"Kool" Keith Thornton has released more than a
dozen albums under almost as many pseudonyms. On his latest, Dr. Dooom 2, the prolific, erratic
rapper reanimates an old persona to complete the task he apparently didn't on
the first Dr. Dooom disc—killing Thornton's best-known alter ego, Dr.
Octagon. Yes, this is confusing and bizarre—and it's par for the course with
Thornton, who first gained fame as part of Ultramagnetic MCs. Annoyed by Dr.
Octagon's success—Dr. Octagonecologyst, made with Dan The
Automator, is a milestone in weirdo hip-hop—Thornton killed the character
on 1999's First Come, First Served, but events outside Thornton's control supposedly
reanimated him. A seemingly shady record deal resulted in The Return Of Dr.
Octagon,
released without Keith's consent or production input. Recently, The A.V.
Club spoke
with the strangest rapper in the business about his beef with American Idol's Simon Cowell (as
detailed on the new album's "Simon"), the death of Dr. Octagon, and more. In a
separate interview (mixed in for clarity's sake), Thornton's current go-to
beatmaker, KutMasta Kurt, gives his perspective.
The A.V. Club: What's your beef with Simon
Cowell?
Kool Keith: I think for one guy to sit up and judge
people and for him to be British at that—who the fuck is he to judge
people? To come to America and try to judge people? I think Simon needs to get
the fuck out the set and give it to someone else. Paula Abdul used to be an
artist, choreographer, dancer, she needs to go back to that. I don't want her
judging talent at all. Randy Jackson, he's cool, he's a buddy of mine. Let
Randy be. Simon needs to get the fuck out of here and go somewhere. What is
Simon's qualifications? I'm trying to figure it out. That guy wears a black
shirt with a gay haircut, and he's going to walk around and judge people? I
don't understand it. That show is full of bullshit. I'd respect it if they had
an American artist doing the shit.
AVC: What about the similar journalistic
call-out on "Always Talkin' Out Your Ass"?
KK: That song I wrote more for the music industry.
The whole industry has this perspective of, like, "The show is not a show no
more, now you got to have a party after." I think the fans are getting used to
a certain thing. Everybody's spoiled. I've learned that people
cheat—downloading. Everyone wants to have fancy jeans or the latest
glasses. "Yeah, I'm hip. I spend money. I got a Sidekick." But at home, they
don't even buy a full CD no more, with the plastic on it. They're official one
way and artificial another. That song is about a lot of things: how people tend
to do things expensive and then they do things cheap at the same time, so they
have a contradicted lifestyle. At least buy a real CD, not a bootleg. You got
on the latest jeans. You got antique jeans on, or some shades that cost $200.
You got a phone.
AVC: You also preempt critics who'll compare
this to a prior outing. Why?
KK: People tend to lock into one thing that you do
that they consider to be better than the last one. I don't think it's no better
than or less than, you know? It's like people who got a lot of
albums—when you listen to all the Public Enemy albums, critics have to
say, "Yo! Bum Rush The Show was their best album, I didn't like the next
album, I didn't like Apocalypse 91." I just think they made the album at a different
point in their time and career, the same as myself. All records are different.
People tend to branch off all these records—when you were good, when you
were bad. I think it's when you were feeling something.
AVC: What were you feeling when you wrote the
chorus of "R.I.P. Dr. Octagon"?
KK: I was just thinking about Octagon in general. I
was pissed off about it. Dr. Octagon 2, the way it was handled, them taking
advantage of the project. Not putting it out for five years and doing remixes
the way they wanted to and hiring all types of people and stuff. I was really
pissed. I'm one of those artists that people take my music without my consent.
People love to snatch my music and do things on their own. You got people that
put me on beats I never rapped on. I just feel that it's a bad thing.
