6B — Thursday, April 6, 2017
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

When the “Rick & Morty” 

surprise episode that dropped 
last Saturday gave nod to a 
long lost Szechuan McNugget 
dipping sauce, the internet 
blew up and “Binging with 
Babish” was on the case to 
try to recreate the mysterious 
sauce.

Andrew Rea, the man behind 

the hit YouTube channel has 
carved out his own little corner 
of the web cooking famous 
dishes from movies and TV 
shows. From the burgers of 
“Bob’s Burgers” to the prison 
sauce from “Goodfellas,” he’s 
cooking his way through the 
screen canon.

“Since before movie theater 

snacks were a thing, people 
were sneaking Baby Ruths 
into movie theaters back in 
the ’20s,” Rea said. “You can’t 
go see a movie in a theater 
without a box of popcorn or 
sneaking in some goobers in 
your jacket.”

Although his mother taught 

him how to cook at a young age, 
Rea’s background is really in 
film. He didn’t go to culinary 
school, but his love of movies 
and television — fostered while 
at film school — led him to 
food.

“I’ve always loved television 

and movies and TV and movies 
always seem to love food,” Rea 
said.

He started doing the show 

accidentally. After investing 
in a camera and light kit, he 
found he had the perfect set up 
for a cooking show and decided 
to give it a go.

“I had just seen an episode 

of ‘Parks & Rec’ where Chris 
and Ron had a burger cook-

off, and Chris’s burger was 
this list of bullshit foodie 
buzzwords,” Rea said. “And I 
was like ‘Would that actually 
taste good?’”

In the episode, Chris cooks 

a turkey burger with a papaya 
chutney, 
taleggio 
cheese 

crisp, micro greens and black 
truffle aioli all on a gluten-free 
brioche bun. So, yeah, basically 
a mess of trendy, pseudo-
healthy food. Ron deftly beats 
him with a beef burger on a 
classic, white bun. In his video, 
Rea cooks both, and he comes 
to a similar conclusion. The 
beef burger wins, but Chris’s 
burger does taste as delicious 
as Beyoncé smells.

“I had to take some creative 

liberties,” 
Rea 
said. 
“Like 

taleggio, that’s an example of 
where I know the writers were 
just fucking around because 
taleggio is a soft cheese and 
there’s no way you can make a 
crisp out of it, it’ll just bleed oil 
and turn into a mess, I tried.“

Instead, Rea blends Fontina 

and Parmesan to create a 
similar funky taste to the 
taleggio, but with a harder 
cheese. 
Rea 
does 
pretty 

thorough research for most of 
his dishes, synthesizing parts 
from various recipes to create 
something he thinks to be most 
true to the source material.

“For ‘Inglorious Bastards’ 

’s strudel I was looking at the 
oldest, Austrian / Viennese 
strudel recipes I could get my 
hands on to try to recreate 
something that would have 
been of that era,” Rea said.

Beyond 
historical 
and 

textual 
accuracy, 
Rea’s 

signature is to make as much 
from scratch as possible, even 
when it’s not necessary. He 
grinds his own beef, makes 
his own pasta and even made a 

whole Thanksgiving dinner for 
the “Friends” episode.

“There wasn’t really any 

need for me to make an entire 
Thanksgiving meal and make 
every element as good as I 
possibly 
could,” 
Rea 
said. 

“They like it when I’m a little 
over the top I think.”

YouTube 
is 
the 
perfect 

platform 
for 
that 
sort 
of 

over-the-top 
content. 
With 

hundreds 
of 
super 
quick 

Tasty 
and 
Tasty-spinoff 

videos 
spamming 
newfeeds 

and timelines everyday, the 
internet seemed to be the right 
way to break into the food 
entertainment world.

“YouTube 
and 
Internet 

cooking videos in general are 
the way of the future,” Rea 
said. “This is a generation that 
likes 
compact, 
information 

rich entertaining.”

Rea was inspired by fast, 

aesthetically pleasing style of 
Tasty videos, but wanted to 
make videos for people who 
were more serious about cook.

“Let’s do this same thing 

where 
it’s 
like 
a 
nonstop 

barrage of information, food 
porn and let’s throw a little 
entertainment 
in 
there 
as 

well,” Rea said, “That’s what I 
think people are after.”

The match Rea has made — 

that of food and film — seems 
to be one made in heaven, 
and Rea hopes to develop the 
channel into a fulltime career.

“I have a lot of ideas for 

verticals 
and 
spin 
offs, 

different little show concepts 
that I want to explore and as 
soon as I’m able to make this 
my full time job,” Rea said. 
“Which I hope will be pretty 
soon.” 

In the meantime, he’s going 

to keep binging on, well, 
everything.

