Dr. Kool’s Pop Quiz

Keith Thornton, Ph.d., an old professor from the new school, knows rap is here to test you

HELLO, PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS

Molly’s in the beer aisle at a Ralph’s grocery in Hollywood. She’s wearing a tennis skirt, pushing a cart, perusing the Bud.

A scrawny, longhaired white kid with a patchy mustache rolls by her side. He says, “Yo, what’s up, primetime?”followed by “What’s up, Ms. Tennis Skirt?” He’s wearing aspirational hip-hop clothing –no platinum, no leather, just multi-pocket cargo pants, canvas Converse sneakers and a stretched-out T-shirt. He hands her a card.

The card has a black man’s picture on it. The man in the picture is dressed up ghetto-fabulous, but in silly colors, baby blues and powders. The man’s wearing a nice new jersey, but has topped off his outfit with an odd, fur-covered Kangol cap. He’s standing in front of a locked-up call box at a nondescript housing complex. The card says “VIP.”

“What’s this?”asks Molly.

“That’s a VIP pass for Kool Keith Entertainment. I’m Sam Madina. I’m his right-hand man.” He parts with the words “Give me a call.”

Molly checks out of the supermarket, gets into her car with the beer and the card, and starts her engine. Knock-knock-knock. Sam taps on her window.

“Yo, call me,” Sam says, walking off toward a taxi idling in the parking lot. He slides into the cab, next to a black man in the back seat –the guy from the card: Kool Keith.

Molly goes home with the beer, and that’s where things get weird, because I’m there at Molly’s house. I flew into LAX an hour ago and am here for her party, hanging out with some old friends. I’m here to meet Kool Keith, but Kool Keith, it seems, has found me first.

“It’s a nice day, a beautiful day,” he says to me two days later when I meet him and Sam for the first time at a Denny’s on Sunset. “We woke up at 6 in the morning. We gotta patrol, see if anything new came into town. Look at those,” he says, pointing out two women across the street. “Possible APB, routine check. That was definitely a model X47, unidentified female objects. Ha-ha-ha. Those are some prospects over there.”

Throughout the day, Keith and Sam proposition a number of women: 1) the two girls across the street (“She has a nice little body,”says Keith), 2) “T-R-E-E-N-A,”a middle-aged black lady walking toward her big black Cadillac, 3) a pair of teenage blonds –“Britney-style,”according to Sam, 4) another middle-aged woman, this one toting a Louis Vuitton purse (“18 to 87,” Keith tells me, “we like the maturity”), 5) a skeptical mother with child (“I got business,”Keith says. “Your business is different than my business,”she replies) and 6) another pair of teens, two giggly black girls a hundred feet from a high school. Keith palms these two some cash with his card as Sam proceeds to explain: “Women are the inspiration for all great art.”

I ask Keith about these “prospects.”

“I do photography,”he explains. “Intimate models of the ladies. That’s my hobby. I style up the ladies, you know? I analyze a lot of my colors, a lot of my backgrounds. I give them some nice shoes and boots and stuff.”

“His theory is that he plays the odds,” says Kurt Matlin, a.k.a. Kutmasta Kurt, Keith’s main producer since 1994. “Some girls call him back from it, though.” But that’s not Keith’s only reason for spotting prospects.

“It’s my way of promoting,” Keith later admits, having given out dozens of cards, some of which bear the word “VIP,” but others that state, “In Stores Now,” each one emblazoned with his ghetto-fabulous portrait and the words “Kool Keith”–the cover of his latest album, Matthew.

See, Keith comes first. More difficult to determine, though, is what it means to say Keith comes first. Does Keith come first in rap? Does rap come first for Keith? Or does life come first of all?

PLEASE STUDY THE TIME LINE

A man with as many aliases as prospects, Keith Matthew Thornton (a.k.a. Dr. Octagon, Dr. Dooom, Black Elvis, Rhythm X, Poppa Large, Big Willie Smith, etc.) is most often known as Kool Keith. Since debuting in the mid-’80s as the front man for the Bronx’s Ultramagnetic MCs, he has had one of the strangest, most circuitous and, in some respects, most continually relevant careers in hip-hop.

By the mid-’70s, DJs such as Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa had laid the music’s seed in the Bronx, playing sets at every community center, block party and high school gymnasium that would have them. At the dawn of the ’80s, peers of theirs such as Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five — and more manufactured but no less important artists such as the Sugarhill Gang, Run-DMC and LL Cool J — popularized the music, pushed its sonic boundaries and expanded its geographic ones.

