The hunt for clues about the life of the masked rapper MF Doom had taken Adam Batty to some strange places, none more so than a remote-control car shop in the market town of Otley, West Yorkshire.<\/p>\n
Rumour had it that Doom, who died in Leeds in 2020, had spent thousands in the shop. Other sightings placed him in the indie venue the Brudenell Social Club<\/a>.<\/p>\n Like most things surrounding the rapper, myth, rumour and lore envelop his story. But the central question of why one of hip-hop\u2019s most loved figures spent the final years of his life in Leeds drove Batty and the BBC 6 Music DJ Afrodeutsche<\/a> to attempt to solve the mystery, in MF Doom: Long Island to Leeds.<\/p>\n Born in Hounslow in 1971, the rapper \u2013 whose real name was Dumile Daniel Thompson \u2013 died aged 49 at St James\u2019s hospital in 2020 due to a lack of oxygen to his brain after a reaction to a drug prescribed for blood pressure.<\/p>\n Adam Batty and Afrodeutsche, the team behind the MF Doom podcast, at a mural celebrating the rapper. Photograph: Adam Batty\/MF DOOM: Long Island to Leeds<\/p>\n The fact he was even in Leeds after being barred from entering the US in 2010 was news to many people, including Batty, a journalist and Doom mega-fan. \u201cIn a way his story is tragedy,\u201d says Batty. \u201cHe was failed by many institutions around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n In the podcast Doom-heads, including the comedian Romesh Ranganathan opine about the brilliance of the rapper, who became known in the late 1980s alongside his brother DJ Subroc as the duo KMD. After his brother was killed in a car accident in 1993, Dumile Daniel Thompson re-emerged in 1999 with the album Operation: Doomsday under the moniker MF Doom.<\/p>\n His new mask-wearing image and sound was influenced by superhero and comic-book culture. His records, including the 2004 collaboration with Madlib, Madvillainy, are considered some of the best hip-hop records ever made. \u201cNobody else can tell a story the way he did,\u201d says Afrodeutsche. \u201cIt was funny, it was intellectual, it was something that you couldn\u2019t keep still to as well.\u201d<\/p>\n The legacy of Doom is contested. The rapper\u2019s wife and former A&R recently resolved a long-running legal dispute revolving around his notebooks<\/a>, while concrete details about his life in the UK remain thin on the ground. \u201cA lot of people won\u2019t speak,\u201d says Batty. \u201cThe family are very suspicious of who\u2019s doing what and why they\u2019re doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n That lack of clarity seems to have only driven interest in the rapper who was once described as being \u201can obstinate and one-of-a-kind genius in the Mingus mould<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n Fellow musicians including Yasiin Bey continue to perform his tracks, reissues of his work abound, and a new illustrated biography published by Faber last year added to a growing Doom bibliography<\/a>. His lyrics were also included in the first new Dr Doom comic published by Marvel in 20 years.<\/p>\n The reason he was in the UK is clear: despite arriving in the US as a one-year-old infant, he never secured citizenship or residency in the country. In 2010, after returning from a tour, a border official denied him entry, partially based on the fact he had a criminal record dating back to the 1990s.<\/p>\n