Fuck all them celery-eatin’-ass motherfuckers

I.

So the other day I was looking at The Onion looking for potential material when I ran across an interview with Kool Keith and Kutmasta Kurt. And I was like, “Damn, I had forgotten all about this Kool Keith motherfucker.”

What struck me as I looked at the photograph of Keith and Kurt mean-muggin’ in some Kobain-style blond wigs and sunglasses with matching flannel shirts was how much influence they have had, subliminal-like, on the low, and how little credit they’ve gotten.  I mean, way before Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse starting taking silly snapshots in kooky costumes, before Andre 3K was wearing wigs and messed-up-lookin’ plaid suits, you had your boy, rockin’ the plastic Elvis wigs, or wearin’ a fake Afro and make-up and wilding out in his videos.

Kool Keith as Black Elvis

There was a time when Kool Keith was basically one of the baddest motherfuckers in the world. People were all about some Dr. Octagon shit, and for a second there he had lots of people watching him wondering what he was gonna do next, as the album earned lots of love from freaky indie type kids.

Then there was the infamous Sex Style, various dubbed cassette copies of which I remember circulating around back when cassettes used to circulate around and stuff.  That was on some more underground independent type stuff (the Dr. Octagon album ended up coming out on Dreamworks eventually, if I’m not mistaken), and is a genuine classic, with such bangers as “Don’t Crush It”, “Make Up Your Mind”, “The Mack is Back”, and of course “Keep It Real…Represent”, with a textbook Kool Keith hook: “Keep it real/Represent what?/My nutsssss!”

The First Come First Served album (released under the Dr. Doom moniker) is the one most people like to say in their favorite: definitely the flyest album cover of all…Keith rocking the plastic Elvis wig with a very somber and angelic look on his face, calmly offering the listener a rat sandwich, with a big ass cockroach and a gorilla standing by his side, and a diaper being thrown out the window of a project apartment.  For my money the standout tracks here are: “No Chorus”, “Apartment 223″, “I Run Rap”, “Dr. Dooom is in the Room”, “Leave Me Alone”, and the surprisingly poignant instant classic that is “Welfare Love”.

(I used to have a huge poster of this, that I later left in care of the inhabitants of ye olde S.S. Vanderbilt. Good times.)

From there, most people feel like Keith went into a slump which he never really broke out of, i.e. he “fell off”. His major label Black Elvis…Lost in Space record totally fell through the cracks, partly because it wasn’t that hot, (aside from ­­a couple of tracks like “Livin’ Astro”, “The Girls Don’t Like the Job” or “I’m Seein’ Robots”) and I remember most people being disappointed with his show at the Cat’s Cradle on the tour for that album—personally I was kind of wasted and I dug the hell out of it if I remember correctly.

Then he put out Matthew, which people generally shit all over it, but is the one I’m really interested in talking about right now. Here you see Keith getting away from the whole “I’m-a-kooky-motherfucker-from-outer-space-who’s-all-like-perverted-and-shit” angle and do some hard, street-type stuff.

You heard hints of this on the song “Leave Me Alone” on the Dr. Dooom record, he’s like “Why you want me to wear this motorcycle helmet?/Why don’t you wear it?/Put on some wings like a parrot” or “Don’t get your imagination messed up/I’m wearing a Yankees hat and a Starter jacket, I’m not dressin’ up” And there he is on the cover of Matthew, looking mad normal, standing by the intercom like what.

Like I said, people shit on this record but as far as I’m concerned, it’s got some of his tightest verses. Instead of outer space weirdness or perverted sex fantasies, it features some of the nastiest battle lines and disses I think I’ve ever heard–for example, “No bitch in their right mind would ever have sex with you”, that’s just COLD, man. Imagine somebody said that to you, that would fuck your whole head up mentally.

Or for instance, when he goes on the attack talking ’bout: “Type of motherfucker to eat a lot of celery” , you start thinking like, “Damn, I don’t know what he’s getting at with the celery reference, but yeah, fuck all them celery-eatin’-ass motherfuckers!”

