2004: MF DOOM, Mm..Food
By Antoine Hardy
I was leaving the post office late Thursday and I got a text from a close friend that read : DOOM died?” I hurriedly went to twitter and saw other posts, “Not my nigga DOOM,” I yelled to nobody on the subway platform; I mumbled for minutes “DOOM, not my nigga DOOM.” MF DOOM wasn’t just a rap favorite, or a scion of indie rap to me; listening to DOOM always felt like talking to a long lost friend from the neighborhood and hearing of his death hit me similarly.
Funny thing is I avoided DOOM early on. I remember my nerdy grad school colleagues praising DOOM and Rhymesayers stuff and telling me I didn’t know “real rap.” . In 2005 I was a hip-hop fan that didn’t subscribe to the conscious/street dialectic, I just liked dope shit from the Lox to Dilated Peoples. DOOM fans were on some overproof “real rap” stuff that just turned me off. ‘Round 05 , on the Okp boards, my good friend Joshua dm’d* me “Yo you would like DOOM, DOOM a street nigga that love to rap.” Josh put me on to the Smiths & UGK, so I trusted whatever he said. He sent me MM..FOOD via AOL instant messenger. I pressed play expecting the lyrical version of The Simpsons “Comic Book Nerd”
Instead, I hear a wild style clip, which automatically gave me Illmatic vibes. I was a huge Ghost fan in 04/05 so the opening cartoon wasn’t jarring in fact it all felt familiar. Then I heard the first line and stopped the tape and stared at the console in shock:
Beef rap could lead to getting teeth capped, or even a wreath from mom dukes on some beef crap.
BRUH. did he just flip Biggie’s line:” Don’t let me fill my clip up in ya back and headpiece, The opposite of peace, sending Mom duke a wreath” sounding like an inebriated E-Double to give a warning about rap beef and a eulogy in two lines? Mind you, I was a grad student writing about rap as rhetoric & the act of signifying on previous forms, it’s like DOOM said add this to your research.
Next, DOOM runs down other health risk peculiar to Black folks as a warning before chastising fake emcees lying about their rap sheet. The second verse is almost a formal introduction to “a rather ugly brother with flows that gorgeous” , who drops 5 percent Muslim gems like stop feeding “babies sugar coated flavored lard squares” and proceeds to move the crowd “like an old Negro spiritual”
My internal convo: “Oh this dude is Black , how does no one talk about this?! Who says negro spiritual and only rapping to white folk? Is he reading what I am reading?” I was in the throes of research linking hip-hop with the gospel tradition via call and response and other techniques, and yes rappers do move Black folk like negro spirituals and in fact, after laughing at his stand up insults of scantily clad rappers and his declaration of sticking to his hip-hop ethics, I was moved. Student me was focused on this idea of Black rappers still talking to Black folk in the presence of white audiences because the scholarship at the time focused on white patronage; which was my initial aversion to DOOM. About the album DOOM said “ That's just how we speak normally in the streets, so I don't wanna look too far into it. It's a normal thing. I'm just putting my stamp on it..” This wasn’t some crazy alien shit to quote P of Mobb Deep, it was talk of prison weapons using foil and brillo, it was good girls becoming krill* sellers, and talk of eating someone’s food a double entendre of prison violence slang and the hip-hop 90s slang of eating mc’s. I heard DOOM position himself as an MC carrying on Black rhetorical traditions of signifying on past forms, the dozens, and communal advice for an imagined polysemic audience--that includes “Black folk”.
On “Beef Rap” , what he called the thesis statement of the album the villain is comedian/preacher/poet an encapsulation of the Black oral tradition giving “a good word” , equipment for living, soul...mm..food for an imagined Black audience. In rhetoric we talk of ethos as a character of a speaker but the primordial meaning speaks to ethos as an abode. A skilled speaker makes you feel at home. Great rap rhetorics can make you feel at home not because we all sold that hard or got a letter from the government the other day, but because they speak to shared cultural memory, treatment, love for Black expression
Listening to MM.Food, DOOM created a dwelling place where underneath the comic mythology and vengeance narrative is/was a nostalgic recreation of his NYC home in sound, language and attitude. An aural space where the supervillian drops gems, robs fake rappers, and upholds the rules of the street. Where hookers and yellow plate cabs are plentiful in NYC, praise of Black creativity, Black Muslim gems, and Black sexual politics are scattered about wit his braggadocio rhymes of domination or melancholy moments of Black loss
Indeed, on ‘Deep fried frenz’ he abandons his braggadocio for a lyrical seminar on his fears of friendship. “Jealousy the number one killer among Black folks.” While in 2021 I suspect this could be taking as a conservative talking point, the song is clearly about hood politics. ‘What happen to honor amongst thieves’, & tales of friends taking your stash. DOOM takes the tales of say Jigga’s D’evils to highlight how friendships in the streets often turn tragic. On a macro level its communal commentary and it’s not about suburbia; as DOOM says about the LP “it’s some street shit.” Indeed, the call and response modality of the Whodini song encourages participation like a park jam as that song happy register always had a melancholy undertone that resonated; the first rap hit is repurposed by the underground king.
