Credit: Possan

As one of the most gifted lyricists of all time, MF DOOM packed his music with metaphors and double entendres requiring multiple listens to understand fully. Born in London and raised in Long Island, the late rapper was at his poetic best on MM..FOOD, his 2004 album released on Rhymesayers.

DOOM once opened up about MM..FOOD during an interview, revealing the title was an anagram of his name. Each song is named after a different type of food, combining analogies between the item and life itself. The closing song on the album, ‘Kookies’, is a prime example. Instead of simply rapping about the baked snack, he was referencing porn.

“I’ll give you an example. ‘Kookies’ is ill, totally on some internet porn type shit,” he told Exclaim. “I don’t know if you’re fuckin’ with the web, but if you do, you gotta go see what’s going on with that shit. I notice when you online on some porn shit, the word cookies comes up. Oh, I guess that’s the picture as it saves to your hard drive. They call those cookies.

“So, I got a fever for them cookies. I’m a cookie monster, trying to go into the cookie jar. So, on the surface the song sounds like I’m talking about regular cookies, but there’s little innuendos that’ll let you know.”

If DOOM’s comments about the internet sound a little dated, he made them in 2004. Internet cookies are small text files stored on a device that remember information about a browsing session, such as login details, preferences, and basket contents. In the first verse of ‘Kookies’, DOOM vividly paints a picture of himself sat at home browsing porn sites.

He raps, “It’s horrible, one little evening alone, home/ End up with carpal tunnel syndrome/ And here I am, known for giving heavy back aches/ Grown and living off of Little Debbie snack cakes/ Supposed to be checking emails/ All I got is messages from ass naked females/ I don’t know a 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 on online Gomorrah.”

MF DOOM went by multiple stage names throughout his career, including Viktor Vaughn, Metal Fingers, Zev Love X, and King Geedorah. Despite all the different characters and aliases, the real Daniel Dumile was always in the music.

“[It was] all me. But ever since I was a kid, I draw influences from all around — anything I see, I use,” he said. “Even the news. That’s the main reason why I use different characters, to get different points across. I don’t really use my opinion. So it might seem like my opinion is switching if I kept one character.

“Say, Viktor Vaughn, his opinion might be different from DOOM. Or he might not care about a particular topic. This way, I cover different angles. Everybody’s opinion deserves to be heard. There are different ways of looking at things. Nobody has to be wrong.”

Speaking on his musical process, he said, “Usually the idea comes first, then I’ll apply it to whatever character it happens to fit. I could be trying to finish a project for DOOM when — pow! — I get a Vik idea out the blue. It comes in different patterns. Sometimes I just get on a DOOM roll, though, and I’m just rollin’.”