Medic!

Kool Keith becomes Dr. Doom

by Alex Pappademas

"I like to battle myself," Keith Thornton proclaimed back when he was an Ultramagnetic MC in '88. That alone doesn't prove he's the first schizoid rapper -- these days, he blames his post-Ultramagnetics stay at Bellevue on "exhaustion." But whereas most rappers have one personality, or less, Thornton -- a/k/a Kool Keith, a/k/a Dr. Octagon, a/k/a Mr. Gerbik, a/k/a Big Willie Smith, and known, at least this week, as Dr. Doom -- has a full Hollywood Squares board. And though Biggie Smalls may have been plagued with "Suicidal Thoughts," Keith's gotta be the first MC to murder his own alter ego on an album, wasting that "Dr. Octagon-ass muthafucka" with a 12-gauge in the opening skit on his new album, First Come, First Served (Funky Ass).

On his last two full-lengths, Sex Style (also on Funky Ass) and Dr. Octagon (re-released, during the Octagon project's abortive stint with DreamWorks, as Dr. Octagonecologyst), Keith vented, exorcising black angst, sweaty-palmed kinkiness, and rap-industry stress in strings of rectum jokes and darkly absurd non sequiturs. Both albums were conceptual pieces. Octagon (loosely) chronicled the adventures of an unhinged space-alien gynecologist, a "paramedic fetus of the East" representing "the Church of the Operating Room." Sex Style starred Keith as a hilariously low-rent pimp with a fistful of filthy Polaroids.

The closest thing to a concept on First Come is Keith saying, "Look in the fuckin' mirror, you're wack . . . fuck you," a sentiment he expresses on "No Chorus" and reiterates, over creeping snares and petroleum-jelly Moogs, on the 18 shit-talkin' tracks that follow. Good thing no one, but no one, talks shit the way Keith does -- each diss has a visual, three-dimensional life of its own, each serial-murder/prison-rape boast makes Eminem sound as hung-up as Dawson Leery. "While you sleep," Keith deadpans at one point, "I take pictures of bullets in your navel/Open your face and pour milk in your forehead . . . I march in black sheets on the sunset streets/With hoods like Dracula I walk in back of ya/Dragging your stomach parts to McDonald's/Drinkin' Absolut bottles and bottles/Why you tryin' to fuck with the most exotic models?"

Later, he tenderly adopts a sewer rat (because "Michael Jackson had one"), accuses rival MCs of wearing skidmarked Victoria's Secret (on the borderline-homoerotic "I Run Rap"), and brags that his vocal cameo on the Prodigy's "Diesel Power" netted him $40 million. No matter what, it's the same story -- Keith knows that he's the greatest and that the world owes him all the booty/power/respect it stupidly lavishes on rappers who suck. But since he can't make the real world treat him like the Mack, he's stuck at the top of a small world, Ron Jeremy dreaming of being Brad Pitt. He can get Pen & Pixel Graphics, the Photoshop imagineers behind those ghetto-phantasmagorical No Limit/Cash Money CD sleeves, to design his (satirical) cover shot, but he's still not a player, and it leaves him so frustrated that his mental orgy scenes keep turning into snuff films. Or maybe the dude's just nuts.

In any case, a little of this goes a long way, especially toward the end, when Keith starts mocking hair-weaved welfare moms as if he were reading for a UPN pilot. And if Keith really despises wack Doc Ock impersonators, he should quit ceding the mike to them -- Sir Menelik, who cameo'd on a few Octagon tracks, is no Kool Keith, and First Come second banana Jacky Jasper is no Sir Menelik. But there's always an arresting image ("rotten skulls on my waterbed") or a gag (like Keith speaking the hook on "You Live at Home with Your Mom" through a tracheotomy-patient voice box) to snap your head back. Bonus (sampled) cameo: Elliott Gould, yo!

FROM THE RIDICULOUS to the sublime: it's been four years since the Oakland duo Blackalicious dropped their casually brilliant debut EP, the now-scarce Melodica (Solesides). They'll have an album, Nia, out this fall on the 3-2-1 label. Until then, check out their East Bay space-cowboy style on the bionically buoyant seven-song A2G EP (also 3-2-1). Gift of Gab bobs and weaves and signifies at breakneck speed, giving shouts out to "all recovered alcoholics chillin' up in AA," while Chief Xcel cuts up country clavinets and chewy, surging funk. The show-stopping closer is "Alphabet Aerobics," where Gab busts 26 all-alliterative verses ("Artificial amateurs aren't at all amazing/Analytically, I assault, animate things/Broken barriers, bounded by the bomb beat . . . ") while a Cut Chemist beat races him to the finish line. It's hip-hop's future in microcosm -- charismatic dudes with talent for days, finding endless inspiration in the same old letters.