Peak DOOM

A new 2XLP deluxe edition of MF DOOM’s 2004 masterpiece MM..Food is out now via Rhymesayers in honor of the album’s 20th anniversary.

On New Years Eve 2020, news of Daniel Dumile’s death left the rap world dumbstruck. Unlike many of the MCs we mourn, he was not cut down in his youth. The mysterious cult hero also known as MF DOOM, among many other names, was 49 and had largely faded from the public eye, living in London since his deportation from the United States in 2010. (Despite having moved to New York State when he was six weeks old, he’d never gained citizenship.)

Maybe it was his relative absence from contemporary hip-hop discourse in the years leading up to his passing. Maybe it was his famous late-career reclusiveness, the stories of shows performed by paid DOOM impersonators, his multiple aliases, or the fact that, even in his prime, he always hid behind a metal mask. Or maybe it was that he’d actually died on October 31, two months before his family shared the news. Whatever the cause, his loss felt different from the deaths of other public figures — like that of an introverted old friend you took for granted, falling out of touch because you never made the time to reach out.

DOOM and Dumile were symbiotes, overlapping often but never fully merging; even in the moments when Dumile most fully embodied the character, he almost always rapped about him in the third person. Still, they were irrevocably intertwined, their relationship charted across a multiverse of internecine side projects, collabs, B-side compilations, and features stretching far beyond their essential studio output. But the least convoluted version of the MF DOOM story is a trilogy, its episodes delivered five years apart: 1999’s Operation: Doomsday is a genesis that holds a fragmented mirror to the origin story of Marvel supervillain Doctor Doom. 2009’s Born Like This finds the villain deeply changed, returning years after his apparent vanquishment. Sandwiched between them, MM..Food finds him at his apex; by the end of the album, he’s been elected master of the world.

MM..Food arrived on November 16, 2004, less than eight months after the release of Madvillainy, a mind meld with Madlib broadly regarded as DOOM’s best work. It was a quick turnaround, disregarding the two albums he dropped in the interim (VV:2 as Viktor Vaughn and Special Herbs + Spices Volume 1 with MF Grimm). Even in today’s profligate production era, no other MC or beatmaker could follow a release of Madvillainy’s magnitude with a record that rose to the same heights. But DOOM at the peak of his powers was an unstoppable force — not just your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper, but one of the greatest producers to walk the earth.

Dumile was one of history’s most inventive samplers and ingenious lyricists, and MM..Food is the most perfect integration of these skills. Sourcing his beats from a dollar-bin singles and beloved hits alike — all but two tracks on the album are self-produced — and flipping old cartoons, news broadcasts, and sketch comedies for interludes, he fully realizes the Marvel-adjacent multiverse he’s been building since Doomsday. Lyrically, he slickly renders sprawling story raps across rhyme schemes that are deeply layered but rarely inscrutable, finding invisible air pockets in his densely packed instrumentals. Even in a vacuum-sealed bag, there’s always room for a food pun.

On track one alone, there are enough killer punchlines to crush a comedian’s tight 20. “He wears a mask just to cover the raw flesh / Rather ugly brother with a flow that’s gorgeous,” he brags self-deprecatingly, riding a tricky clip from an early-’80s episode of Spider-Man. “Drop-dead joints hit the whips like bird shit / They need it like a hole in they head, or a third tit.”

“What up? / To all rappers: shut up / With your shuttin’ up and keep a shirt on, at least a button-up / Yuck,” he spits contemptuously later on in the track, aiming his laser cannon directly at his image-obsessed fellow MCs. Elsewhere on the album, he expands on this frustration with the two-faced music industry. He’s most incisive on “Rapp Snitch Knishes,” where he takes aim at fake criminals who’d never hold up in court, and on “Deep Fried Frenz,” a treatise on backstabbing that leaves the listener wondering who hurt him so badly. Late in that track, he rattles off the dictionary definition of “friends,” concluding that “that’s about the size of it” but clarifying that “Most of the time these attributes is one-sided / To bolster the crime, they’re apt to shoot you through your eyelid.”

On “Kon Karne,” we get a rare glimpse into Dumile’s own humble beginnings, including a period of homelessness. “Can’t take the street out the street person / Lookin’ for the perfect beat, coercion into heat burstin’,” he raps over the perfect beat (a masterful flip of Sade’s “Is It a Crime”). “They couldn’t spot him on the spot date / Got the only tape that come with a free hot-plate.” The final line of the song is dedicated to his brother Subroc, “the hip-hop Hendrix,” who died in a car crash in 1993. In these brief moments, DOOM’s mask slips, blurring the line between man and myth.