MF DOOM’s music was his legend. The man himself was the myth

2004 was the tipping point for the myth 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 status that year with four albums across four independent labels and a handful of personas, capped by the vaunted Madlib collaboration Madvillainy on Stones Throw Records. Few hip-hop LPs are so preceded by their reputations, two solitary geniuses from separate coasts linking for a one-off alliance through incredible kismet: DOOM had entered a self-imposed exile after the tragic demise of his Elektra group, KMD, in 1994, vanished again for years after the label that released Operation: Doomsday went under in 2001, and was located only by chance, incommunicado in Kennesaw, Ga., through a friend of a friend of Stones Throw’s general manager. Whether by coincidence or fate, the discovery brought about one of the great independent triumphs of the 21st century, a record of near-perfect rapper-producer synergy that set a new high water mark for off-kilter, conceptual alternative hip-hop, equal parts zany and grounded, classicist and experimental. “No other rap album exists in the same constellation as Madvillainy,” Jeff Weiss wrote in 2014.

Born in the shadow of this “phantasmagoria of flow,” as the critic Robert Christgau put it, is the solo record MF DOOM released months later: MM..FOOD, the rapper’s second proper album under the DOOM moniker, which carries a wacky conceit (even for a guy who’d rapped a whole album as a Godzilla kaiju), building its tracklist entirely around meal puns. The contrast between the two albums is evident before you even hit play: Madvillainy‘s cover photo is gritty, washed out and achromatic, depicting its star as dead-eyed behind his dingy, impenetrable Doctor Doom mask, while MM..FOOD renders him in cartoon mischief, rapacious at the breakfast table with his gaze cocked naughtily over his shoulder. If Madvilliany is the key to DOOM’s aura as the supervillain behind the veil, as beloved by his cult as he is misunderstood by the masses, MM..FOOD is the flip side, making plain the core tenets of his actual selfhood: voracious reader of The Dictionary of Clichés and Depraved and Insulting English, connoisseur of both a well-executed skit and perfectly queued heel turn, lover of an insane rhyme and a good bit.

DOOM was a mystery until the very end. He spent nearly a decade in seclusion before his death in 2020 (on Halloween), which wasn’t revealed to the public until months later. Since then, the milestone anniversaries of his work have presented opportunities to wrestle with the character once more, the latest of which is a new deluxe edition of MM..FOOD for the album’s 20th. Apart from the usual extras — updated cover art; remixes from Madlib, Jake One and Ant from Atmosphere — the reissue includes some interview snippets, providing bits of insight on the recluse’s process. In one called “The Making of MM..FOOD,” the rapper is asked about a previous claim that this album was a turning point, whereby he’d drop the “MF” from his stage name and make a full transition into DOOM as a stand-alone persona. “I was really meaning in the sense of being personalized: DOOM, the person, if you were to ever get to know this cat,” he says. “This FOOD album is innermost thoughts and personal opinions … it gets into more of the character.” He then adds, “the FOOD album is a real, real personal album, too,” before trailing off. As often happened, the line between the character and the rapper blurred. Maybe he was just messing with the poor interviewer, but in retrospect it’s clear that manifestation was on his mind — which makes it easier, now, to see this LP as a DOOM manifesto. We often think of autobiography as limited to what is said explicitly, what we are told directly, diaristically and through confession, those innermost thoughts and personal opinions selected for public disclosure. But MM..FOOD presents a more subtle case: Sometimes you tell people who you are through what you like and how you move. In that sense, the album is a trove of data, a captivating sound bank clueing us into the mania of the DOOM psyche.

It hasn’t always been treated this way. Initially, many saw MM..FOOD as a trivial entry in the DOOM canon — the impetuous master fiddling around in his notebook, crates and VHS collection, his whims his only muse. “Here Doom wants nothing more than to score some Clever Points with quirky one-liners over tight beats,” Nick Sylvester wrote in his Pitchfork review. The liberal deployment of skits, in particular, was a point of contention: The album cuts together segments of dialogue sourced from superhero cartoons and interviews with USDA food scientists into plot and backstory, which many found grating. “The successive skits merely serve to ruin any sense of cohesion in the album,” Nin Chan wrote for Rap Reviews in 2004, in a mostly positive review that nonetheless reads as backhanded about the record’s indulgences. “What makes this a minor work compared with, say, the same year’s Madvillainy is a glut of cartoon-sampling skits that will tax all but the very young and the very stoned,” Dorian Lynskey added in The Guardian in 2007. And yet, while its sister release will always have the edge, MM..FOOD‘s stock has been climbing steadily over the past 20 years, the strength of its self-contained bizarro Marvel universe proving too rich and animated to ignore.