KutMasta Kurt: I wasn't really super-involved,
but from what I understand, there were some sort of masters that were floating
around—I don't know when they were recorded—that a label got hold
of. A producer was involved with the project; for whatever reason, the label
and producer couldn't come to an agreement. So they said, "Forget him, we'll
just remix the whole album." So they stripped off all the vocals, found this
other producer team… As a creative person, Keith's very sensitive about his
art. Sort of like if you painted a painting of something and somebody went and
painted over it, that's how he felt on that project. The Dr. Octagon character
was rapping over sounds that were dark and sinister, but they turned the album
into this dancey electro-pop. A lot of it had this Euro-dance feel, and I was
like, "Wait a second, not only did they change the music, they changed it into
something that couldn't relate." I think we might've been on a flight somewhere
in Europe in December 2006, and he was saying, "This record doesn't even sound
like an Octagon record." And people wanted us to perform some of the songs, and
Keith was like, "I'm not really feeling the style and sound. They're not really
related." I said, "Well, you want to bring Dr. Dooom back?" Without that album,
we wouldn't have made this album. There would have been no need for Dr. Dooom
to come back.
AVC: The first Dr. Octagon album has been
casting a shadow for a decade.
KK: I think people got stuck on something, but I have
a total dimensional lifestyle besides Doc Oc. I just made a record. I was an
artist on a project, and I think people misconcepted that I was an artist on a
project. Octagon wasn't my life. I've done tons of projects. I had groups. I
worked with different groups and myself. Ultra. I rapped on Prodigy's "Smack My
Bitch Up." I've done a lot of things that were totally around different things
other than Octagon. Are some people just afraid to venture off into my life and
see that I do other things which are great? I think people stuck me with
something.
AVC: Are you a victim of success?
KK: I don't know if Dr. Octagon was successful. It
was just different and new, but I've done more things. It's like Stephen King.
He wrote "Children Of The Corn" and he wrote the clown [the novel It], but he's still Stephen
King. I like some of his other movies. He did the car, the trucks, running by
themselves. [Maximum Overdrive.] They made a bunch of Halloweens, but I'm not just going to
fall in love with Halloween number one. Just like Saw. The guy made different
parts. He made other movies. Some with the puppets waking up out of the box.
You just got to adapt to them.
AVC: You and Kurt have had a long relationship.
How does a Bronx rapper meet a Santa Cruz, California producer in the late '90s?
KK: He sent me a demo. I was like, "Wow, this was a
white dude with some funky beats." All the white guys got good beats in the
industry now. Just like the NBA. We got a couple white guys playing in the
league. That was a big thing. I never thought we'd be making so many records
together. He was opposite me. I was more into fun, I always related to shopping
and buying stuff. And when I got some record deal, everything had to be
partially put into my shopping, and as I worked on my albums, I'd go to Macy's
and Bloomingdale's and get a nice new shirt, new pair of jeans, buy a collared
shirt.
KMK: He's a challenging guy. People in the industry are
like, "Dude, you deserve an award." But I have a very calm and patient
personality. So I think we're sort of the like The Odd Couple in a way.
KK: We lived together. It was fun times. One time we
had an apartment and Kurt didn't want to live in Beverly Hills and the label
[wanted us to]. I said, "They're paying for it. We going to live in Beverly
Hills." He wanted to go stay with his aunt. He was always the more conservative
person. I was more the outgoing person. I'm the type of guy that wants to get
the Cadillac, and Kurt wants to rent the Pinto. It's like cheap and expensive
hanging out together. It sometimes got out of hand.
[pagebreak]
AVC: Why shopping?
KK: I like to smell new clothes, tags. The store has
new scents. It's just motivational to me. That's the point of doing something.
I always buy something to make myself motivated. It's good to feel that you can
buy something and motivate yourself. That's what I do, just buy stuff. I like
to buy something new and then record. It's just a mechanism, like when a batter
goes up to the batter's box, some of them have to spit on their hands. Some of
them have to dig up dirt. Some of them have to dig their cleats in a certain
spot. That's the same thing with me rapping. I take a walk first. I look
around, window-shop. Buy stuff. It's sort of the rhythm of my social life. For
some people it's drugs. They got to sniff a lot of cocaine to start to make a
record. They got to smoke all types of things. Me, I go do some shopping. At
least I'm not abusing myself. I'm proud of myself. I stayed in all those big
cities, stayed in L.A. and partied, and I didn't get caught up in that. I've had
fans hand me all types of things—bags of pills, different things. Bags of
coke. I take it, but I don't use it. I get on the tour bus and in my hand is a
big bag of coke, or two big balls of Oxy, or something, I don't know. What am I
going to do? Take them and fall out? If I took everything that everybody gave
me, I'd probably lose my mind. It'd be like, "Yo, that guy can't even talk no
more. He's standing in New York talking to himself."
