MF Doom’s ‘MM..Food Drive Tour’ Documentary Is the Weird (and Wonderful) Tribute He Deserves

MM..Food is one of my favorite albums of all-time. The first time I heard it, in the mid-2000s, I was on the cusp of starting high school. Everything about the album hit me immediately and all at once—the concrete fluidity of Doom’s internal rhymes, the vintage freshness of the beats, the near-pathological obsession with food and alcohol as metaphors for the ups and downs of life. 

But what really stood out, and continues to phase me years later, is how blissfully weird this project is. Doom’s “create for yourself and figure the rest out later” aspect is a big part of his appeal, but Food thrives within its tipsy, candy-colored wonderland, with the ruff-and-tumble street rap of a Boot Camp Clik rubbing shoulders with the gonzo surrealism of De La Soul’s Buhloone Mindstate. A quarter of the album gives way to zany interludes revolving around vocal samples from The Electric Company and food documentaries; another cedes the mic entirely to rapper Stahhr, who speaks on untangling herself from a dance with Islam’s devil, Sheitan. When Doom is around, he’s using food to make sense of life—whether mourning the death of his brother, calling out rappers who self-snitch, or being busted for watching porn behind his wife’s back. Nothing about this album is straightforward but it all makes perfect sense, the line between character and person blurred with beer goggles and tied together by the retrofuturist painting of artist Jason Jagel’s album cover.   

Earlier this week, I went to an event celebrating 20 years of MM..Food at Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s dine-in Nitehawk Cinema. It offered a rare chance for fans to catch the MM..Food Drive Tour documentary—an hour-long collection of live and behind-the-scenes footage from the album’s eight-city tour/food drive, originally included as a bonus disc in a 2007 CD reissue—on the big screen. Tote bags stuffed with vinyl, plastic 3D Doom masks, pins, and sticker sheets were given away. A special menu featured IRL renditions of meals from the album: a “Deep Fried Frenz” chicken tender plate (with green “vomit spit” buttermilk ranch dip), a “Fig Leaf Bi-Carbonate” cocktail, and two different “Poo-Putt Platter” dishes (charcuterie boards featuring meat or cheese). It struck a good balance between being a corporate viewing event—it was, after all, an activation sponsored by Spotify—and an intimate movie night for die-hards.

I had never seen the MM..Food Drive Tour before. As it began to play I was transfixed by seeing Doom in his element on stage, toasting the crowd, adjusting the levels and pitch of beats in real-time, feigning stage dives and joking with the audience. But just as interesting was the footage of down moments between and after shows. In one scene, Doom, decked out in a Stephon Marbury Knicks jersey, and his entourage divvy up hot food on a bed in a hotel room before Doom goes to eat by his lonesome. In another, he jeers the Knitting Factory in L.A. for its mic quality, glasses propped over the eyeholes of his trademark face mask, before twisting the cap off a beer and hopping into a taxi. There’s quite a bit of footage of Doom roaming through airports. It’s all shot verite-style on crappy camcorders, captured with dim colors, horrible light composition, pixelated zooms and lens flares. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That’s because, watching it all unfold onscreen, the only thought going through my head was: This is raw! Unvarnished, honest, plenty zany, and a lot of fun. It matches the scuzzy atmosphere of the album perfectly and, like most of Doom’s work, benefits from the lo-fi aesthetics integral to its identity. Plus, this was a guy who frequently tricked promoters and audiences by sending imposters dressed like him to perform; a man who wasn’t above taking money from labels and media companies and ghosting them for no reason. He was as grimy and mischievous as can be, but he also cared deeply about craft and community.

All of this got me thinking about the presentation and marketing MM..Food has received throughout the year for its 20th anniversary—and how they don’t quite fit in the same way as the tour doc. When I look at artist Sam Rodriguez’s new cover for the reissue (a saturated diner setup with Doom, masked patrons, and various Doom alter egos and Easter eggs sprinkled throughout) or an orchestral tribute like FM Mood (led by composer Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and featuring appearances by Madlib, Erykah Badu, and producer Daedalus at this past weekend’s Flog Gnaw Carnival) I see handsome and well-made homages that don’t feel fully in lockstep with Doom’s ethos. Rolling out the red carpet for an artist like him in this way is a double-edged sword: You want to pay proper tribute without things feeling too clean, or worse, watered-down and sterile. But you don’t want the legacy of a rapper like Doom—who once joked about companies like Mello Yellow jacking his swag to sell “poison” to the babies—becoming the thing he critiqued in life.

To be clear, that’s not what I think is happening here. The posthumous boosting of artists, especially those as revered as Doom, through reissues and new releases is always prone to skepticism—rightfully so. But Doom’s family, estate, and management team are directly involved—much of the money made from the reissue is going to them—and, like it or not, many new fans’ introduction to Doom will be through this album, presented in this way, by these people. Doom has become to Gen Z what the late J Dilla was to younger millennials after he died in the early 2000s: A titan of hip-hop who was already stamped in life, now repackaged and distributed as a legend in a box, more icon than man. It can be difficult to process that change, especially as a fan from before he passed. But seeing Doom in proudly shitty resolution, thanking his fans for bringing canned food for the needy and breathlessly rapping cuts from across his discography, felt like all the tribute I needed.