As hip-hop began courting the pop market, the Bronx was left behind. LL and Run-DMC were from Queens; MC Shan’s “The Bridge” claimed that borough was the new home of hip-hop. MCs, DJs and b-boys from the eternally blighted Bronx didn’t appreciate that. So when the Ultramagnetic MCs came together in 1986, they were not only among the first generation of groups who could anticipate commercial success, they also understood that the world had some fundamental misunderstandings about hip-hop and its history.

The new-school Ultramagnetic knew that hip-hop culture had gone askew in its transition from an underground phenomenon to a pop-cultural trend; it offered a corrective. If in its second wave the new school brought a multiplicity of new sounds –the density of Public Enemy, the jazz of Gang Starr, De La Soul’s alt-hippie shtick, in California the gangsta stroll of Ice-T and N.W.A –the first burst brought lyrics: Slick Rick, Eric B. & Rakim and, back in the Bronx, Boogie Down Productions and Ultramagnetic.

“Me and Ced went to Clinton together,” Keith remembers, speaking of Ultramagnetic’s Cedric Miller, a.k.a. Ced Gee. “That was high school. His brother Pat had a lot of equipment. And they were producing a lot of different things together up there, but basically it was Boogie Down Productions and us. KRS-One [BDP’s MC] used to come up there. Scott La Rock [BDP’s DJ] used to come up there a lot before he got killed.” The two groups and their fans were scattered among the projects: Patterson, Melrose, Jackson, Butler, Webster, Washington. This was ghetto modernism: In the Bronx, hip-hop artists had a sense of what had come before, a sensitivity to the borough’s decreasing centrality to its native art, and a desire to take the music to another level.

“‘Ego Trippin’ was hot, and it was a big hit,” Keith says, speaking of the group’s signature single. “Every day you’d hear nothing but cars pass by — MC Ultra!’ That was all you used to hear, every day, every morning.” The song’s main MC is announced by name. “Kool Keith,” the record intones as Keith chimes in:

They use the simple back and forth, the same old rhythm That a baby can pick up, and join right with them But their rhymes are pathetic, they think they’re copacetic Using nursery terms, at least not poetic On a educated base, intelligent wise As the record just turn, you learn, PLUS burn By the flame of the lyrics which cooks the human brain Providing overheating knowledge, by means causing pain . . .

Best appreciated on Ultramagnetic’s first LP, 1988’s Critical Beatdown, Keith’s raps are pinched, relentless and just a little bit crazy, packed with witty disses and wild non sequiturs. A master of focused intensity, he juggles a litany of metaphors and obsessions through each song, bringing an idea back into the mix just as it begins to fade from the listener’s mind –a favored topic throughout his career has been cannibalistic violence revolving around other rappers’ brains.

* * *

For Ultramagnetic, making money was not as easy as making records. The new school came at a time before labels like Def Jam or Priority had firmed up their relationships with major entertainment conglomerates. Hip-hop was still dominated by fly-by-night labels with names like Tuff City, Winley, Wild Pitch and Select, enterprises that often operated under the supervision of shysters, that chased trends rather than the passions of ghetto entrepreneurs.

Hot street acts such as Ultramagnetic were like currency for a small label, moving thousands of units with little promotion. Sign two or three good street groups and you could build a business, accumulating enough cash to push pop-rap acts via advertising, radio consultants or videos for MTV. Jumping among four labels in their eight-year career, Ultramagnetic was left behind as rap began making serious cash. Though they worked with celebrated hip-hop entrepreneurs such as Russell Simmons and Andre Harrell, their career got them noticed by hip-hop historians, not hip-hop accountants. The group disbanded in 1993.

Keith’s solo career has been equally fraught. He moved from the Bronx to Los Angeles in 1994 after signing a solo deal with Capitol, but was cut loose a year later when the label laid off its entire black-music department. He signed with the Sony-affiliated Ruffhouse in 1998. Coming off the success of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill –the first hip-hop album to win a Grammy for Album of the Year — Ruffhouse seemed an ideal home; instead, the label proceeded to implode over conflicts amid its upper management. In 1999, after being delayed for more than a year, Keith’s one album from that relationship, Black Elvis/Lost in Space, was released and marketed with a whimper by the curiously named Red Ink, Sony’s indie distribution arm. He proceeded to publish on his Web site the names and e-mail addresses of all his contacts at Sony, asking fans to deluge them with inquiries about his album’s desultory treatment. Keith was dropped shortly thereafter.

