The hunt for clues concerning the lifetime of the masked rapper MF Doom had taken Adam Batty to some unusual locations, none extra so than a remote-control automobile store available in the market city of Otley, West Yorkshire.
Hearsay had it that Doom, who died in Leeds in 2020, had spent 1000’s within the store. Different sightings positioned him within the indie venue the Brudenell Social Membership.
Like most issues surrounding the rapper, fantasy, hearsay and lore envelop his story. However the central query of why certainly one of hip-hop’s most beloved figures spent the ultimate years of his life in Leeds drove Batty and the BBC 6 Music DJ Afrodeutsche to try to unravel the thriller, in MF Doom: Lengthy Island to Leeds.
Born in Hounslow in 1971, the rapper – whose actual title was Dumile Daniel Thompson – died aged 49 at St James’s hospital in 2020 attributable to an absence of oxygen to his mind after a response to a drug prescribed for blood stress.
The very fact he was even in Leeds after being barred from getting into the US in 2010 was information to many individuals, together with Batty, a journalist and Doom mega-fan. “In a means his story is tragedy,” says Batty. “He was failed by many establishments around the globe.”
Within the podcast Doom-heads, together with the comic Romesh Ranganathan opine concerning the brilliance of the rapper, who turned identified within the late Eighties alongside his brother DJ Subroc because the duo KMD. After his brother was killed in a automobile accident in 1993, Dumile Daniel Thompson re-emerged in 1999 with the album Operation: Doomsday beneath the moniker MF Doom.
His new mask-wearing picture and sound was influenced by superhero and comic-book tradition. His data, together with the 2004 collaboration with Madlib, Madvillainy, are thought-about among the greatest hip-hop data ever made. “No one else can inform a narrative the way in which he did,” says Afrodeutsche. “It was humorous, it was mental, it was one thing that you simply couldn’t hold nonetheless to as nicely.”
The legacy of Doom is contested. The rapper’s spouse and former A&R lately resolved a long-running authorized dispute revolving round his notebooks, whereas concrete particulars about his life within the UK stay skinny on the bottom. “Lots of people received’t communicate,” says Batty. “The household are very suspicious of who’s doing what and why they’re doing it.”
That lack of readability appears to have solely pushed curiosity within the rapper who was as soon as described as being “an obstinate and one-of-a-kind genius within the Mingus mould”.
Fellow musicians together with Yasiin Bey proceed to carry out his tracks, reissues of his work abound, and a brand new illustrated biography printed by Faber final yr added to a rising Doom bibliography. His lyrics had been additionally included within the first new Dr Doom comedian printed by Marvel in 20 years.
The rationale he was within the UK is obvious: regardless of arriving within the US as a one-year-old toddler, he by no means secured citizenship or residency within the nation. In 2010, after coming back from a tour, a border official denied him entry, partially primarily based on the very fact he had a felony report relationship again to the Nineteen Nineties.
He then discovered himself solely capable of journey to the UK, which meant he needed to depart behind his spouse and youngsters in Atlanta. In 2023, Leeds instructing hospitals NHS belief issued an apology for the substandard care he was given. “I used to be most shocked about how he was handled,” says Afrodeutsche. “That broke my coronary heart – he was a humble man.”
In the end, the pair don’t discover out why Doom moved to Leeds. Does Batty want he had solved the riddle of Doom’s time in Leeds? “I don’t suppose it’s an anticlimax as such – the very best ending for us is that the thriller lives on.”
