Herb Sundays 81: Kool Keith
Rap's great psychic wanderer, in disco mode.
Herb Sundays 81: Kool Keith (Apple, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon).
Art by Michael Cina.
“People think I listen to rap or write weird rap all day everyday. I zone out to disco jams all the time and especially when I’m on a long plane ride” - Kool Keith
Kool Keith, born Keith Matthew Thornton is one of history’s finest rappers. He has been a fixture in Hip-Hop since the early ‘80s, first as a dancer/b-boy and then as a founding member of the seminal group, Ultramagnetic MCs.
I talk a bit about the power of aliases and personas in this newsletter and Kool Keith, in his various guises, is amongst the most ambitious in this particular lane. Work-ethic style, he rides in the wake of Prince, anti-industry and stockpiling songs for his own pleasure. He told PopMatters in 2017:
“I just naturally like to record. To me, I think making records is very therapeutic for myself. I make records natural. I make records seriously for the time that I’m making them, but I feel good making them. I’m not phony making them. I’m really making those songs. For me I’m not trying to make them for a record label or something. It’s like Prince working on the songs that end up on his album.”
The New York Times's Jon Caramanica correctly calls him “one of the great non sequitur rappers of all time” and continues:
“Like some amalgam of science fiction fabulist and pornographer, Kool Keith — a 1980s innovator turned ’90s eccentric turned 2000s mystery — pinballs among topics, sentiments and scenes. His tone is amelodic, declarative and a touch absent-minded, as if starting fresh with each rhyme. A random sample of touchstones: Lynn Swann, Tyrannosaurus rex, laundry detergent, onion rings. He finds magic in the absurd and the minute. It is a style almost impossible to emulate.”
Rap is not terribly inviting to its elders, and on the eve of Hip-Hop’s 50th anniversary (tagged to DJ Kool Herc’s August 11, 1973 party in his Bronx apartment building), there are scarce MCs who can lay as much claim to being part of the whole thing and still be vital.
The closest parallels in rap may be Oakland’s bawdy troubadour Too Short (with 21 albums next to Keith’s 39) but the comparison ends because Short never broke character. The other would be the late MF Doom (a graffiti writer who also was in a seminal group at first) with which he shared a label and an alias for a short time. Doom’s references are a bit less lurid than Keith’s and the mask is a bit to connect with as a common theme across most of his career. Perhaps a better line of history to follow is by putting him in the pantheon of Afrofuturists alongside Rammelzee and Basquiat, otherworldly cultural innovators, beyond explanation and definition.
It’s tempting to Tokyo Drift into the “wow, what a weird guy” train of thought when talking about Keith, but it’s sort of condescending. Yes, part of his Paul Bunyan myth is that he spent time at Bellevue Hospital for mental illness (which he has dispelled). Yes, Keith may sometimes sound absent-minded but when he’s on, he’s a verbal freight train, one of the most clear and convincing MCs. Content-wise, Keith’s various themes call to mind a sci-fi Blowfly, but the sex and violence are too little Cronenberg body horror-ish or Troma Films funny to be truly offensive, but he rides the line close.
I’m no Keith completist, and it would be hard to be one. Spotify boasts a fan-made 1,400+ Keith playlist if you want a go, but even this leaves out some key Keith projects (a Redditor laments a missing one: “Spankmaster is definitely a top 5 Kool Keith album!”). The venerable Passion Of The Weiss blog boasts late-career best of’s, and can help draw up a map.
The project that may be most recognizable to my readers would be Dr. Octagon, a collaboration between Keith, producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, and turntablist DJ QBert. Their debut in 1996 kicked off Keith’s seminal solo run which starts with Octagon and closes around Black Elvis (which I think you can draw a line to Yves Tumor and Tyler from), the alias from which a second volume is due this Fall.
In the excellent Cabbages newsletter, Gary Suarez goes inside the moment:
Originally released on Dan The Automator’s Bulk Recordings some three years prior, and then reissued to a wider global audience via Mo Wax [Editor’s note: Then Dreamworks], the album dubbed Dr. Octagonecologyst fully brought Kool Keith out of the smoldering wreckage of the forever underrated hip-hop squadron Ultramagnetic MCs. His cred as a solo artist grew substantially with that album and the major label effort Black Elvis/Lost in Space. Though he still dropped albums under his earlier moniker, specifically the vicious Matthew and the raunchy Sex Style, he seemed enamored of the artistic freedom afforded to him through pseudonyms in the mid-to-late 1990s, as Octagon, as Black Elvis, and, indeed, as Dr. Dooom.
Octagon arrived at a time when rap was making a concerted Bad Boy-driven move on the mainstream which left room for new entrants in the underground. The 1996-1997 season was sort of a line in the sand, and while De La Soul warned us of the dangers ahead, Dr. Octagon represented the apotheosis of a few deviant strains of rap. For one, the emergence of credible indie/backpack rap which traded in sci-fi themes such as the Rawkus roster and Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus album, and two, in the global flirtations in Transatlantantic Electronica, and trip-hop, including the scratch-driven “turntablism” concept.
The reason the project worked is that Keith is actually no Herb, and his Ridley Scott command of dark ship sci-fi pornocore is uncontested. The album is a thousand-yard stare into the abyss, it’s goofy but not funny, and it sort of hits as scary, like the Pushead-designed sleeve (where most of Metallica’s best graphics came from).
This period you could also see Keith as a fiction writer of sorts who showed his skills as one of rap’s great satirists. There’s an early Bret Easton Ellis-type transgressive streak as our hero plays out his fantasies. The Dr. Dooom alias project First Come First Served sleeve was done by design team Pen & Pixel who were then the kings of the bling aesthetic for clients such as No Limit Records, but instead of luxury, Keith orders a grody tableau.
For Herb Sundays, Keith upends expectations yet again and delivers a lean disco and boogie set which if you read his “5-10-15-20” for Pitchfork, won’t come as a surprise. It also makes sense as disco was indeed the original b-boy tonic, the dancer’s music, and origin story. In this video you can see Keith in the stripes, almost impossibly, a man out of time:
As it relates to performance, in the video for the amazing “Poppa Large” (1992) off Ultramag’s 2nd LP, Keith is perfectly cast as leading man (he’s the only main MC on the track, so…), leaning into the crazy man image, hung upside down and bound in a straitjacket. Even held hostage, his charisma is intact.
For me, the most poignant Keith is when there’s a little daylight of vulnerability. His work with underheralded producer and MC, Godfather Don (who I put in the same sentence as Large Professor and Buckwild) is my favorite. Godfather’s beats always feel like a hair’s breadth away from a depressive episode, big lumbering jazz riffs over cave beats. Through this prism, Keith’s high pitch sounds both more exciting and pissed-off as a result. It’s just great rap, pure and simple.
So while the red carpet rolls out for Hip-Hop 50 this year, you’re gonna see a lot of artists getting their flowers that are long overdue. Who you may not see onstage is Keith who was too low key for a Hollywood film career, too weird for the rap mainstream, and carries a CV too vast and inconsistent for your “best MCs of all time” list. But he’ll be there, maybe in the balcony like a crazy Muppet or under the stage Phantom style, talking shit, or maybe already en route to another session. Just outrapping your favorite rapper, like it should be.
From the field (some choice mixes this week).
Herb 31, Josh Marcy shared this playlist of Herb fare from Alan Palomo (Neon Indian) which is hitting the spot.
DMY did a “best Keith track list” type thing and is great.
The immortal wisdom of Keith is best shared in video form below. Be Seltzer my friends…