So yeah, just in general a lot of really ill lyrics, with a sick delivery.  Which is all you really look for in a Kool Keith record. I mean, production-wise, his records never really had crazy wild bust-your-whole-shit-open beats or nothin’ like that.

And as far as hooks go, he very rarely ever switches out of “repeat the title of the song four times” mode.

But in the case of Matthew, with tracks like “F.U.-M.F.” (where he just shouts “Fuck you…motherfucker!” for the chorus and that’s it), “Never Lived in the Projects” (“You never lived in the projects…you ain’t no drug-dealer”), or “Back Stage Passes” (“Back stage…Back stage passes!…you’re excited, stop looking all around”), I don’t know,  for some reason it works for me.

And yeah, maybe the majority of the tracks on the CD are weak.  You can make the same case for 90% or all hip-hop (or non-hip-hop) albums made in the last fifteen years.   Uh-huh.  Yeah, I thought so.  You know damn well in this day and age, if you buy a new CD and five out of 15 tracks are truly worth a damn, then you doin’ aiight.

In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t listened to any of Keith’s shit since Matthew, so I don’t know.  The new Dr. Dooom 2 album is out but I haven’t peeped it yet.  We’ll see.

II.

Honestly, I’ve been too busy listening to the new album by Toteking, entitled T.O.T.E.

And it may come as some surprise, but a lot of what I’ve just said about Kool Keith applies to the new one by Tote.

“Huh?”  Yeah.  Tote brings lyrics and delivery.  And in the past, the beats on his records have never really been much to get really hyped about.  On his new record he has taken steps to correct this last fault.

He’s said in interviews that he’s been listening to a lot of Kanye, Lupe, and stuff like that, I suppose that’s influenced him to update his beat science a little bit.

Whereas on the last album Un tipo cualquiera he worked exclusively with Big Hozone (from the Málaga group Hablando en Plata Squad) to create a sort of classic, old-soul kind of vibe for the tracks to go along with the generally low-key, introspective vibe, on this one, he’s brought in a variety of producers, who use a lot of synths, handclaps, 808s etc.  In fact, if you’re one of those people who only listens to rap music made with 808s at 80 bpms, he’s got something for you, too.

The album has at the very least 7 really good songs out of 17.  Not bad by my standards, considering that the other ones, while not great, aren’t bad per se.

The problem is that Tote, like Keith, doesn’t always bring it with the hooks, man.  And that’s pretty crucial.  Whereas Kool Keith sometimes seems to just throw out a phrase and repeat it a few times, Tote’s hooks have so much information packed in that they don’t really…hook you.  If Keith’s method is the “repeat the chorus four times” method, Tote’s is the “oh I’ll just take 8 bars from this verse I wrote, say it twice, and that’ll be the hook” method.  Which doesn’t really do it for me in all cases.

Complaining aside, the songs that do do it for me: “Rapear” (which features not Tote on the hook but his man Ego, who keeps it simple just repeating “Solo quiero rapear, es lo que quiero, lo que quiero“), “No Sonrío pero Todo Está Bien” (I’m not a big fan of Violadores del Verso as a group but individually I dig their guest appearances, like Lírico here), “Ya Está”, “Demasiado Pesado” (which is in fact too heavy), “Como en casa”, and “Hace Tiempo Que…”

But I must reserve special mention for the track he does with his little brother Shotta (in my humble opinion, Shotta still wins out for hip-hop album of 2008).  The song is called “Ven”, and is dedicated to “las groupies locas”.  An instant classic, and also an indication that the game is changing and that producers in Spain, while once a bit behind the times, are catching up bit by bit.

Notice the chorus inspired by this sketch from La Hora Chanante:

Which was in turn inspired by this classic jam from your boy Mr. T:

Now, if I nerd out any harder my head is going to explode, so I’ll stop here.  Questions, comments, concerns?