Between deals, though, Keith has remained prolific. He released his solo debut on his own Funky Ass label in 1997, the obsessively pornographic Sex Styles. In 1999, he put out First Come, First Served under the alias Dr. Dooom. Packaged in a ghetto-chic sleeve, Dooom lashed out against rap’s continuing dependence on misogynistic, ultraviolent hip-hop by fronting even more violent: Dooom was a serial killer who hunted down weaker rappers, i.e., all of them, including Keith’s most famous alias to date, Dr. Octagon.

The story of Octagon offers proof both of Keith’s uniqueness and of his inability to take advantage of hip-hop’s pop-culture dominance. While Keith and Kutmasta Kurt continued recording tracks for what would become Sex Styles, a friend of Kurt’s from the Bay Area began lobbying Keith to contribute to a quickie, one-off release. It all started in 1995, soon after Matlin had sent that friend, Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, a tape of two tracks featuring a new Keith persona announced in the title of one of the tracks: “Dr. Octagon.”

“Automator started talking to Keith right at the time that things started going bad with Capitol,”Matlin says. “So Keith said, — Okay, you want to do some crazy record, Dan, over your weird beats. I’ll come up to San Francisco for a weekend and do an album with you, fuck it.’ Keith went up there for three or four days, recorded the album and came back and was like, –Okay, I did it.’ And I’m like, –Did he pay you some money?’ And he’s like, –Yeah.’” Nakamura took two months to finish producing the record and got the renowned Bay Area turntablist DJ Qbert to scratch on it.

Released as Dr. Octagonecologyst at the end of 1996 on a one-off label called Bulk, within months the hip-hop intelligentsia had started to buzz over the record’s futuristic vision of rap in the year 3000. It was a mutant strain of hip-hop, as sonically abstruse as anything from the “alternative” rap movement trumpeted in the early ’90s by groups such as Arrested Development and P.M. Dawn, and as surrealistic as the lyrical bricolage then being served up by Beck. (Beck and Keith are currently recording a handful of tracks together that await release.)

“Halfsharkalligatorhalfman,”Keith rapped, in one of his more notable logorrheic flows:

With my white eyes, gray hair, face is sky blue, yellow sideburns react my skin is colored lilac. My skin turn orange and GREEN in the lim-oh-zine, people think I’m mixed with shark, drinking gasoline. Underwater I breathe with lizards on my sleeve walking down Hollywood Boulevard, room for credit card . . . LAPD through gray clouds couldn’t see me, I first turned rainbow, closed my eyes, watched my brain glow. People got scared and ran away they think I’m weird. I was born this way, halfsharkalligator . . . In my real world orangutans dance for Thanksgiving with skeleton bones and skunk tails, is my mission. Holding backward in raps on my power pack baboons clap and girl horses want to hit the sack with two bowls of ocean water monkeys sniffing ice contactjupiterfools Martians bring my rice . . .

Picked up in the U.S. by DreamWorks and in the U.K. by the hipster electronica label Mo’ Wax, the record sold well over 100,000 copies. Demands for Dr. Octagon to tour began to mount, but, unimpressed by the audiences responding to the project, Keith disappeared.

“Dr. Octagon hadn’t blown up, but it started to go,”says Nakamura. “We signed on to do Lollapalooza, and all of a sudden Keith decided he didn’t want to be that alternativey. One day, he got a check –it was practically a six-figure check –from DreamWorks, and we never heard from him again.”

Winning Keith an entirely new fan base among critics, college-radio DJs and fans of alternative rock, Dr. Octagon in large part spawned what has come to be known as underground hip-hop. Keith dismisses this new audience as “corny white guys,” “alternative hippies” or “skateboard kids,” despite the fact that this fan base has helped his post-Octagon records consistently sell upward of 50,000 copies.

But fame in the context of a hip-hop underground defined by middle-class, well-educated whites and blacks is not what Keith is striving for. What he wants is an audience among the same underground, the same “urban children,” he played to when he was back in the Bronx. He wants the type of audience that has propelled a number of regional hip-hop artists to success in the late ’90s: Detroit’s Esham and DJ Assault, Houston’s recently deceased DJ Screw, Tennessee’s Three 6 Mafia and Eightball & MJG, and the musicians on New Orleans’ No Limit and Cash Money labels, both of which have made it onto the national album charts with quick, cheap records made assembly-line-style by house producers such as Beats by the Pound and Mannie Fresh.