DOOM created this space where I felt like an old homie reunited from my few summers in NYC. The type of friend that went with me to Hairy’s barber shop and debated with the 5 percenters, recorded Thundercat clips and spliced them with Wu-tang songs for their crew, a friend who gets a reference to rapper Redhead Kingpin and the FBI but also loves news media with Brit Hume. He even talked like my NYC cousin Eddie. That year, I had lost my uncle Mitch the only person I had in Florida and been diagnosed with a then mystery illness involving my pancreas. By the winter of 2006 down almost 40 lbs., placed on a low fat diet and banned from drinking alcohol—which killed my social life. I literally had to change to a drastic no-fried food diet. MM..FOOD strangely was speaking to all parts of my life.
As the only Black man in my program and without my community connects, I yearned to talk hip-hop with folk raised on it. I missed drinking brews and blasting music in the jeep so “your people can stare at the rhymes” I missed saying phrases like “shit you telling me” or making jokes referencing Black culture that I would have to translate to my colleagues.
“NEGRO HUMOR never appealed to me. “
That audio clip felt like an inside joke on first listen. It was like DOOM had seen the confusion from my peers , when me and work study students were hyped about a Katt Williams show yet these same people recommended DOOM; I wonder if they got all the jokes The humor is what I missed the most in hip-hop and DOOMs comic frame of irony, misdirection and self -deprecation spoke to this kid raised on Redman, Pharcyde, and De La. Of course there are the classic stand up punchlines of “if I dime for other rapper that bust guns, “ that pass off as hip-hop aphorisms or ironic absurdity “rumor has it , it was a s curl accident DOOM was known for keepin the best back bent” where DOOM alludes to possibly having a 90s s-curl ---that I trust few white fans knew what that was-- ..but only for the ladies. DOOM was bus stop lunchroom funny. Yet the causal conversational style could switch to the casual intensity of a corner cipher in a split second on MM. . . FOOD
The four instrumentals are often seen as just indulgence but the Fat albert soundscape and Blaxploitation clips reinforce this 80s Black pop cultural memory and comedy that imbues the album. The kits definitely gave me De la vibes and transported me to my childhood. Friday nights at Joey Thompson house. In rural eastern NC, I lived in those small towns you heard Jay-Z locking down. Where you could cop a Ron g tape and a beef patty con queso from the dread spot. NYC Fashion stores were mainstays, and, we wore timbs in the summer. Home of Jerry Stackhouse and DB Cooper (out with the moolah) In relation, Joey had all the dj equipment, every gaming system, a garage of all the rap posters you could imagine, every game--in retrospect Ms. Thompson kept her boys and so many of us out of trouble.
Back in 92 I had peach fuzz as the girls said and when Joey played the KMD song I felt seen. It was smart alecky, it was playful and pre-teen Toine loved the ladies! I would get hype when it came on rap city old school Wednesdays. I had no idea ZEV LOVE was DOOM. When I found out it made my listening even more personal. I moved around a lot as a kid and you never get to run back into a friend. Mm..food felt like a reunion, with family and friends no longer here. DOOM gives OG advice on Hoe Cakes. The villain who plays love counselor in one breath “do for her, keep in a new fur’ and paranoid pimp “don’t call her wifey if you met her at the freaknik, in the next, feeling like a phone call from deceased NYC cousin Julius warning me not to trust those “bougie” woman you meet at college.
Even the album’s music took me back, DOOMs intertextual approach to beatmaking felt so familiar yet new. A JJ Fad sample, an Anita baker loop and an EPMD Jane lyric to start off seems snatched from the memory of a mid-80s Black radio mix show. And it kinda is, DOOM once explained the production style was a holdover of his days as a DJ “That’s where it all starts with me, just being in the park, you know maintaining that same energy.” Reminiscing, DOOM waxes poetic about DJ’s switching from Keith Sweat to Whodini “mad butter instrumentals.” It’s his care for these hip-hop ethics that makes the music feel like a conversation not just via the lyrics. Stuck in my loft doped up and in pain, the music took me back to my youth with my dad mixing Sade and Whodini as we watched cartoons.
I do the kind of hip-hop where the MC is more pointing out things and accentuating certain things that have been forgotten at some stage.
