Pitchfork

Rap loves food. Skeptics: name another genre that has its own brand of potato chips, or counts as heroes men named Notorious B.I.G. and Big Pun and Puffy and Fat Joe and Raekwon the Chef, or singlehandedly stabilized a dying French wine town with an MTV spot and a few choice Diddies. Foodtalk is facile shorthand, and after 15 years in the game, MF Doom has had his share of Warren G Cheezie Nachos and Master P Platinum BBQ Rap Snacks. But when hip-hop got fat and gangsta and lucrative-- as well as massively important, culturally influential, and-- Doom kept low, disgruntled by what he saw as big-money rap's new self-importance. "Only in America could you find a way to earn a healthy buck/ And still keep your attitude on self-destruct," Doom would say later in "Rhymes Like Dimes". By 1993, rap had toasted to The Chronic, Illmatic, and 36 Chambers; had it been released then, KMD's pointed and confrontational Black Bastards would have sounded but a wolf cry while the rest of hip-hop was taking its first sips of gin and juice.

"There are different topics besides murdering everybody. That seems to be the in thing-- how many people you can murder on a record. So I'm bringing it back to the old, bragging about how nice you are with the words." Doom said this on NPR in 2003, but the sentiment holds true for his 1999 comeback solo full-length Operation: Doomsday. Like other rap heavyweights at the time, Doom promised world domination, but with tongue firmly in cheek, making tall boasts only to undermine them with nerdy self-deprecation and high-falutant science-fiction soap-ops. Doom "came to destroy rap" because rap had betrayed itself: Operation: Doomsday was the story of-- and vehicle for-- his return-to-roots revenge.

"Operation Doomsday complete," we're told in the opening sound collage of Mm..Food?. As an official follow-up to Operation: Doomsday, Mm..Food? is an attempt to make good on Doom's almost fascist conceit to restore rap's golden age despite its loss of innocence. While Doom doesn't drop strictly food-related rhymes, the album's subject matter is always commonplace: friends, sucka MCs, girls, weed, and hip-hop. Post Doomsday, MF Doom as MF Doom has no interest in the space-laser rapocalypse of King Geedorah's Take Me To Your Leader or the dysfunctional gangster whim of Madvillain's Madvillainy. Here Doom wants nothing more than to score some Clever Points with quirky one-liners over tight beats.

"On his own throne, the boss like King Koopa", Doom spits silver dollars like a subway-card dispenser, but he also loosens his mask a bit for a few tender bleats: "Look like a black wookie when he keeps his hair low," he confesses on "Beef Rapp". There aren't as many belly laughs on Mm..Food? as there were on VV1 or Madvillainy, but Doom does manage this spam-mail slam on "Kookies": "Supposed to be checkin e-mails/ All I got is messages from ass naked females [cookies]/ I don't know no Jenny, she said it's free/ And I won't owe her a penny, and that's the last time I saw her/ But thousands of more horrors are on line (Gomorrah...)". Unlike Doomsday, guest spots are smartly kept to a minimum, though in fairness, "Rapp Snitch Knishes" co-emcee Mr. Fantastik hardly embarrasses himself: "True to the ski mask New York's my origin/ Play a fake gangsta like a old accordian."

Most of Doom's raps on Mm..Food? sacrifice cohesion for maximum punch. When Doom does muster some self-restraint, he comes off triply brilliant. From the beginning, the Count Bass-D production "Potholderz" darts back and forth across the metaphor until we simply can't tell whether Doom's talking about gloves or roach clips: "What-- these old things?/ About to throw them away with the gold rings that make them don't fit like OJ". The Whodini sample on "Deep Fried Frenz" is awful in that purposeful maybe-Eminem sort of way. Here Doom turns a feel-good song into a mess of betrayal, bitterness, and matter-of-fact credos: "You could either ignore this advice, or take it from me/ Be too nice and people take you for a dummy."

With the exception of the album's two older tracks-- the Madlib-produced, Madvillainy leftover "One Beer" and the PNS-produced "Yee Haw", here re-recorded as "Kon Queso"-- and "Potholderz", Doom controls all the production on Mm..Food?. A lot of these beats are old no-frills Special Herbs loops, most lacking the marks of Doom's science-fiction fetish. Of the newer beats, the 70s Blue Note funk on "Vomitspit" is up there with Doom's best production work, and the stuttery "Potholderz" has the best bassline on any hip-hop album this year. Doom is also one of the few producers who should be allowed to do sound collage skits: "Poo-Putt Platter" has sample sequences that at one point reads, "'You risked your life for us.' 'Thanks.' 'I've lost an arm.' 'Good.' 'Stop it father!'" One skit would have been plenty though; instead, Doom dumps four of these right in the middle of the album, a nasty rut that makes Mm..Food? pretty much unplayable front-to-back after the first few spins, especially since the tracks that follow these skits-- the elevator-rap "Kon Karne" and the maudlin "Guinnesses"-- are among Doom's worst.

If Mm..Food? feels merely good or somewhat inconsequential, it's because it is that way by design. Doom has no pretense here-- he's an equally great rapper and producer, and he wants people to respect him for his skills alone: "It's about the beats/ Not about the streets and who food he about to eat". On one hand we can admire his intentions; on the other we can criticize his pigheadedness. Hip-hop can be consequential and important when it wants to be, and perhaps the capable Doom is keeping his aspirations too far in check. The truth is that Doom could go on making five or six Mm..Food?'s each year for the rest of his career-- but when will "merely good" not be good enough?