Out & About

Kool Keith should never worry about finding his niche in a hip-hop world obsessed with marketing and gimmicks, because he’s got the market cornered on total insanity. We’re talking the sort of blue material that sounds like Blowfly and Redd Foxx getting together to tag team Millie Jackson, or Ishmael Reed going off on just about anything. The production is always threadbare, just a scattershot of bump-and-grind beats and off-the-wall samples. But it’s not low-rent, gutter-meet-gallows humor looking for a cheap laugh. Keith’s artful enough to wiggle something truly unique out of seemingly perverted flamboyance.

He comes back swinging on his latest, Spankmaster on TVT, a bumpier ride than last year’s Matthew but far more entertaining. And don’t mind the butt cheeks in booty shorts on the cover–Keith’s not simply petting the ladies this time out. He’s got other asses to spank. He goes ballistic in “Drugs,” shamelessly name-dropping black entertainers who’ve had public battles with substance abuse. But he’s not trying to offend; Keith’s got some beefs to unload. He sounds more vindictive than Spike Lee on “N.B.A.” and “Jealous,” tossing lyrical daggers at basketball players and hip-hop industry stars for acting like snobs whose shit don’t stink once the greenbacks start rolling in. Elsewhere, he flays rap’s marketing veneer on “I’m a Tell-U” when he growls, “You wear black all the time, you look wack all the time/Got the nerve to try to pose with a girl, then spit a hard rhyme.”

Admittedly, Keith hasn’t unveiled a personality that’s as compelling as his Dr. Octagon persona, but you gotta give the man some credit; he’s got more wild ideas than Ross Perot. And he always packs his albums with more booty, boobs and blood than a Russ Meyer and Dario Argento double feature. That may, in fact, be Keith’s best analog–’60s and ’70s exploitation flicks. When almost every hip-hop concept album is built around some futureworld, cartoon saga–what’s up with hip-hop’s superhero, comic-book caper crap anyway?–Keith’s off on a planet all his own. He struts through the sort of completely bizarre realm that may align him with the brother-from-another-planet jive that fueled Sun Ra, Lee “Scratch” Perry and George Clinton, musical eccentrics whose genius lay in realizing that the best way to counter being an invisible black man in America’s strange land is to be the most out-there muthaphucka on the planet. Keith may not have that same sort of subversive politic running through his musical élan yet, but he’s sure as hell on the right track.