Red Emma’s

Before the talk, join us for a Doomsday Happy Hour, with DOOM-themed drink specials, and Cullen Enn playing a selection of DOOM classics and collaborations, sample sources and cuts from the extended famalam.

On December 31, 2020, the world was shocked to learn about the death of hip-hop legend MF DOOM. Born in London and raised in the suburban enclave of Long Beach, New York, Daniel Dumile Jr.’s love of cartoons and comic books would soon turn him into one of hip-hop’s most enigmatic, prolific, and influential figures.

Sweeping and definitive, The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast recounts the rise, fall, redemption, and untimely demise of MF DOOM. Broken down into five sections: The Man, The Myth, The Mask, The Music, and The Legend, journalist S. H. Fernando, or SKIZ, chronicles the life of Daniel Dumile Jr., beginning in the house he grew up in in Long Beach, NY, into the hip-hop group KMD, onto the stage of his first masked show, through the countless collabs, and across the many different cities Daniel called home. Centering the music, SKIZ deftly lays out the history of east-coast rap against DOOM’s life story and dissects the personas, projects, tracks, and lyrics that led to his immortality.

Including exclusive interviews with those who worked closely with DOOM and providing an unknown, intimate, behind the scenes look into DOOM’s life, The Chronicles of DOOM is the definitive biography of MF DOOM, a supervillain on stage and hero to those who paid attention.

S.H. Fernando Jr. ("Skiz") is the author of The New Beats: Exploring the Music, Culture & Attitudes of Hip-Hop (Anchor/Doubleday, 1994), one of the first books about hip-hop. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, and Vibe. He currently resides in Baltimore, MD.

Cullen Enn is a worker-owner at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, which he helped found in 2004. For three decades, he has been a performer, promoter, and patron of independent music - from metal and experimental noise to indie dance-pop and global house. He’s made sporadic (and mostly painful) forays into journalism, and is an amateur archivist and collector of subcultural and countercultural ephemera.