US rap rebel MF Doom’s final years revealed in West Yorkshire | hip hop

The search for clues about the life of masked rapper MF Doom takes Adam Patty to some strange places, and none more so than a remote control car shop in the market town of Otley, West Yorkshire.

Rumor has it that Dom, who died in Leeds in 2020, spent thousands at the store. Other scenes placed him at the independent venue Brudenell Social Club.

Like most things surrounding the rapper, legend, rumor and lore shroud his story. But the central question of why one of hip-hop’s most beloved figures spent the final years of his life in Leeds prompted Patty and BBC 6 music DJ Aphrodite to try to solve the mystery, in MF Doom: Long Island to Leeds.

Born in Hounslow in 1971, the rapper – whose real name was Dumile Daniel Thompson – died aged 49 in St James’s Hospital in 2020 from a lack of oxygen to his brain after a reaction to a prescribed blood pressure medication.

The fact that he was in Leeds after being banned from entering the US in 2010 was news to many people, including Patty, a journalist and Doom fan. “His story is a bit of a tragedy,” Patty says. “Many institutions around the world have failed him.”

On the podcast Doom-heads, including comedian Romesh Ranganathan, opined on the brilliance of the rapper, who in the late 1980s became known alongside his brother DJ Subroc as the duo KMD. After his brother was killed in a car accident in 1993, Dumile Daniel Thompson resurfaced in 1999 with the album Operation: Doomsday under the moniker MF Doom.

His new image and voice wearing the mask were influenced by superhero and comic book culture. His recordings, including his 2004 collaboration with Madlib and Madvillainy, are considered some of the best hip-hop records of all time. “No one else could tell a story the way he did,” Aphrodich says. “It was funny, it was intellectual, and it was something you couldn’t keep going too.”

The legacy of death is disputed. The rapper’s wife and former A&R company recently settled a long-running legal dispute revolving around his notebooks, while concrete details about his life in the UK remain scant on the ground. “A lot of people don’t speak up,” Patty says. “The family is very suspicious about who is doing what and why they are doing it.”

This lack of clarity appears to have sparked interest in the rapper who was once described as a “unique, stubborn genius in the Mingus mold.”

Fellow musicians, including Yacine Bey, continue to perform his compositions, reissues of his works abound, and a new illustrated biography published by Faber last year has added to Doom’s growing bibliography. His words were also included in the first new Dr Doom comic published by Marvel in 20 years.

His reason for being in the UK is clear: despite arriving in the US as a one-year-old infant, he has never obtained citizenship or residency in the country. In 2010, after returning from a tour, a border official denied him entry, partly due to the fact that he had a criminal record dating back to the 1990s.

He then found himself only able to travel to the UK, which meant he had to leave his wife and children in Atlanta. In 2023, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust issued an apology for the substandard care he received. “I was very shocked about the way he was treated,” Aphrodich says. “He broke my heart – he was such a humble man.”

In the end, the pair don’t know why Doom moved to Leeds. Does Patty hope to solve the mystery of Dom’s time at Leeds? “I don’t think it’s a negative ending per se – the best ending for us is for the mystery to continue.”