It remains to be seen, though, how much Keith is willing to alter his idiosyncratic style to satisfy any audience. Case in point is his Dooom album. While the record’s cover was designed by Pen & Pixel Graphics –a firm that designed many of No Limit’s gaudy diamond- and female-studded covers –for his album he had them parody their signature style: Keith is pictured next to a cockroach, rubbing his chin and holding a rat sandwich on a sesame seed bun.

One thing is certain: He’d rather not eat at Denny’s.

READ THE REQUIRED TEXTS

Keith tells me to head south on Fairfax. “I need to go on and get me some Golden Bird,” he says, taking us to a fast-food fried-chicken restaurant in Crenshaw. “You’ll like Golden Bird. It’s really good chicken.

“Other rappers are fake,”says Keith. “They’ll come out here, stay in their Ramada Inn hotel rooms and smoke weed, and that’s it. They’ll be staying at the Mondrian Hotel, scared to death, and send messengers to run out and get them some sandwiches. You know, a lot of guys are mouses. I can’t live like a mouse. I can’t make a record to be a mouse.

“You see other rappers expending so much energy on this, on that,” he continues. “Record labels got them gassed to the point where they’re rentin’ titties for their video, giving them the private jets, rentin’ a few Rolls-Royces and Benzes so they look so fabulous. And they’re not recouped yet. Basically they’re just getting their first taste of Similac, their first breast milk . . . But you can’t feed me cheese. I’m not putting my head in those fucking mousetraps.

“Give me four biscuits,” Keith says to the woman behind the counter, “and two orders of mashed potatoes . . . No potatoes? Give me that potato salad. Three fruit punches and . . . four breasts.” The meat bleeds butter. The hot sauce burns.

“The majors like people who are not smart at all,” Keith says. “When you’re smart, they have bad things to say, like –He’s smart, I don’t want to fuck with him. He knows about his royalties. He knows about his points. He knows about his publishing. He knows his quarter splits. He knows his release dates. He knows if he shouldn’t change to get to Europe or change in a fucked-up city for a connecting flight. He knows everything. He knows the business.’ They hate that.

“This is the Slauson Mall,” says Keith as we drive down the street. “The Swap Meet! They have the good sneakers, the top sneakers. That’s all I buy, a lot of sneakers. I have so many sneakers they don’t even come out the box.” Inside the mall, he begins his search.

“I want the sneaker that no one else is rockin’, the most distinctive sneaker ever made in life,” he says to the Korean shopkeepers, the Latino clerks. “You know, the new ones where the smoke come out the back, the one with the rocket? You put the real gas inside. They got like the headlights on the side. When you walk some got the sound like –Vrmmmm! Vrrmmmmm!’ You don’t have the lights? Okay, I’ll be back . . .”

We go to the record stores–Sang’s Records, Music Power! Keith checks the racks, chats up the clerks, talks excitedly to a guy promoting a show in Australia. Keith tracks down girls and peeps cheap panties, airbrushed nails, electric-lime-green slacks: Angel Lingerie, Cool Cool Helen Jewelry, Temptation Underwear, Queen Nails, Leather Express, L.A. Sock & Cap. Later that evening, Keith goes upscale, takes Sam and me downtown, to South Los Angeles and Eighth streets –the fashion district, merchants of brands like Tulliano, Dimensione, Angelino and Creme de Silk.

“The alternative stuff doesn’t excite me,”says Keith. “They use a cheaper material. And I’m not into the Bronx black hoodie stuff: –I am a Terminator Matrix robot!’ I like color: leather, silk, alligator, ostrich. A lot of people want to force the synthetic materials on the market, but I don’t think I deserve that after 15 years of honorable rapping.” Keith chatters with the salesmen, buys an expensive Coogi-style patterned shirt, picks up a pre-ordered pair of custom-made ivory pants with way-deep pockets. At M&M Clark Shoes he buys a $500 pair of citrus-yellow Maury’s, a brand of alligator-skin loafers, peeling 20s off a fat stack.

