However “One Beer” is heat, bleary, and completely engrossing; it additionally underlines—unsurprisingly given its title—the way in which DOOM’s model refracts via completely different illicit substances. In an interview with the Los Angeles Overview of Books, Open Mike Eagle characterised his favourite rapper’s early model in a very incisive method. In discussing how DOOM turned more and more regimented over the course of his profession—the skittering flows from Doomsday, which continuously spilled over the ends of measures, being corralled, by the point of Madvillainy and MM..FOOD, and stuffed deep into the pockets of beats—Eagle mentioned: “I really feel just like the MF DOOM on Doomsday is like, drunk, attempting to outlive […] he’s recording like he’s not going to reside for much longer. There’s an embrace of the uncooked that’s each aesthetic and alcoholic—particularly alcoholic.”
Whereas it may be tough to know what, in Daniel Dumile’s life, was and was not efficiency, profiles of DOOM from the 2000s make the heavy consuming appear, certainly, like a plague on his actual life. On “One Beer,” Madlib’s beat flits between mischief and tender tragedy, and DOOM’s first line on the track (“There’s just one beer left…”) sounds oddly, ominously despairing. Madvillain, whereas additionally evincing an “embrace of the uncooked,” is unmistakably a document about and knowledgeable by weed. That is grimmer, extra solitary; for all of the cartoon supervillain posturing, FOOD extra continuously seems like a missive from somebody hoping to drag us down into the muck with him. Even when the previous is recalled fondly, liquor looms: in a while the LP, DOOM will reminisce in regards to the days he drank Hennessy straight as a result of he couldn’t afford sodas to chase it.
However by FOOD, that alcoholic sloppiness had largely been scrubbed from DOOM’s method. That is starkest on the opening track, “Beef Rapp,” which is quoted extensively by Mos Def in that video. However the place Mos’ eyes bug out as he remembers traces—“He wears a masks simply to cowl the uncooked flesh/A moderately ugly brother with flows that’s attractive”— DOOM locks right into a low, unwavering growl. (After an early model of Madvillain leaked on-line, along with including new songs, DOOM re-recorded his vocals for the whole mission, abandoning his typically buoyant supply to rappel down a number of octaves, right into a deep baritone; he opens FOOD with a good flatter have an effect on.) Whereas the album is dotted with pops of shade and winking pattern flips, “Beef Rapp” appears purposefully drab, like each the craft and content material are supposed to be grayed out.