Credit: Possan

MF Doom was a master wordsmith, particularly adept when it came to wordplay and conjuring up vivid imagery within his songs. But his art was about more than his lyrics. Doom was a character, a larger-than-life figure, a supervillain, and his mask added to the mystique.  

The man born Dumile Daniel Thompson wasn’t always MF Doom. When he started his music career in the late ’80s, it was not as a masked supervillain but, rather, it was as an unmasked member of the hip-hop trio KMD. He performed back then under the name of Zev Love X, and he did so alongside his brother Dingilizwe Dumile, aka DJ Subroc. The group disbanded in 1993, after his brother tragically died aged 19.

This loss left Dumile grieving and drifting aimlessly through New York; his music career ground to a halt. But, over time, he began to return to the stage again, beginning to rap again in the mid-1990s. Only this time, he did it with a mask. Or, at least initially, with a stocking pulled over his face to conceal his identity.

He started developing his MF Doom alter-ego, and his mask eventually became more sophisticated. As he recounted in a 2009 interview with Nerdtorious, the mask that came to symbolise this whole Doom project actually originated with the movie Gladiator, which was released in 2000.

“You know the movie Gladiator?” Doom asked his interviewer. “Well, around that time, they started selling these ‘gladiator masks’ that were replicas from the movie. So what it was is that a friend of mine told me he saw this mask that would be perfect for the Doom character.”

His friend bought the mask, fashioned it into something that could be worn on stage, and handed it over. Thus, this infamous look was born, and the character that Dumile had been working on was given clear form. The weirdest hip-hop legend ever was born.

Doom also spoke in this Nerdtorious interview about the fact that, even when he had been rapping without the mask in his earlier days, he had still been playing a character. “Zev Love X was a character, too,” he said. “Most people think that’s me, but he wasn’t. They’ve all been characters.” He was referring there, of course, to his other personas, King Geedorah and Viktor Vaughn.

But thanks to the mask, Doom was the most recognisable of Dumile’s characters. “I decided the mask would just add to the mystique of the character, as well as make Doom stand out,” he explained of his decision to first don it on stage. “I thought it’d be an easy way for people to see and differentiate between characters, sorta like when an actor gains weight for a role. Throwing on the mask was just a good way to switch it up.”

In a lecture for the Red Bull Music Academy that Doom delivered a couple of years after this interview was recorded, he elaborated more on the deeper rationale behind his mask. He explained that it helped him to push back against industry trends in hip-hop that he had begun to notice around this period, where he was coming up. As he saw it, the hip-hop business was beginning to prioritise looks over substance. 

“The mask really represents rebelling against trying to sell the product as a human being,” he said. “It’s more of a sound. At the same time, it’s something different, and it fits with the theme of the rebel, the villain. He don’t care about the fame. That shit’s of no consequence. It’s more the message of what’s being said. It helps people focus more on what’s being said. But it’s still entertaining, it’s like the theatre.”