“I love the point that I’m wearing my own football jersey and my own sneakers, and MCA or Columbia or Universal ain’t going to call me and say, –Bring those sneakers back that you wore in the video,’”Keith says. “I’m all done with that. I’m enjoying my life, traveling places by myself. I mean, you can’t feed me cheese.”

* * *

To sum up Keith’s current attitude, I’d quote the chorus of “F-U M.F.,”the first track on Matthew. “Motherfucker,”he says, like Richard Pryor in his prime, “fuck you.” It’s an apt echo. Because, really, it’s comedians like Pryor who provide the model for an entertainer like Keith: He doesn’t want you to aspire to be him, he wants to shame and amuse you for being you. Along the way he’ll prove that he’s not only smarter, faster, funnier, but that he’s deeper, darker –altogether more real. More to the point, Keith’s as dirty as Dolemite, as moralizing as Pryor and as verbally agile as Redd Foxx. “It’s been nice being with you. I hope you had some fun out of this,” Foxx would say, closing his act on an earnest, almost penitent note. “If anyone here in the audience has been offended by anything I might have said or done during the course of my trying to entertain you, I want you to know that, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart”–bang –“I don’t give a shit.”

The problem is, no one really “gets” Keith. Granted, he doesn’t make it easy to determine when he’s being serious, when he’s commenting on the state of our culture, or when he’s making jokes. Case in point: Summer 1999, Ruffhouse is set to release his major-label solo debut. South on Highland Avenue, past Sunset, in the middle of Hollywood, hangs a billboard of a young, sloppily attired white guy standing next to Keith. “Black Elvis,” it reads beneath Keith. “White Manager,” it says beneath the other guy. It turns out that guy is ex-manager Jeremy Larner, who got Keith his ill-fated deal.

“The whole thought process behind that was entirely Keith’s,” says Larner. “One day he said to me, –Jeremy, you’re young, you’re starting to make a lot of money, you should start to become well-known. Look at Russell Simmons, he used to manage me. Look at Andre Harrell, he used to manage me.’ He’s like, –Yo, let’s do some shit, let’s do a billboard.’ And I’m like, –What are you talking about? You must be out of your mind,’ and he kind of pressured me into doing it. There were actually two billboards, and they were up for nine months. And it worked. So many people saw it, and it was funny.”

But one wonders who got the joke. Oblivious commuters and pedestrians? Keith and his management team? Or just Keith?

GUESS WHAT? IT’S AN ORAL EXAM

“The basis of being a rapper is called frenetics,” Sam says to me at the Slauson Swap Meet while Keith is off searching for the perfect sneaker. “It’s being able to put words together in a rhythmic pattern, and it has a lot to do with math. Know how when you were a kid in school you would study haiku and they would tell you 5–7–5 or whatever it was . . . 5–5–7? That’s all poetry is. Besides the meaning and the soul, the actual physical content of it, the wordplay, is frenetics. And Keith’s a master.

“A lot of rappers do two-bar cadences, like –Yeah, what’s up, I’m here chillin’ on the map/I’m ‘onna drop the shit, and I’m ‘onna tell you the facts.’ Keith’ll come with an eight-bar cadence. He’ll do four lines, and then the last word in the fourth line will be the rhyming word with the next four lines. People are like, –Is he even rhyming?’ He’s like a Carerra: too fast for a regular car to keep up with.

“Today there are a lot of rappers. They stop, they stick to their one cadence. Like Jay-Z. He hit the –Jiggidy-jay. Jiggidy-aye. Jiggidy-why. I’m so craaaay-zeee,’ and then he never went any further. Or like Ja Rule: –Haaeeey whut you whaaaaant/Whut you really really whaant!/Huggh!’ These guys are yelling, and that’s all they can do.”

Keith does more, as on Dr. Octagon’s “3000,” in which he riffs on a theme, then drops it; rhymes inside rhymes as if alliteration and terminal syllable sounds were his only guide, then picks up where he once left off:

As space I’ve shown participator acts walk up clog up and mess up water down the sound . . . that comes from the ghetto.

In the middle, the core, you tour explore experience what is real you feel,

Changing ways commercial rap’s in the grave, stuff on disc that’s very wack that you saved.

You think it’s good won’t go platinum or even turn wood. Sell the cassette your homey’s tape deck is wet.

You my pet, my poodle chicken noodle’s on the rise. Open your eyes and see my life.

Rap moves on to the year 3000!

* * *

“I been to places,” says Keith.