DOOM knew better than almost anyone that “truth” could be a prison for a great storyteller. Rap has often prioritized not just the first-person narrative, but the performance of self as a show of authenticity. Though an effective writing mode, it can curtail one’s artistic license: “I think a lot of times, especially in hip-hop, artists get pigeonholed into being, ‘You’re the guy.’ It’s kind of limiting in a way. I look at it like I’m the writer,” DOOM said in a Red Bull Music Academy lecture in 2011. Being a writer is an identity in itself, and in his embodiment of the “rapper’s rapper,” he expressed a commitment to craft that revealed much of who he was, his sharp, droll, unconventional verses betraying those qualities in a personality he longed to keep hidden. In that sense, MM..FOOD is the album on which the lore most plainly aligns with the ambition of the man behind it. So much of the character work displayed across his defining run is about experimenting, but this record turns comic book incongruity into autofiction — and vice versa.

DOOM’s bars are his life story. They are the thing to which he dedicated himself fully, exhibited not just in his originality or skill but in how much he rapped about rap, policing its standards and christening himself its bellwether, if not its face (faces, he argued, were unnecessary). “Enough about me, it’s about the beats / Not about the streets and who food he about to eat,” he raps on “Beef Rapp.” “It’s a miracle how he get so lyrical / And proceed to move the crowd like a old negro spiritual.” There are, of course, literal clues to who DOOM was beyond the illusions of his work, which distorted real aspects of his identity and experiences — references to Islam, a tribute to his late brother and groupmate DJ Subroc, intimations of latent alcoholism — but far more prominent and constant are hints that being a performer is foundational to his individuality. The elusiveness he practiced was in service of peace of mind, not legend-building: “Average emcees is like a TV blooper / MF DOOM, he’s like D.B. Cooper”; “Crooked eye mode, nerd, geek with a cold heart / Probably still be speaking in rhymes as an old fart”; “Once they get to know us people dig us / Leaders in the fight for equal rights for n****s.” He never came at anything straight on, but that, too, felt like a display of his true nature.

In S.H. (Skiz) Fernando Jr.’s recently released DOOM biography, The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast, the KMD affiliate Simone, or Mr. Hood (who appears in the foreground on the cover of the group’s debut album of the same name), talks about the importance of slang to the identities in burgeoning New York City crews and the growing hip-hop community of the ’80s and ’90s. “Vocabulary was a priority, ’cause vocabulary creates our uniqueness,” he says. It’s a parallel that more or less defines DOOM: a grasp of language so idiosyncratic that it comes to represent not just a personality but a worldview. The sense that a manner of speaking can make someone who they are, even (or perhaps especially) when playacting, is all over MM..FOOD, not just in the lyrics themselves but in the hidden stories connecting his various word-association games. Follow his train of thought from knishes, a funny word for a Jewish staple snack in his native Long Island, to snitches, a thing just as prevalent in New York City circles. “Words that rhyme with knish … any aspect of that, how it sounds, how it can match with something in society. So ‘rap snitch’ and ‘knishes’ kinda go together,” he told XXL in 2013. “So it was easy to find a title. The challenge was coming up with good enough references to make a song.” In both the meticulous dot-connecting and the curatorial challenge, we find the essence of DOOM: a New Yorker bound by multiculturalism and street code, and a puzzle master trying to riff on as many absurdities as he can find.

But the MM..FOOD appeal is about more than just words; it’s about collages. His phrases and flows can register as such on their own, cluttered jumbles strung together like deranged Mad Libs that take the brain a beat to untangle. Yet the raps merely slot into the larger hodgepodge that is his songcraft, a stream of what can only be described as chaos montages. Produced, with only a handful of exceptions, by DOOM himself, MM..FOOD follows its own logic of imagination. It’s nonlinear, freewheeling, referential in a loop that feels like a Möbius strip. It repurposes old beats made under his producer moniker Metal Fingers, flips Frank Zappa and mines The Electric Company, PlayStation sound effects, Late Night with David Letterman, Sade, a Spider-Man cartoon, Fat Albert’s Halloween Special, Starship Orchestra, Sesame Street and Blaxploitation films for kooky, dialogue-heavy songs that play as both a sequel to his masked villain origin story and a pseudo-concept album bent into an inside joke. At its center are the narrative skits, which he saw as an extension of his writing, just as bonkers and arcane. “Have the record tell the story, you know what I’m saying?” he said at RBMA. “Have little intervals and cutscenes. Everything flows better when I got multiple characters to portray the story.”

It was always difficult to tell how much of what DOOM said about himself was “true,” or even how much of it he meant. Obfuscation was part of the performance; the rapper had such a cagey, though intentional, relationship with reality and fiction. Eventually, he began to feel like a puzzle that needed solving, and with secrets and unknowns comes intrigue. There’s no doubt that covering his face, ironically, helped bring greater attention, which in turn led to greater scrutiny — DOOM likely could relate to another comic villain who noted that no one cared who he was until he put on a mask — but there was never a need for autobiography as a means to parsing the DOOM albums, and being evasive is not the same as being unknowable. To that end, MM..FOOD might be the greatest representation of the man and artist standing at the center of the fog, its music personalized to such an extent that it feels illuminating. In the details of its craft, we learn far more than any account of his personal life could ever tell 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 good taste; amused by an open question; obsessed with villainy. On this “personal album,” DOOM is all right there, in plain sight.