- Kiana Mickles tells the story of the underground classic that showed the late artist's gift for sampling and storytelling.
- Smart, New York-raised and a comic book geek with a brain that stubbornly refused to leave the '80s, MF DOOM has always reminded me a little of my father. When I first heard his music as a young college student, I was transported to sun-filled Saturday mornings watching cartoons with my dad, the Fruit Loops in my bowl dissolving into multi-colored pulp as my eyes glued to the TV screen. Much like those weekend cartoons, DOOM's music is hilarious, but also stone-cold serious in its left-field creativity. He was a risk-taking writer crafting music purely for himself, breaking all the rules in a way that made his peers reconsider why they were there in the first place. When his wife, Jasmine Dumile, announced his death two months after his initial passing on October 31st, the music community struggled to cope.
The author behind the character MF DOOM was Daniel Dumile, a London-born, New York-raised rapper who had been in the game since 1989. He cut his teeth as a young artist who went by Zev Love X, a member of an early '90s rap crew called KMD. As they were working on their second album, DJ Subroc, Dumile's brother and fellow KMD member, tragically died. After a fumbled attempt to go through with the album release, Dumile went into retreat, writing while on the brink of homelessness, maybe picking up a bottle of Olde English when he had an extra dollar. The place he was lucky enough to be crashing at was bound to run out of electricity at any point. Then, on an unusually promising summer day, it all clicked. If he were to continue his rap career, he'd return as his own version of one of his favorite Marvel characters: Doctor Doom. The first album under the fresh alias came out in 1999: Operation: Doomsday.
New York house producer Eli Escobar recalls a young Dumile who'd frequent Footwork, Bobbito Garcia's now-shuttered East Village record store, around the time of that seminal album's release. "DOOM was always bringing in the weirdest beats," he told me. "You know, his stuff just sounded so outlandish to everybody. He just existed on his own stratosphere. Back then with a lot of his stuff I'd be like, 'Yo this dude is crazy.' Like he's sampling super-obvious R&B records, or weird records that slow down and speed up." But once the records were complete, he concedes, they sounded brilliant. At the time, Dumile would carry around a portable sampler, the Roland VS-880, which he could use to sample records on the fly. His sampling wasn't always polished, but that quickly became part of his DIY appeal.
2004 was a life-changing year for Dumile. He released his hazy collaborative project with Madlib, Madvillainy, a record destined for greatness. It picked up rave reviews upon its release, and today it still stands as one of the greatest hip-hop albums of the '00s. Riding on the high of that album, Dumile released MM...FOOD months later, but to mixed reviews this time. Compared to the commercial polish of Madvillainy, MM...FOOD was raw and unadulterated DOOM. The production is crinkly, deftly flying through soundbites of the 1981 Spider-Man and 1978 The Fantastic Four television series, as well as various blaxploitation films. Some of his references were downright mind-boggling. Wedged in between a three-track venture of cartoon splices, an old man in the woods boasts about whipping up "a really substantial meal!" in the memorable "Filet-O-Rapper," which samples a 1974 Euell Gibbons spoof on PBS.
Dumile also committed several sampling offenses, or so they were considered at the time. He was known for not only sampling melodies from obvious records—in "Hoe Cakes'', he strips the instrumental from Anita Baker's R&B classic "Sweet Love"—but also ripping entire drum instrumentals from well-known hip-hop records. Underneath the soaring jazz saxophone of "Deep Fried Frenz" are the drums and chorus of Whodini's 1984 classic "Friends." For anyone else, these decisions may have amounted to hip-hop suicide. "That was kind of a no-no or deemed as like, what are you doing? Nah. You can't do that," New York-based PTP boss Geng tells me. "You have to sample from a '70s record, because of timeline ideas as well as being like, 'Hey, that was like something that we programmed ourselves.'" Despite this unruly sampling approach, the tracks are timeless and impactful, particularly for those who grew up listening to their original references. DOOM fans tend to cite "Hoe Cakes" and "Deep Friend Frenz" as two of the album's top cuts.