COURTESY OF ANDREW REA

A still of “Binging with Babish”
YouTube’s star ‘Babish’ 
now combines film & food

In an interview about his series “Binging with Babish,” Andrew 
Rea talks experimenting and innovating on the small screen

Reflecting on MF Doom’s 
nonsensical ‘Mm.. Food’

Food has become a focal point 

of sorts for today’s hip hop elite. 
Action Bronson styles himself 
as much a rapper as he does a 
culinary raconteur. Rick Ross 
found himself on the forefront 
of memedom thanks to his love 
for pears. Hell, Drake has his 
own brand of whiskey. It isn’t 
that good, mind you, but it 
exists, and that’s what matters. 
That all being said, food’s 
newfound hip hop limelight, 
while bombastic, is the result of 
years of rap’s old guard’s lyrical 
love for food finally bubbling 
over into present day — and 
what emcee to best illustrate 
one of the many virtues of the 
genre’s relationship with food 
than the erratic and enigmatic 
MF Doom?

MF Doom is likely one of 

hip hop’s most inadvertently 
versatile emcees. After releasing 
six different albums in a 10 year 
period, one would think that 
listening to his discography 
could afford them a fairly solid 
understanding of Doom’s ways. 
It isn’t a terribly hokey idea — the 
same could largely be said for a 
variety of other rappers who 
have been around longer than 
Doom, but fail to boast as large 
of a discography as he does. Yet, 
if you attempt to compare any 
one of his works against another, 
you’re likely quick to realize 
Doom’s 
unhealthy 
penchant 

for 
throwing 
his 
listeners 

absurd, 
aural 
curveballs. 

Boisterous production is often 
nestled against lyrics that are 
simultaneously 
nonsensical 

and bizarrely genius — lyrics 
that Doom threads together 
so cohesively that they have 
a near percussive quality to 
them. 
Those 
features 
are 

fundamental to Doom’s style, 
but his application varies across 
a dauntingly large spectrum — 
but I digress. This isn’t a lesson 
in Doom’s discography by any 
means, but it is important to 
understand the foundation of 
the man’s crazed style before 
taking a gander at a more 
relevant example of his artistry, 
in 
this 
case, 
his 
blatantly 

culinarily-grounded caricature 
of an album, Mm.. Food.

Just as its name suggests, the 

record’s subject matter primarily 
relies on food and references 
to it. The masked enigma we 
know and love finds himself 
rapping about beer, snacks and 
gluttonous desserts 
over 
and 
over 

again. It’s absurd, 
absolutely. It’s also 
slightly gimmicky, 
undoubtedly. 
But 

the 
fact 
that 
it 

works so well in 
spite of those facts 
is a testament to the enduring 
style that Doom so often touts. 
A fan of double and triple 
entendres, his use of references 
to food often becomes a medium 
for laudable insults (grounded in 
his trademark clever wordplay) 
to other hip hop contemporaries 
— a skit on “Gumbo” memorable 
mentions “Not perfect for every 
situation but edible (w)rappers 
could actually beef up your next 
meal,” illustrative of the kind 
of brute braggadocio layered 
within his songs.

That being said, as much 

as his lyrics gattle and his 
production bounces, his songs 
tread absurdist waters too — but 
that’s not to say it’s a terribly 
negative mark against Doom or 
the album, either. Oftentimes, on 
Mm.. Food listeners find Doom 
exchanging lyrical cohesion for 
aural excellence, touting his 
bread and butter of memorable 

one-liners juxtaposed against 
kitschy, unconventional beats 
— something his few guests 
have a knack for doing as well. 
The yet-to-be-unmasked Mr. 
Fantastik holds the title of one 
of the most memorable lines 
on Mm.. Food, spitting “True 
to the ski mask New York’s my 
origin / Play a fake gangsta like 
an old accordion” on the album’s 
magnum opus, “Rapp Snitch 
Knishes.” Isolated, many of Mm.. 
Food’s lines don’t seem terribly 
noteworthy, but in the context 
of the album’s instrumentation 
and emotions, they come off as 
masterfully constructed.

Why Doom grounds this 

album so deeply 
in food remains 
as much of a 
mystery as the 
man himself. One 
interpretation 
is 
that 
when 

listening to Mm.. 
Food, Doom’s use 

of food anchors his artistry in a 
way that allows him to construct 
one of the genre’s more creative 
and (laudably) absurd works. 
His lyrics are vehicles to a 
simple, singular message — 
Doom is one of the genre’s best, 
and he’s well aware of that 
fact. He hammers that message 
home by slapping together an 
unnecessary backdrop grounded 
in food purely to create an 
album that’s humorously over-
the-top, 
and 
unwaveringly 

(and 
unapologetically) 
self-

aggrandizing to boot. Who else 
would do that but the very best? 
That was probably a rhetorical 
question he’s asked himself 
multiple 
times 
over 
when 

putting together the record. Just 
like he notes on the album, “It’s 
about the beats / Not about the 
streets and who food he about 
to eat.”

