MF Doom Achieves His First Solo Top 10 With ‘Mm..Food’ Anniversary Release

The late MF Doom achieves his first solo top 10 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart as Mm.. Food opens at No. 5 on the list dated Nov. 30 after a 20th anniversary edition of the 2004 release.

Mm..Food, released on Rhymesayers Entertainment, launches with 31,000 equivalent units earned in the U.S. in the tracking week ending Nov. 21, according to Luminate. Traditional album sales contribute 27,000 units, giving MF Doom the best sales week of his career. The flurry of sales sparking the Mm..Food’s No. 5 re-entry on the Top Album Sales chart, where MF Doom picks up his first appearance in the top 10 and highest career rank on the list.

Diving further into the sales total, 26,500 of the units derive from physical variants – including 22,000 in vinyl sales, which makes for the project’s No. 2 re-entry and a new peak on the Vinyl Albums chart. The remaining 500 units come from albums in digital forms.

In addition to the standard 15-song tracklist, the Mm..Food 20th anniversary edition comes with new album artwork, four new remixes – a Madlib retooling of “One Beer” and three different versions of “Hoe Cakes” – and seven spoken interview tracks with the artist.

Sales bolster most of the first-week performance, but Mm…Food also registered 5,000 units from streaming activity, with 5.6 million official on-demand U.S. streams for the album’s songs, and a negligible amount of track-downloads. (One unit equals the following levels of consumption: one album sale, 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams for a song on the album.)

While Mm..Food gives the rapper his first top 10 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums with a solo project, he previously visited the tier in a collaborative capacity. His joint album with Bishop Nehru, listed under the duo’s NehruvianDoom name, reached No. 10 in October 2014.

Elsewhere, Mm..Food returns to the Independent Albums chart at No. 1, the rapper’s first time in the top slot there. The project also arrives at No. 4 on the Top Rap Albums chart and re-enters at No. 18 on the Billboard 200 for its second week on the chart. On the latter, the return gives MF Doom his highest career peak on the Billboard 200 and first time inside the top 40.

From his 1999 debut, British-American rapper MF Doom carved out a lane in the independent hip-hop space in his nearly 20-year performing career, before he died at age 49 on Oct. 31, 2020, after an adverse reaction to a blood pressure medication.

While his first two albums, 1999’s Operation Doomsday and 2003’s Take Me to Your Leader, failed to make much commercial impact, he first cracked Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums with Vaudeville Villain in October 2003, which peaked at No. 99. It was the first of seven appearances on the list between his solo work and collaborative output, the latter of which includes joint albums with artists including Madlib, Danger Mouse and Czarface.