For many Black listeners, the anything-goes attitude of the album felt pleasantly familiar. "He rhymes as weird as I feel," Mos Def once said in a raucous seven-minute clip in which he raps his favorite rhymes off the album. Beyond its nostalgic sampling, MM...FOOD's cultural references spoke to an intimate sense of Black humor, as well as a multi-generational and bicoastal Black experience. Closing the skits of "Gumbo," a man smoothly utters "chitterlings." In "Hoe Cakes," DOOM advises: "Whether a bougie broad, nerd ho, street chick / Don't call her Wifey if you met her at the Freaknik." The Madvillainy leftover, "One Beer," opens with the line: "There's only one beer left / Rappers screaming all in our ears like we're deaf," a clever jab at the bombastic Busta Rhymes, who would holler "there's only year left!" in the intro to his 1998 debut album E.L.E.. The hilarious "Rapp Snitch Knishes" is a cautionary tale for braggadocious young rappers whose catalogs double as an archive of criminal evidence against them. "Do you see the perpetrator? Yeah, I'm right here!," DOOM's left-hand man, Mr. Fantastik, acts out in the chorus.
In the '00s, many white critics failed to wrap their heads around MM...FOOD. At the time, Pitchfork's Nick Sylvester criticized Dumile's indulgence in skit-sampling, and called the album intentionally "merely good or somewhat inconsequential." In 2007, the Guardian's Dorian Lynskey described the LP reissue as comparatively unimportant next to Madvillainy, due to a "glut of cartoon-sampling skits that will tax all but the very young and the very stoned." The fanfare and mainstream luster of Madvillainy consistently overshadowed MM...FOOD's singular storytelling and sample work.
"Don't get it twisted, it was a slept-on album," says Miami-based producer Suzi Analogue, who grabbed MM...FOOD off the shelf when it first came out. "I can understand in terms of commercial viability, why they did not get that album. I don't think it was made for them at all." There was a youthful nature to Dumile's geeky narrative building that was particularly reminiscent of Black childhood predating the '00s. "If you watch [Spike Lee's] Crooklyn," Suzi Analogue adds, "there are a lot of scenes where the brothers and sisters just gathered around the TV." Sections of the album sound like a bored child flipping through kids' channels. In the opening of "Guinnesses," we hear: "Running desperately low on food, they were forced to turn back." "Well I'll be!" "What's that villain doing?!" His use of these samples was more than a gimmick to fall back on. Dumile was a sincere pop-culture sponge with a sharp DJ's ear (his DJ experience stretched as far back as the third grade), deploying visionary writing to further develop his DOOM persona. Wu-Tang had kung fu films, Kanye West had his infatuation with Akira and DOOM picked up just about everything and anything that had touched a TV screen.
Some 17 years later, the impact of Dumile's second solo album as MF DOOM is immeasurable. It's one of the albums that crowned him as everyone's favorite rapper's favorite rapper. His influence can be seen in Joey Bada$$'s breakthrough 2012 debut, 1999, where the track "World Domination" rips a sample from "The Fat Albert Halloween Special," the same sample undergirding the mélange of skits in "Poo-Putt Platter." The sampling of French band Cortex's "Huit Octobre 1971" in "One Beer" also inspired a host of rappers to make use of the song's wistful falsetto vocals and jazzy instrumental, most notably Wiz Khalifa and Tyler, The Creator. In 2008, the latter—clearly a long-time fan—released a grainy black-and-white video of himself gesturally lip-syncing "Hoe Cakes." DOOM touched more people than he didn't, and listening to MM...FOOD now is like diving into a bottomless pool of underground hip-hop genius. His last album under his most-celebrated alias will surely satiate his dutiful fans over many lifetimes. A real substantial meal in its own right.
Tracklist01. Beef Rap
02. Hoe Cakes
03. Potholderz feat. Count Bass D
04. One Beer
05. Deep Fried Frenz
06. Poo-Putt Platter
07. Fillet-O-Rapper
08. Gumbo
09. Fig Leaf Bi-Carbonate
10. Kon Karne
11. Guinnesses feat. 4Ize & Angelika
12. Kon Queso
13. Rapp Snitch Knishes
14. Vomitspit
15. Kookies