By Sean Flinn | May 26, 2000
 |
| "I'm gonna give it to 'em raw": Kool Keith prepares to play his toughest persona yet -- himself.
|
Buy Kool Keith's music
Visit Kool Keith's
Web site
|
|
ADULT VIDEO BLOWOUT: $5.99! The blazing neon sign is the mom 'n' pop video store's only identifying feature. It catches the eye of Kool Keith's music publisher immediately, Keith having jumped out of my car to return two videos, minus their dust jackets. "They don't rent videos without dust jackets, do they?" Keith's music publisher asks me, knowing full well what kind of videos get rented sans cover.
I don't respond. Having only tenuously connected with Keith minutes ago, my biggest concern is getting him back in the car so we can proceed to our scheduled interview. Keith's music publisher, Choler staff writer Joseph "Gazoo" McCombs and I waited outside Keith's apartment building for 20 minutes before confirming, by cell phone, that he was not at home. He was out for a walk. He'd meet us at a nearby intersection -- which he did, sparing his publicist a bit of embarrassment and justifying the hour that Gazoo and I spent driving to Hollywood. If Keith actually makes it out of the video store and back into the car, everything will be fine.
He does. And it is fine -- after a brief diversion into a liquor store for some Guinness Stout (Keith's favorite breakfast beverage because, he tells us, "It gets me pumped up"). As we cruise down La Brea Avenue, en route to a coffee shop for lunch, Keith is happily sipping his beer as I scan madly for cops, and everything is A-OK.
I'll say it now, because it needs to be cleared up before we move on: Kool Keith -- a.k.a. Dr. Octagon, a.k.a. Dr. Dooom, a.k.a. Mr. Gerbick, Rhythm X, Fly Ricky the Wine Taster and, most recently, Black Elvis -- is not insane. He doesn't eat rat sandwiches, doesn't show up for interviews in a crash helmet and a cape. Although he is muscular, it's doubtful he could throw a 1,000-pound walrus through a brick wall (as his character Dr. Dooom claims), and he doesn't have skin like an alligator (that's the 208-year-old uncle of Dr. Octagon, Mr. Gerbik, talking). As far as I know, he doesn't own a monkey-green ragtop Seville (check "Supergalactic Lover" on Black Elvis).
At worst, Keith is hard to pin down. He's also suffering from the strangest identity crisis in the history of hip-hop. While some artists spend obscene amounts of time and money trying to market themselves as something they're not (hard-core, project-bred, bling bling -- whatever), Keith has spent the past few years trying to prove to the world that he is not -- repeat, not -- a space alien.
"Certain fans got more into a cornball state of mind," he says over a lunch of hamburgers and soda. "Like those Octagon fans -- they were weird. And I was meeting weirder people, handing me, like, weird gifts at venues. Too weird. Just overrating who they think I am. And I think that a lot of people who live through my CDs and stuff in a negative way, they might say, 'Well, Keith must be this weird guy. He doesn't go shopping; he doesn't like girls.' You know, my personal life was stripped through my CD. They think, 'He's a guy who probably doesn't eat food. He might be a space alien or something.' That's why I had to get serious. I found out that people weren't taking me serious. I might present something out there, and they twist it."
The doctors (Dooom and Octagon) are through taking appointments. Black Elvis has left the building, and Kool Keith has moved back in.
"I'm a regular guy now. I went back to that format of 'me.' And I think that helped me out a lot because it eliminated weird people. [During the period of Octagon and Dooom] I found myself drawing weird groups [asking] for me to do records. And when they'd see me in a studio session, they'd get a misinterpretation of me. They'd want me to do a weird record. They want me to be in there all day saying a weird chorus, and it drew weird people, which I didn't go for, naturally. And now, I feel like I might do an album with Patti LaBelle. Who says I can't? I don't have to be on a Weird Al Yankovic tip. That's not me. I go to clubs, I go to strip clubs, I buy clothes, I go to the Beverly Center, I go to the malls -- I mean, how regular can I be? That's what I think a lot of fans out there don't understand. They lost that point about me: my reality. They think, 'Oh, this is a guy we can mentally go on vacation with. We play the CD, and we're mentally on vacation.' And now it's back to a reality thing."
Keith has been battling the public's perception of him ever since 1996, when the Dr. Octagon project with producer-DJ Dan "the Automator" Nakamura dropped. While praised by critics for his unique themes and subject matter, Octagon made it easy for fans to perceive Keith as an oddity unworthy of the popularity or respect given to those he's inspired. The marketably insane Ol' Dirty Bastard (a.k.a. Big Baby Jesus) gets more props than Keith. Never mind Keith's massive success in collaborating with Prodigy on their double platinum The Fat of the Land album. ("Smack My Bitch Up"? That's a sample of Keith, taken from the Ultramagnetic MCs' "Give the Drummer Some"). Or the massive influence the Ultramagnetic MCs have had on hip-hop. (The September 1999 issue of The Source cites Keith's UMCs work as pioneering everything from vocalizing off-beat to insisting that hip-hop lyrics don't need to rhyme).
Despite all of this, Keith remains the crazy uncle of the hip-hop family. They'd lock him in the basement if they could.
He takes some of the blame for the misconceptions himself, acknowledging that he enjoys playing the different characters he creates but that he misjudged the ways in which his fans would perceive his role-playing. But he also believes -- and he makes a strong case -- that his image suffered at the hands of various record labels, most notably Sony, that he claims mismanaged him, pushing the novelty of his work while downplaying any hint of authenticity.
|
|
| Click
here
to read our review of Kool Keith's
Matthew |
|
|
"I had a bad situation with a young manager, a kid who didn't know anything about the record industry at all," he says of his recent battles over Black Elvis/Lost in Space. "The representation of me was poor. I've been in the business so long that I know the record business, but I tend to let other people handle it for me sometimes because I feel like I have other things to do besides handle the music industry. And it's like, I let people do it, and it didn't turn out quite right after all. And that lack of experience led to a downfall -- two people misrepresenting me. And when I said I needed to talk to the record company and I needed to have a certain way of putting my album out, it was misconceived. So I went back independent.
"I tried to get Sony to do the Black Elvis thing, and it was supposed to be Black Elvis with a wig, regular clothes, jewelry and chains and stuff, but they made it into a cornball image. They took it into a poppy thing. That wasn't interpreted by me. They didn't listen to me. They didn't have marketing meetings. They didn't do the video right; they did a corny video that I had nothing to do with. And I blame the representation I had for that. I let a dumb manager handle that part for me."
And then there was the DreamWorks/Dr. Octagon/Lollapalooza fiasco. Scheduled to tour with the annual traveling alternative-music festival in 1997, Dr. Octagon turned up a no-show when Keith disappeared a few days before the festival's opening date. While it looked at the time like Keith had pulled some sort of schizophrenic burn on his band mates, the reality was far, far different.
"My whole reason for canceling Lollapalooza was a big, good reason. It was about the practice and me not going out and embarrassing myself, and it was basically a miscommunication with DreamWorks and with Automator [giving] me a late notice and [asking me to go] out to do a show four or five days before a big tour starts with no practice. Plus, they didn't discuss any money at the time. I'm not just going to hop on a bus like some new Joe neck-bone."
|
| 
