DOOM was forced to spend his final years in the U.K., only adding to his mystique. In 2010, however, Dumile’s life was uprooted when he was denied reentry into the United States following an international tour he had never become a naturalized citizen. An anti-hero of underground hip-hop, he stumbled into crossover success when both his 2004 joint album Madvillainy with Oxnard producer Madlib and songs for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim caught the attention of a new class of rap and cartoon fandoms at a time when those worlds were further intersecting online.

He went on to release six solo studio albums, six collaborative albums, and a slew of instrumentals, live albums, compilations, singles, and music videos.

From that point on, Dumile was rarely ever photographed without some version of his mask, replicas of the ones worn in the 2000 film Gladiator. When Dumile finally crept back into hip-hop in the late ’90s, Zev Love X was gone and replaced with a masked supervillain persona called MF DOOM, inspired by Marvel antagonist Doctor Doom. Elektra Records dropped KMD and shelved the group’s next album, Black Bastards Zev Love X retreated from music. Their collaboration was upended by tragedy: In 1993, Subroc was struck by a car on a local expressway and pronounced dead hours later. He moved to the United States as a child and began his journey in music on Long Island during the late ’80s under the name Zev Love X, starting a hip-hop trio called KMD that also featured his younger brother, Dingilizwe Dumile, as DJ Subroc. Her message did not disclose a cause of death or explanation for the belated news but instead expressed personal love and gratitude for both DOOM and their late son, King Malachi Ezekiel Dumile, who died in 2017 at 14 years old.ĭaniel Dumile was born in London in 1971. His widow broke the news on her husband’s Instagram, revealing that the 49-year-old had actually passed two months before, on Halloween. When Daniel Dumile’s wife, Jasmine, announced to the world on December 31, 2020, that her husband, the enigmatic, famously masked rapper MF DOOM, had died, shock cut equally through his fans and peers.

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