MM..FOOD (20th Anniversary Edition)

Every couple of years I return to my favorite video on YouTube: a seven-minute clip of the rapper then known as Mos Def holding court in a studio, eliciting gasps and laughter from an unseen audience by reciting MF DOOM lyrics. This is all a capella; sometimes he adopts DOOM’s meter to emphasize its fine-watch precision, but more often, Mos breaks the spell and draws out the ends of lines as if he’s in utter disbelief: “Read the signs: ‘No Feeding the Baboons’???” he says, incredulously. “Seeing as how they got ya back bleeding from the stab wounds???”

Toward the end of the video, Mos raps part of Madvillainy’s “Meat Grinder.” That full-length collaboration with Madlib—one of the most anticipated, aggressively bootlegged, and ultimately acclaimed underground rap records of its time—vaulted DOOM to a new level of notoriety even as it threatened to overshadow everything that would follow. But for the most part, the verses that captivate Mos are from MM..FOOD, the 2004 album that punctuated one of the great madcap runs in rap history. At another point, someone from offscreen suggests that rapping alongside DOOM would be a challenge. The famously virtuosic MC shakes his head. “It would be fun,” Mos says. “He rhymes as weird as I feel.”

What is most striking about MM..FOOD—which Rhymesayers has reissued in a 20th-anniversary edition that includes a handful of remixes and brief clips from a previously unheard interview—is the way DOOM blends his absurd character sketches with real autobiography, his outre zaniness with something grimily naturalistic. Though nearly rendered a footnote at the time by Madvillainy, FOOD captures DOOM at his funniest and most mercenary. For a record that seems determined, at every turn, to lower the stakes—the culinary motif, the bizarre structure that leaves the middle of the tracklist completely bereft of vocals—FOOD stands alongside 1999’s titanic Operation: Doomsday as the most fully realized creation of rap’s greatest eccentric.

That mercenary bent is clear both in and outside of the text. At a glance, a few of the specs would suggest a tossed-off side project or the begrudging fulfillment of contractual obligation: the aforementioned suite of instrumentals, the apparent crowbarring into a release schedule. When he raps that he “plots shows like robberies/In and out, one, two, three—no bodies, please,’’ the second bar sounds an awful lot like “nobody’s pleased,” which would be a fitting reaction to DOOM’s well-documented practice of sending doppelgangers to lip sync and collect fees from club owners. That this couplet is rapped on a song cut from Madvillainy would only seem to confirm FOOD as a minor work.

But “One Beer” is warm, bleary, and entirely engrossing; it also underlines—unsurprisingly given its title—the way DOOM’s style refracts through different illicit substances. In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Open Mike Eagle characterized his favorite rapper’s early style in a particularly incisive way. In discussing how DOOM became increasingly regimented over the course of his career—the skittering flows from Doomsday, which frequently spilled over the ends of measures, being corralled, by the time of Madvillainy and MM..FOOD, and stuffed deep into the pockets of beats—Eagle said: “I feel like the MF DOOM on Doomsday is like, drunk, trying to survive [...] he’s recording like he’s not going to live much longer. There’s an embrace of the raw that’s both aesthetic and alcoholic—specifically alcoholic.”

While it can be difficult to know what, in Daniel Dumile’s life, was and was not performance, profiles of DOOM from the 2000s make the heavy drinking seem, indeed, like a plague on his real life. On “One Beer,” Madlib’s beat flits between mischief and soft tragedy, and DOOM’s first line on the song (“There’s only one beer left…”) sounds oddly, ominously despairing. Madvillain, while also evincing an “embrace of the raw,” is unmistakably a record about and informed by weed. This is grimmer, more solitary; for all the cartoon supervillain posturing, FOOD more frequently feels like a missive from someone hoping to pull us down into the muck with him. Even when the past is recalled fondly, liquor looms: later on the LP, DOOM will reminisce about the days he drank Hennessy straight because he couldn’t afford sodas to chase it.

But by FOOD, that alcoholic sloppiness had mostly been scrubbed from DOOM’s technique. This is starkest on the opening song, “Beef Rapp,” which is quoted extensively by Mos Def in that video. But where Mos’ eyes bug out as he recalls lines—“He wears a mask just to cover the raw flesh/A rather ugly brother with flows that’s gorgeous”— DOOM locks into a low, unwavering growl. (After an early version of Madvillain leaked online, in addition to adding new songs, DOOM re-recorded his vocals for the entire project, abandoning his often buoyant delivery to rappel down several octaves, into a deep baritone; he opens FOOD with an even flatter affect.) While the album is dotted with pops of color and winking sample flips, “Beef Rapp” seems purposefully drab, like both the craft and content are meant to be grayed out.

The intricacy that tone obscures is, of course, staggering. On the Count Bass D-featuring and -produced “Potholderz” (one of only two songs, along with “One Beer,” that DOOM didn’t handle himself), he raps the ends of lines so deliberately as to turn each into a dare. From nearly any other vocalist, this would sound boring at best and amateurish at worst; instead, DOOM holds attention like a movie star in a silent closeup. “Hot as hell and it’s a cold day, innit?” he teases, each syllable stressed but unhurried. “Working on a way that we can roll away tinted/Some say the price of holding heat is often too high/You either be in a coffin or you be the new guy.” This was another joy of DOOM’s music: a luxurious escape plan and the threat of jail worded as if by someone who had read every book ever published but never spoken out loud.

FOOD is a consistently playful record (its most stone-faced song is “Kookies,” a lament about leering at women on the internet which originally sampled Sesame Street), filled with the kind of song where a rapper plays call-and-response with a vocal sample. On “Hoe Cakes,” the disembodied “super” is used as both an exclamation and a noun referring to a slumlord; on “Frenz,” it’s guns rather than comrades who are the “ones we can depend on.” But that tongue-in-cheek device is upended on “Kon Karne,” the best song on FOOD—and perhaps in DOOM’s entire catalog. A long dedication to his late brother, Subroc, and to the New York DOOM occupied when he was alive, he lets Sade sing “My love is…” and finishes the thought himself: “Vaster than the seven seas, bigger than Mount Kilimanjaro.”

The immensity of his heartbreak colors every little remembrance: the pliers used to steal cars, the records he borrowed from a friend and has to return. It’s a remarkably sincere verse—for once, the image of DOOM pawning a piece of jewelry is of a desperate man, not a conniving one. And so, however cynical one might be about him padding out the tracklist with that stretch of instrumentals, the sequencing ends up suggesting something about the difficulty of voicing all the things he does in “Kon Karne,” which is buffered on its other end by a song given over entirely to another vocalist. It’s too much; it has to breathe. If the mask is too easy a metaphor, maybe this is a time capsule—buried for posterity but also to keep what is too painful at a distance.

Not long after “Kon Karne,” DOOM returns with “Rapp Snitch Knishes,” his exuberant, extended taunt of MCs who incriminate themselves in their songs. On that track—which features an artist named Mr. Fantastik, whose identity has never been revealed—DOOM is delightfully, justifiably smug about the wall he’s erected between the persona and the personal. But throughout MM..FOOD there are fissures in that partition. “Deep Fried Frenz,” which Mos quotes so giddily, is weighed down by real, evident pain: “You could see the white of they eyes/Bright with surprise, once they finish spitting lies.” It recasts the whole enterprise—the early shows at Nuyorican Poets Cafe where he wore a stocking over his face, the lunchboxes and box sets that came later—as a futile one, the mask able to cover only so much.

MF DOOM: MM..FOOD (20th Anniversary Edition)

$35 at Rough Trade