The hip-hop legend who lived out his final years in West Yorkshire
On the surface of things, West Yorkshire doesn’t exactly scream “hip-hop.” Yet it was here, up in the north of England, that one of hip-hop’s most legendary, enigmatic figures lived out his final days. MF Doom, the masked supervillain, died in Leeds in 2020.
Doom had been living in Leeds for some time before he passed away, which was quite a shock for lots of people to discover. Why, exactly, had an East Coast legend from the streets of Long Beach decided to move to the north of England, of all places?
The answer has proven somewhat difficult to establish. On the one hand, Doom certainly had links to England. He was born there in 1971, but, even then, his connection to the country was somewhat tenuous. He once claimed that the only reason his mother had given birth to him there was that she happened to be visiting a friend in the country when she went into labour.
More to the point, the fact that Doom was born in England doesn’t exactly explain why he was in Leeds specifically. His birthplace was a town called Hounslow, which is in West London. Leeds and London are on opposite sides of the country, so Doom’s connection to Leeds isn’t at all obvious.
Not long after his birth, Doom’s parents took him to Long Beach, New York, which is where he grew up. The problem was that they never secured the correct visa for him, so, when he was an adult, that came back to haunt him. After going on an international tour, he was denied reentry to the United States in 2010.
With few other options available to him, Doom ended up settling in the UK. But that still doesn’t explain why it was Leeds that he decided to live. There are plenty of cities in the UK to choose from, but something clearly drew him up north.
One of Doom’s fans, a journalist called Adam Batty, has been preoccupied by the question of why the rapper chose to live in Leeds. He and the English DJ Afrodeutsche sought to find out the answer to that following Doom’s death, but their quest hasn’t proven to be remotely simple.
“A lot of people won’t speak,” Batty remarked of his investigation, as reported by The Guardian. “The family are very suspicious of who’s doing what and why they’re doing it.”
Batty, so far, has failed to get to the bottom of it. But, while that might be frustrating, it does seem somewhat fitting for an artist shrouded by as much mystery as MF Doom was. “I don’t think it is an anticlimax as such,” Batty said of his failure to figure things out. “The best ending for us is that the mystery lives on.”