Hip-Hop Journeyman Kurious on His Decades-Long Bond With MF Doom and Never Calling It Quits
The 54-year-old talks about his new album ‘Majician,’ which was executive-produced by MF Doom, and why the music industry is failing young artists.
As aspiring New York rappers in the late 1980s, Jorge Antonio Alvarez and Daniel Dumile forged an instant bond. “As soon as we were introduced, we were hanging out later that same day, and it just never stopped,” says Alvarez, aka Kurious, of his decades-long friendship with the man the world would come to know as MF Doom.
They both released major label debuts in the early ’90s, when they were together all the time, fine-tuning their styles. Then, around the turn of the century, MF Doom’s career took off, and Kurious’ didn’t. But Doom never forgot about his brother. “There would be times when I was moving to a new apartment and needed to pay my security deposit and my rent, and me and my lady were like, What are we gonna do?” Kurious recalls. “And all of a sudden—boom—some bread would come from Doom.”
Their friendship’s final act comes with the new Kurious album, Majician, which was executive-produced by Doom. It’s one of the last records the masked villain worked on before his death in 2020 at age 49, following an adverse reaction to blood-pressure medication. For Kurious, making the project with Doom marked a full-circle moment: “It was just like working with him in the ’90s.”
