At 20, MF DOOM’s ‘MM..FOOD’ is his de facto memoir : NPR

Rapper and producer MF DOOM circa 2004, the yr he launched each the game-changing collab Madvillainy and the sleeper basic MM..FOOD.

Courtesy of Rhymesayers Leisure

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Courtesy of Rhymesayers Leisure

2004 was the tipping level for the parable of MF DOOM. The comically sinister rapper, whose 1999 solo debut Operation: Doomsday kicked off a prolific rise from label castoff to if-you-know-you-know sensation, sealed his indie-rap god standing that yr with 4 albums throughout 4 unbiased labels and a handful of personas, capped by the vaunted Madlib collaboration Madvillainy on Stones Throw Data. Few hip-hop LPs are so preceded by their reputations, two solitary geniuses from separate coasts linking for a one-off alliance by means of unimaginable kismet: DOOM had entered a self-imposed exile after the tragic demise of his Elektra group, KMD, in 1994, vanished once more for years after the label that launched Operation: Doomsday went beneath in 2001, and was situated solely by probability, incommunicado in Kennesaw, Ga., by means of a pal of a pal of Stones Throw’s basic supervisor. Whether or not by coincidence or destiny, the invention caused one of many nice unbiased triumphs of the twenty first century, a file of near-perfect rapper-producer synergy that set a brand new excessive water mark for off-kilter, conceptual various hip-hop, equal elements zany and grounded, classicist and experimental. “No different rap album exists in the identical constellation as Madvillainy,” Jeff Weiss wrote in 2014.

Born within the shadow of this “phantasmagoria of stream,” because the critic Robert Christgau put it, is the solo file MF DOOM launched months later: MM..FOOD, the rapper’s second correct album beneath the DOOM moniker, which carries a wacky conceit (even for a man who’d rapped a complete album as a Godzilla kaiju), constructing its tracklist completely round meal puns. The distinction between the 2 albums is obvious earlier than you even hit play: Madvillainy‘s cowl photograph is gritty, washed out and achromatic, depicting its star as dead-eyed behind his dingy, impenetrable Physician Doom masks, whereas MM..FOOD renders him in cartoon mischief, rapacious on the breakfast desk along with his gaze cocked naughtily over his shoulder. If Madvilliany is the important thing to DOOM’s aura because the supervillain behind the veil, as beloved by his cult as he’s misunderstood by the plenty, MM..FOOD is the flip aspect, making plain the core tenets of his precise selfhood: voracious reader of The Dictionary of Clichés and Wicked and Insulting English, connoisseur of each a well-executed skit and completely queued heel flip, lover of an insane rhyme and an excellent bit.

DOOM was a thriller till the very finish. He spent practically a decade in seclusion earlier than his dying in 2020 (on Halloween), which wasn’t revealed to the general public till months later. Since then, the milestone anniversaries of his work have introduced alternatives to wrestle with the character as soon as extra, the newest of which is a brand new deluxe version of MM..FOOD for the album’s twentieth. Aside from the same old extras — up to date cowl artwork; remixes from Madlib, Jake One and Ant from Environment — the reissue contains some interview snippets, offering bits of perception on the recluse’s course of. In a single referred to as “The Making of MM..FOOD,” the rapper is requested a few earlier declare that this album was a turning level, whereby he’d drop the “MF” from his stage identify and make a full transition into DOOM as a stand-alone persona. “I used to be actually which means within the sense of being personalised: DOOM, the particular person, in the event you had been to ever get to know this cat,” he says. “This FOOD album is innermost ideas and private opinions … it will get into extra of the character.” He then provides, “the FOOD album is an actual, actual private album, too,” earlier than trailing off. As typically occurred, the road between the character and the rapper blurred. Perhaps he was simply messing with the poor interviewer, however looking back it is clear that manifestation was on his thoughts — which makes it simpler, now, to see this LP as a DOOM manifesto. We regularly consider autobiography as restricted to what’s mentioned explicitly, what we’re advised straight, diaristically and thru confession, these innermost ideas and private opinions chosen for public disclosure. However MM..FOOD presents a extra refined case: Typically you inform individuals who you’re by means of what you want and the way you progress. In that sense, the album is a trove of knowledge, a charming sound financial institution clueing us into the mania of the DOOM psyche.

It hasn’t all the time been handled this manner. Initially, many noticed MM..FOOD as a trivial entry within the DOOM canon — the impetuous grasp fiddling round in his pocket book, crates and VHS assortment, his whims his solely muse. “Right here Doom needs nothing greater than to attain some Intelligent Factors with quirky one-liners over tight beats,” Nick Sylvester wrote in his Pitchfork evaluation. The liberal deployment of skits, specifically, was a degree of competition: The album cuts collectively segments of dialogue sourced from superhero cartoons and interviews with USDA meals scientists into plot and backstory, which many discovered grating. “The successive skits merely serve to wreck any sense of cohesion within the album,” Nin Chan wrote for Rap Critiques in 2004, in a principally optimistic evaluation that nonetheless reads as backhanded in regards to the file’s indulgences. “What makes this a minor work in contrast with, say, the identical yr’s Madvillainy is a glut of cartoon-sampling skits that may tax all however the very younger and the very stoned,” Dorian Lynskey added in The Guardian in 2007. And but, whereas its sister launch will all the time have the sting, MM..FOOD‘s inventory has been climbing steadily over the previous 20 years, the power of its self-contained bizarro Marvel universe proving too wealthy and animated to disregard.

