact of heart disease on the Black community. Not to mention, this is all gracefully managed while remaining cohesive with the overarching themes and imagery of the album.

*Album cover of "MM... FOOD”, record company: Rhymesayers Entertainment*

Dumile's characters are his works of art just as much as his music is— and much like all art, they are intricately shaped by the life of their creator. Despite moments where DOOM's characters clearly depart from Dumile's life story, they are still intimately linked to his personhood in a way that sets him apart from all other rapper alter egos. In 1988, Daniel Dumile came on the scene as his first-ever character, Zev Love X, one-third of the group KMD, along with his younger brother Dingilizwe Dumile AKA DJ Subroc.

In 1993, just before they were set to release their second album, Black Bastards, Dingilizwe was suddenly killed when a car struck him as he crossed a Long Island expressway. After his brother's death, Dumile went on to finish the album alone. At his brother's wake, he set up a boom box next to the casket and played "pretty much the whole Black Bastards album," according to KMD's co-manager, Pete Nice. This moment of Dumile's life is the undeniable beginning of his descent into musical villainy—a combination of dreadful depression, complete devotion to his artistic pursuits, and one of many injustices throughout his life: the rejection of the album he'd put so much of himself into by his label, Elektra.

After Black Bastards, the parallels between Dumile's life and the lore of Marvel's Dr. Doom are striking. Dr. Doom became disfigured after an accident involving a machine he built to attempt to communicate with the dead; Dumile considered himself "deformed" by the music industry. Both isolated themselves for many years and returned to the world not only masked but changed. Dumile began to perform under the MF DOOM moniker, obscuring his face with tights before adopting his iconic mask. It must be noted, however, that Daniel Dumile spent his entire career letting us know he was not MF DOOM:

"I just write as this evil super-villain rapper named DOOM. Zev didn't rock a mask and I have other characters that don't wear masks too — and they all have their own thing that makes them stand out. My albums are all characters and together they're part of this lineage of stories and albums written by me. I'm a writer. It just depends on the type of shit I wanna continue to come forth with."

As his career progressed, he developed a broader canon of characters, including King Geedorah and Viktor Vaughn. Key themes that first began to emerge in his KMD days remained consistent throughout his entire discography, as well as his presentation: he was always private, always speaking to us from the darkness, always both consuming and consumed.

Dumile's cast of characters served not only as a canvas for his artistic expression but also as a tool for the discussion of real life issues. Alcoholism is a key example: In track 4 of Bastards "Sweet Premium Wine", Dumile introduces himself as the Villain we know perhaps for the first time. Alcoholism is discussed repeatedly throughout his body of work, including later on Bastards' track 7 "Contact Blitz" where he describes himself as "the O.E. alcoholic". In a 1999 interview with LifeSucksDie magazine, DOOM was asked about the references to alcohol in his music and if he may actually have a drinking problem. He explained that "it goes back to the character again, Doom. He's the grimy alcohol nigga that drink every day."

*Album cover of "Madvillainy", record company: Stones Throw Records*

As DOOM's discography expanded, we learned more and more about the characters that served as mouthpieces for his art and attempted to pin them somewhere in the grey space between complete fiction and Dumile's own reality. He only let us into his real life a few times, most notably regarding more injustices and tragedies. In 2010, he was denied re-entry into the United States due to his lack of American citizenship, one dramatic episode in a long history of immigration disputes throughout his life. In 2017, his son Malachi died, and the family chose to maintain their privacy about the details. While we're lucky to have gotten as rich of a discography from Dumile as we did, considering the unfortunate brevity of his life, it's notable that he released considerably less music in the last decade of his life than he did in the 2000s.

Within this discrepancy between the mystery of the artist and the wealth of the lore behind the alter ego is the intrigue that defines DOOM in the eyes of many. The quest for understanding, the calling out through music from a place darkened not only by pain but by self-inflicted obscurity and externally enforced solitude. The attempt to reconcile the man and the myth is one that has broad applications for Black people. So naturally, when we received word of his death two months after he'd died, the questions were overwhelming.

It was frequently suggested, with various degrees of seriousness, that he wasn't dead at all; it was part of the act. It can't be forgotten that this was a man with a documented history of sending body doubles to perform in his place at concerts. Now that both the man and the art are in the past tense, making sense of them together is infinitely more complicated. The scope of his work made him a giant, and his influence was similarly massive: he was commonly dubbed "Your Favorite Rapper's Favorite Rapper." Having watched a man with such incomparable ability continue to make not just music—but great music—after a lifelong series of crushing traumas, I allowed myself the fantasy that he was invulnerable. When his wife, Jasmine Dumile, began her legal inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death earlier this year, that fantasy was shattered. This information that he died as many Black people do, neglected, in a manner that may have been preventable is the worst possible reminder of what he fought so hard to tell us while he was still here—under the mask, he was just a man.

As we reflect on MF DOOM's death three years later, with information that we never thought we'd have, we have more than ever to become consumed by as listeners. But despite the profoundly upsetting points throughout the story of Daniel Dumile's life, he maintained the separation between his personal self and his characters in an entirely unique way. He never compromised his artistic integrity. He played with the line between truth and story while still creating a body of work that's firm in its positions on racial justice and its expressions of his personhood.

As Black people, we are perpetually navigating the space between ourselves and a narrative that is pushed upon us: we often find ourselves playing characters in different situations that have various degrees of relation to our most authentic selves. To put it plainly, many of us often find ourselves villainized. Daniel Dumile took the conventions of rap music, one of the most influential genres of Black art, and flipped them on their head to suit his ends and tell the stories he wanted to tell. He was an artist who gave his all to his art without confusing his artistic alter ego with his real self. We may never understand the Villain—but that's the nature of villainy: it pushes against common thought from some dubious place beyond our understanding.

Why I Haven’t Stopped Thinking About MF DOOM, And You Shouldn’t Either