ANAY KATYAL

Managing Arts Editor

RHYMESAYERS ENTERTAINMENT

Rapper MF Doom

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
ARTIST PROFILE

An exploration of the absurdity of MF Doom’s oft-forgotten record

MADELEINE GAUDIN

Senior Arts Editor

Basement Arts confronts 
unspoken female violence

COMMUNITY CULTURE PREVIEW

Recent play “Dear” questions nature of violence in womanhood 

Set in a communal bathroom 

of a college dorm, the play 
“Dear” follows four women’s 
encounter with violence and 
how it affects their lives and 
their womanhood.

“It’s really interesting to 

see how verbal and physical 
violence affects these three 
women,” said Elle Smith, an 
SMTD junior and director of 
the show. “We simultaneously 
hear 
these 
stories 
of 
the 

atrocities 
committed 
by 

other women who have been 
sentenced to jail for their 
crimes.”

The play considers how 

the acts of violence by female 
killers connect to the day-
to-day circumstances college 
students face. Smith reflected 
on the parallel between what 
this play is exploring and how 
audiences can relate to its 
themes.

Four 
women 
— 
April, 

Francie, Greta and Hazel — are 
the driving forces of the show.

“April 
is 
the 
character 

who 
we 
see 
through 
her 

monologues,” 
Smith 
said. 

“She is very pretty and very 
girly and she is undervalued 
because of that.”

April, 
played 
by 
SMTD 

freshman Christie Moyle, is a 
progressive character; during 
a two-week period and as time 
passes, the audience is able 

to witness how her character 
evolves.

“She 
ends 
her 
section 

very 
differently 

than she begins 
it,” 
Smith 
said. 

Additionally, 
Francie, 
played 

by SMTD senior 
Zoey Bond, poses 
a 
contrast 
in 

personality, which 
allows the play to 
move through a 
series of different 
character 
dynamics 
and 

interactions.

“Francie is sort 

of the ‘Regina George’ type 
character and as we get to see 
more about her, we realize 

BAILEY KADIAN

Daily Arts Writer

that 
she 
is 
actually 
quite 

vulnerable,” Smith added. The 
other two characters are Hazel 
and Greta, the best friends of 
April and Francie. 

“Hazel and Greta are the 

two sidekick type characters. 
Greta (played by SMTD junior 
Savanna Crosby) is Francie’s 
best friend and she is constantly 
looking for validation with 
her friendships with other 

women,” 
Smith 

said. “She [Greta] 
loves to write and 
is more sensitive, 
but 
when 
she 

is 
aligned 
with 

Francie—she 
can 

bite.”

Meanwhile, 

Greta’s 
counterpart 
Hazel, played by 
SMTD sophomore 
Megumi 
Nakamura, 
is 

April’s 
best 

friend and “we see her as 
she is reacting to the loss of 
her friend, but she’s not as 

victimized as she appears to 
be.”

Smith 
admits 
that 
the 

casting process was difficult 
because there were so many 
women who brought different 
elements to these roles.

“We had nearly fifteen girls 

audition and it was incredible 
to see so many young women 
interested 
in 
this 
play,” 

Smith said. “They all brought 
something very unique to the 
table and it was definitely the 
most difficult thing I have ever 
had to cast.”

The play explores violent 

acts as the central idea, while 
thinking about other ideas of 
womanhood, of men and the 
power of unity.

“We are looking at how else 

violence is expressed, if not 
physically. 
Thinking 
about 

these three women, what does 
it mean when we are fighting 
with each other? And not 
standing 
together?” 
Smith 

asked.

“Dear” also abandons male 

roles when considering acts of 

violence. The appearance of 
men or discussion about them 
is a rare occurrence in this play.

“There 
are 
few 
men 

mentioned in the play, and 
when they are, it a strategic 
mention of who they are and 
the role these men play in 
these women’s lives,” Smith 
discussed.

Lily Houghton, the show’s 

writer, gives a lot of flexibility 
to the cast as they learn what 
works and what doesn’t in 
transitioning the piece from 
script to stage.

“That’s part of the fun of 

working with a new work—
something that may read really 
well doesn’t translate to the 
stage, but it was really fine in a 
read-through,” Smith said.

This play aims to unite 

and encourage women, while 
illuminating important themes 
in all of our lives, and, Smith 
said, “It is important (that) 
women come to see this show 
to realize that we are stronger 
together, rather than fighting 
apart.”

MM.. Food

MF Doom

Rhymesayers 
Entertainment

“Dear”

Studio One 

Walgreen Drama 

Center

April 6th, 7th & 8th 

@ 8 P.M. 

April 8th @ 11 P.M. 