In DOOMs world the mid-90s of my teenage years didn’t stop, I could still say that’s “butter” or “catch wreck, where shoes are called skips, or say anywho because I really talk like a cartoon in regular life. On the clairvoyant “Rap Snitch Knishes”, DOOM explained that “he just reinforcing something that everybody already knows about. It's street rules.” But the everybody is those of us who know or were raised around “ street nigga’s stamped and bonafide” to quote Mr. Fantastic.
As a writer, DOOM reinforced the hip-hop enthymeme of stylizing the regular, why say chicken when you can say “yardbird”? Instead of saying a cheap nerdy drug fiend, instead “dedicated cheapskater that keep data and self-medicated to sleep later.”
Toni Morrison once said “It is the thing that Black people love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It's a love, a passion.” DOOM’s love of words is grounded in these communal traditions. The villain is an outlaw who pushes normative limits and creates space for nuanced, polysemic poetics of Black invention. That’s the jewel----DOOM symbolizes freedom outside the margins as a Black creative.
For sure, I know the villain is an avatar for all, but the animated clips, quiet storm samples and Blaxploitation/wild style clips take me back to my childhood in an all-Black world. For sure, I know the villain is an avatar for all, but the clips, quiet storm samples and Blaxploitation clips felt like a conversation with a neighbor Describing his style, ’ll take that and I stretch it a little, leave one word blank, knowing that the listener is following along and will fill in that blank, just like I’ll fill in a blank, t’s like you keep a conversation with the listener.” He asks the listener, to finish the sentence like a close comrade would.
Elsewhere on the album the eulogy “Kon Karne” interpolates the Sade sample “my love is wider” into a couplet of how strong his love is for his deceased brother Subroc; (greater than the pyramids of pizza, greater than MT Kilimanjaro, taller than the empire state) referencing their diasporic journey through the fellow brit Sade and juxtaposing Subroc with another great Black musician gone too soon coining him “the hip-hop Hendrix” .The song remembers his brothers’ hip-hop skills, humor, and street bonafides and always reminds me of friends like Josh , cousins like Julius who exhibited similar qualities but no longer with us.
His crew wear pitcvhforks and halo’s
By the time we get to "Kon Queso", DOOM tells us “once they get to know us people dig us, leaders in the equal fights for niggers” “us” seems to reference his characters fidelity for equal rights in the form of expression and creativity for Black folk I would suggest. Later he states "he's on a campaign train to gain your support" and then proceeds to dazzle with internal rhymes, cadences and flourishes to reiterate that he’s the champion for those that a “keep more cash in the stash than a peso, ok ya’ll know who to follow” A classic rhetorician, DOOM references his opener to persuade listeners that the leader in the equal rights for niggers is also the hero of misfits that mainstream hip-hop ignored in the age of bling.
DOOM did something only a villain would do. He froze time. For 20 years DOOM was able to rap about street shit, drop five percent gems, and beats based off his 80s youth and not be questioned about living his rhymes. DOOM represents what I call an ethos of Black sincerity, a caring ethic for maintaining Black rhetorical traditions and Black expression. DOOM inspired many, but fellow Long Island artist Roc Marciano most notably took his time warp lesson and added to a world where the old NYC never died, in sound or focus inspiring a current NY sound informed more by DOOM than Jay-Z See: Griselda Records. DOOM the character was original NYC hip-hop. DOOM showed how Black rappers could be writers who created their own space outside of trends and stay true to their ethics, be successful but never concerned with selling out. I always suspect that DOOM in exile saw what flourished in NYC and the character DOOM was a slight parody of the NYC street rapper that became a repository for Daniel Dumille’s desire to “teach my people” his original motive for rapping he once told Hua Hsu.
Everyday in BK, I see old heads in busted timbs playing 90s mobb all day, ogling young women, telling war stories from the crack era, or arguing about marvel movies on the corner. These are street niggas, complicated nuanced but proud of their origins. These the OG”s that say the cops heavy on Broadway avoid, the og’s that hi-five you when they see your new girl, the og’s that threaten to smack fire out you if you don’t vote. MM..FOOD spoke to suburbia but it also was soul food for those raised by and around these kinda street niggas. And what a nigga know is that DOOM was my nigga.
PS: I dedicate this to Josh aka Menphyel7 the hip-hop maven
Antoine Hardy is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Borough of Manhattan Community College and Kinston, North Carolina native. He’s the author of Loving the Cool , published in journals such as Critical Studies in Media Communication and previously ran a community restorative justice program in Miami. Toine currently resides in Bed Stuy Brooklyn . In his off time, he makes music with his childhood friends (A&R, production) , you can find the newest project Youth Wasted on the Young on Georgesuggs.bandcamp.com. You can find him on twitter @Slangdini