DOOM knew higher than nearly anybody that “fact” might be a jail for a terrific storyteller. Rap has typically prioritized not simply the first-person narrative, however the efficiency of self as a present of authenticity. Although an efficient writing mode, it will probably curtail one’s inventive license: “I believe loads of instances, particularly in hip-hop, artists get pigeonholed into being, ‘You are the man.’ It is type of limiting in a manner. I take a look at it like I am the author,” DOOM mentioned in a Purple Bull Music Academy lecture in 2011. Being a author is an id in itself, and in his embodiment of the “rapper’s rapper,” he expressed a dedication to craft that exposed a lot of who he was, his sharp, droll, unconventional verses betraying these qualities in a persona he longed to maintain hidden. In that sense, MM..FOOD is the album on which the lore most plainly aligns with the ambition of the person behind it. A lot of the character work displayed throughout his defining run is about experimenting, however this file turns comedian e-book incongruity into autofiction — and vice versa.

DOOM’s bars are his life story. They’re the factor to which he devoted himself absolutely, exhibited not simply in his originality or talent however in how a lot he rapped about rap, policing its requirements and christening himself its bellwether, if not its face (faces, he argued, had been pointless). “Sufficient about me, it is in regards to the beats / Not in regards to the streets and who meals he about to eat,” he raps on “Beef Rapp.” “It is a miracle how he get so lyrical / And proceed to maneuver the gang like a previous negro non secular.” There are, after all, literal clues to who DOOM was past the illusions of his work, which distorted actual features of his id and experiences — references to Islam, a tribute to his late brother and groupmate DJ Subroc, intimations of latent alcoholism — however much more outstanding and fixed are hints that being a performer is foundational to his individuality. The elusiveness he practiced was in service of peace of thoughts, not legend-building: “Common emcees is sort of a TV blooper / MF DOOM, he is like D.B. Cooper”; “Crooked eye mode, nerd, geek with a chilly coronary heart / In all probability nonetheless be talking in rhymes as an previous fart”; “As soon as they get to know us folks dig us / Leaders within the struggle for equal rights for n****s.” He by no means got here at something straight on, however that, too, felt like a show of his true nature.

In S.H. (Skiz) Fernando Jr.’s just lately launched DOOM biography, The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast, the KMD affiliate Simone, or Mr. Hood (who seems within the foreground on the duvet of the group’s debut album of the identical identify), talks in regards to the significance of slang to the identities in burgeoning New York Metropolis crews and the rising hip-hop neighborhood of the ’80s and ’90s. “Vocabulary was a precedence, ‘trigger vocabulary creates our uniqueness,” he says. It is a parallel that kind of defines DOOM: a grasp of language so idiosyncratic that it involves signify not only a persona however a worldview. The sense {that a} method of talking could make somebody who they’re, even (or maybe particularly) when playacting, is throughout MM..FOOD, not simply within the lyrics themselves however within the hidden tales connecting his numerous word-association video games. Observe his prepare of thought from knishes, a humorous phrase for a Jewish staple snack in his native Lengthy Island, to snitches, a factor simply as prevalent in New York Metropolis circles. “Phrases that rhyme with knish … any facet of that, the way it sounds, the way it can match with one thing in society. So ‘rap snitch’ and ‘knishes’ kinda go collectively,” he advised XXL in 2013. “So it was simple to discover a title. The problem was arising with ok references to make a music.” In each the meticulous dot-connecting and the curatorial problem, we discover the essence of DOOM: a New Yorker certain by multiculturalism and road code, and a puzzle grasp making an attempt to riff on as many absurdities as he can discover.

However the MM..FOOD enchantment is about extra than simply phrases; it is about collages. His phrases and flows can register as such on their very own, cluttered jumbles strung collectively like deranged Mad Libs that take the mind a beat to untangle. But the raps merely slot into the bigger hodgepodge that’s his songcraft, a stream of what can solely be described as chaos montages. Produced, with solely a handful of exceptions, by DOOM himself, MM..FOOD follows its personal logic of creativeness. It is nonlinear, freewheeling, referential in a loop that seems like a Möbius strip. It repurposes previous beats made beneath his producer moniker Steel Fingers, flips Frank Zappa and mines The Electrical Firm, PlayStation sound results, Late Evening with David Letterman, Sade, a Spider-Man cartoon, Fats Albert’s Halloween Particular, Starship Orchestra, Sesame Road and Blaxploitation movies for kooky, dialogue-heavy songs that play as each a sequel to his masked villain origin story and a pseudo-concept album bent into an inside joke. At its middle are the narrative skits, which he noticed as an extension of his writing, simply as bonkers and arcane. “Have the file inform the story, you recognize what I am saying?” he mentioned at RBMA. “Have little intervals and cutscenes. Every part flows higher after I received a number of characters to painting the story.”

It was all the time tough to inform how a lot of what DOOM mentioned about himself was “true,” and even how a lot of it he meant. Obfuscation was a part of the efficiency; the rapper had such a cagey, although intentional, relationship with actuality and fiction. Finally, he started to really feel like a puzzle that wanted fixing, and with secrets and techniques and unknowns comes intrigue. There isn’t any doubt that protecting his face, mockingly, helped convey higher consideration, which in flip led to higher scrutiny — DOOM probably might relate to one other comedian villain who famous that nobody cared who he was till he placed on a masks — however there was by no means a necessity for autobiography as a way to parsing the DOOM albums, and being evasive just isn’t the identical as being unknowable. To that finish, MM..FOOD could be the best illustration of the person and artist standing on the middle of the fog, its music personalised to such an extent that it feels illuminating. Within the particulars of its craft, we be taught excess of any account of his private life might ever inform us: that he was a goofball and a stickler; a first-rate smack-talker and a hip-hop occultist; anti-establishment and pro-open bar; averse to short-sighted notions of excellent style; amused by an open query; obsessive about villainy. On this “private album,” DOOM is all proper there, in plain sight.