“You got people in different ghettos that sit in the same place, and I was never that guy. When I was a kid, people just sat on the block and drank beers. I think I was the only one to break away and go to DeKalb, Coney Island. People used to say you stuck, but there’s no fence around the projects.

“With Ultramagnetic, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday we’d have some show at a skating rink. We were going to hole-in-the-wall places, spots that just been shot up the week before you got there, just real deep Vietnam spots. You had to perform for unhappy crowds and still rock –people with gold teeth, and everybody was looking mean and hard. We would go to the clubs, and it would be so tense because somebody would get their chains snatched right next to you and a razor blade to the neck. And we would go to the clubs and chill. Right? Hah! We’d go to Philly, go to After Midnight, go to the Latin Quarter, go up to Connecticut, go out to Newark, New Jersey. The limos would pick me up in the projects and take me to the show.

“I been to Miami standing next to the most beautiful models. I’ve been out in London, Germany, walking through the subway stations looking at exotic girls from Paris, to down South in the mall in Memphis. Even Texas. I envision it: One minute I’m at a truck stop, looking at real cowboys with spurs coming through. Next thing I’m going through a ghetto in Houston. And then you can be in an exquisite restaurant in Paris. I got to see the world, and looked at a lot of things. The déjà vu of change.

“Everyone now is just doing what I did in the ’80s. Some hustler comes in with alligators on and pays you really real, 20s all in brown paper, and they say, –Do what you want.’ Just being fly –a kid making seven grand a night and splitting it with a group, and riding in limos, and taking your money, your Coogis, your chicks, and chip in together and party and stuff. I’ve been through it. Those times . . . Just buying shit and leathers and jewelry. Every year I bought 10 rings for each finger. And the big plates on my neck, and the biggest pieces to the small pieces. From gold to all types of sorts of different elements of platinum to even just diamonds. I’m glad I got to see a long time ago what rappers lust after right now.

“See, rap is a high. But if you don’t come down, it can fuck with you. You never slept. From sniffing cocaine, from that life of champagne coke days. Staying up late. Bags under your eyes. Smoking weed. Taking Ecstasy. Different shit. I felt times when my heart was gonna bust, and I just stopped. I just altogether changed my life and stopped fucking around.

“A lot of these kids I work with just need patience,” he says, speaking of kids like Sam, whom Keith is grooming to be a rapper while Sam serves as an assistant. “They’re entering the gates of hell. It’s a roller coaster. Goes up and down, and people think it’s gonna be a straight line. It’s a mean-ass roller coaster, but you gotta wait in line for it like the Cyclone at the park. These guys . . . take their record away, these guys wouldn’t have any self-esteem left.”

We pass a billboard for Disney’s new film, 102 Dalmatians, and Keith riffs, “They even got dogs up there now. –Oh, there go the 102 Dalmatians! Give me one of the dogs’ autographs! Oh, give me the one with the spots!’ Which one? All of them got spots.

“One thing I have is personality and humor, so I make the day go by just talking to people, vibing. I can’t walk around serious all day with a doo-rag on my head and looking at people mean. I think that shit is for kids. ’Cause I grew up in the projects. I seen people get shot. I used to hold guns for people that did stickups and robberies. After a while, I didn’t really care for all that shit.

“Now I’m more laid-back. I enjoy being a citizen more than being a star. It’s like baseball. I can play nine innings, not 24 hours. Other people’s pressure is to pull me back into the business, but I can’t do that. My obsession with materialistic things is at a medium level. Sometimes I go to the ghetto-fabulous spots, but sometimes I’m ready to just watch a movie and eat some oatmeal cookies. I buy sneakers for myself. I take my kids to the mall. I don’t even watch cartoons no more, because to me the animation is looking at them now. I see myself when I was young, as a little kid, like on the back of the Matthew cover. At the time I was smartly animated. I see my kids in that same format, like characters of me in the past. It’s cool, though, you know. I mean, I definitely love looking at that reflection.”

Perhaps Keith is too advanced for the ‘hood, too much the hip-hop futurist, but he might also be too down-home and insensitive for the scientists, too much Golden Bird and Slauson Swap Meet and triple-X.

“You know what’s a good thing?”he says. “That there are people all over the United States who know who Kool Keith is. That’s a big thing to be happy about, coming from the Bronx, knowing that you circulated something cross-country. I basically remain a legendary rapper.

“It’s cool.”

Originally published in LA Weekly on December 6, 2000.