Known for wearing a metal mask and often actively avoiding the spotlight, British-American rapper MF Doom won a slew of admirers in the music and creative arts community during a truly unique career that spanned decades and included several breaks and reinventions. Born Daniel Dumile, the underground hip-hop artist collaborated with some of the music industry’s biggest names and attracted a following on the back of his clever and sometimes puzzling lyrics. His wife Jasmine took to social media yesterday to announce he passed on October 31st at the age of 49, and in the time since, tributes and memories from both famous faces and regular fans have begun flowing in.
One of the most fitting came from Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson. The Emmy Winner reflected on how unusual and out of place MF Doom was in 2020. He was a man who basically ran from the spotlight, despite his enormous talent, and he existed within a culture where so many do everything they can to run toward it. You can check out his tweet below…
It’s not a surprise MF Doom was an inspiration to writers like Cord Jefferson because he was such a wordsmith himself. In a truly wonderful interview with Spin, he once compared his writing style to playing Scrabble and trying to earn triple word scores. He went on to really breakdown the process, talking about phonetic pronunciation, the difficulty of working in references while staying on topic and how it’s all like verbal gymnastics. Reading it is a bit like watching Dennis Rodman explain rebounding in The Last Dance, and you come away blown away, impressed and absolutely positive you’re not operating on as high of a plane of existence.
Of course Cord Jefferson was far from the only notable name who paid tribute to MF Doom after news first broke. We got statements from a wide variety of celebrities from Biz Markie to Riz Ahmed to Kid Mero. MF Doom was clearly very well respected and liked within the hip-hop community, but since we’re a movie and TV site, we’ll drop in the response from Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn, who has been known over the years for his own unconventional approach…
The specifics around MF Doom’s passing haven’t been publicly announced, but I would highly recommend heading over to his social media accounts and reading the truly touching statement from his wife Jasmine. It can be found here. She talks about what he meant on a personal level, and it’s easy to see how strong their bond was. For the rest of us, we’ll always have his music and he’ll always have our appreciation for doing it well and doing it in his own way. I believe Tyler The Creator put it best…
