![]() ![]() ![]() There was a mean streak to his humor, and he made references to the death of his brother (“On Doomsday-ever since the womb, till I’m back where my brother went / That’s what my tomb will say”). His verbal agility was intact, and his lyrics had grown more sinister. Then, in 1999, Dumile released a solo record, “Operation: Doomsday,” under the moniker Metal Face Doom. “I was just doing regular stuff, just raising my son,” he told me. Disaffected music fans began to refer to the halcyon days of the eighties and nineties-when every rapper had a d.j., and label owners didn’t vamp in videos, confusing themselves with artists-as “the Golden Era.”ĭumile vanished from the national scene and began living as a civilian in New York City. Meanwhile, I kept the assembled works of Wu-Tang Clan on repeat and stewed, convinced that somewhere around 1998 hip-hop had run out of things to say. Dre were going multiplatinum, and by the end of the decade rap had gone from American cult music to American pop music. The group left the label, just as rap’s commercial appeal was becoming undeniable. Later that year, KMD’s label, Elektra, refused to release the group’s second album, “Black Bastards,” fearing a controversy over the cover art (a Sambo figure being sent to the gallows). In 1993, Dumile’s brother Dingilizwe, also a member of KMD and known as Subroc, was hit by a car and killed. It was slightly competitive, and everyone was blowing before us. Such-and-such over here is live.’ And we were all going hard. “It was ‘Such-and-such over there is live. “At the time, it was people coming out everywhere,” he told me recently. Dumile’s style is vibrant and freewheeling he skates over the beat, undisturbed by guitar and piano riffs, sliding words into the empty spaces between the snare and the kick drums. Hood.” It was uneven, notable mostly for the cult hit “Peach Fuzz” (“By the hairs of my chinny chin chin, gots many plus plenty / String by string, I think I counts like twenty”). Two years later, as a member of the group KMD, Dumile released the album “Mr. His babyish face seems to shrink behind a pair of oversized glasses. Dumile, who was eighteen years old when the video was made, wears a gas-station attendant’s uniform and a baseball cap cocked to the side. Botha, and the mainstream rapper MC Hammer. In the video, an assortment of hip-hop royalty gives “the gas face” (a maneuver that involves shaking your face in a slack-jawed manner, while moaning) to Adolf Hitler, the South African President P. Performing under the name Zevlove X, he made his début in 1989 with a verse on a song called “The Gas Face,” the second single by the group 3rd Bass. This was the heyday of sampling-most rap was too small for lawsuits-and a hard-ass beat could come from anything: the opening piano riff from Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle,” the horns from Inspector Gadget’s theme song, a hook from “Schoolhouse Rock.”ĭumile was typical of that motley generation. to the mysticism of Rakim and the goofy musings of the Afros. In those days, you could tune in to “Yo! MTV Raps” and see everything from the gangsta stylings of N.W.A. But my mastery of the arcane verses of X-Clan, my sense that the decoupling of EPMD was an irreparable tragedy, and my abiding hatred of Vanilla Ice ushered me into the scowling ranks of my generation. I came up awkward in West Baltimore-a tall black boy with no jumper, no gear, and no game. ![]() The music was not so much “CNN for black people,” as Chuck D would later dub it, as a lingua franca. I first heard the rapper Daniel Dumile (pronounced DOOM-ee-lay) when I was fourteen and hip-hop was just beginning to bloom. Doom explains his mask as an effort to “control the story.” Illustration by Jaime Hernandez ![]()
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