AVC: You do have a reputation for being insane,
which you've encouraged.
KK: One time I had like 75 people interview me, and
they started asking me the same questions. One guy was just asking me all types
of questions, and I was just like, "Yeah, I went to Bellevue. I chewed my own
hand off and they had to sew it back on." And the guy believed it. I guess he
printed it, and then it started to spread, and next thing you know I see things
that read: "The former Bellevue guy making a record." I didn't know it would
travel like that. And I looked back like, "Wow, this story traveled." People
tend to coincide my music with my mind. I write weird and do things sometimes
as though I'm on drugs or crazy, but I don't have to get high to do that. Even
the partial things that I do. they gotta take coke up the nose and shoot
needles. You got rock stars out there—they gotta get high just to make
the record I make normally.
AVC: "Step-N-Fetchers" is insane.
KK: "Step-N-Fetchers" is like a lot of my people in
the music industry, my black people, who are wearing the monkey suits and
dancing with the cup. And they're going to all these different awards and
they're dancing. They're really doing some Sammy Davis Jr.—and I think
Sammy Davis is a great person. But I think a lot of my people now are dancing
too much, even in the movie world. In the entertainment world, a lot of the
black people are dancing too much, they're putting on them shiny shoes with
sand on the floor and sliding around. They really dazzle them on the floor
right now. All these events that you see, these big events, you see black
people starting to paint their face black and put the white lipstick on. The
Louis Armstrong effect. They're playing the tuba with their eyes wide open.
What happens when the step-n-fetcher gets onstage is, they say, "You want me to
dance? How hard, sir?" And then they get more of the approval and applause, so
they dance more and they dance harder.
We have a big Sambo committee in the black
entertainment world. There's a very large Sambo world, and they even dress like
that, they wear the bow ties to the event. They wear a lot of tuxedos. And
that's what we call our house monkeys. They work for Master Tom. They are our
cotton-pickers. BET is a Sambo organization. They broadcast the Sambos out.
They do the Funky Chicken sometimes. If you look at TV, it's just all
entertainment. You got rappers out there really doing… circus things. They got
top hats on! It's all one big circus. We have a big Sambo audience. They're
playing, slapping their thighs—all they need is a banjo. You might as
well buy that monkey with the cymbals, the one you wind up. That's what we're
working with right now. We do have a very humongous Sambo organization, and got
a lot of networks that are responsible for the Samboism.
AVC: When did you start using different names?
KK: I think I was in high school. I just was Kool. Put
Kool in front of Keith. Keith Energy, Keith Turbo, Keith Magnetic. I used to
wear my hat to the side. I created the baseball cap worn to the side, even as a
little kid. I think I was the first guy that really cocked my baseball cap to
the side, a patented style in New York that I've done. Most rappers wear their
hat straightforward. Even when I grew older, my ball caps, I always wear a
baseball cap cocked to a certain side. For performance or life. Kool Keith in
general.
AVC: What's the coolest name in hip-hop?
KK: Kool Keith.
AVC: KutMasta, what's your take?
KMK: People say, "Hey, that's a cool, retro-sounding
name. It's like Grandmaster Flash." And I'm like, "I actually thought of it
about that same time." [Laughs.] It was the mid-'80s. I was learning to DJ, and
cut-master was a name people had. I just adapted it for myself. It's your
persona, your trademark, your brand. It's almost as if you're making yourself a
superhero, or a caricature of yourself. A majority of these hip-hop guys have
been and are still into comic books. With Keith, one guy is a serial killer,
another guy is the porno guy. Basically his solo career was his hidden self.
He's a caricature of himself. He amplifies his different personality facets. Black
Elvis was a good one. My favorite Kool Keith name is Fly Ricky The Winetaster.
AVC: Keith isn't the only one with beef. What's
your problem with Doc Oc producer Dan The Automator?
KMK: The first Dr. Octagon album started with the
song "Dr. Octagon," which I produced along with the other song, "Technical
Difficulties." I recorded that song and mailed it to radio stations like a
teaser track, and was giving it out to DJs. I sent it to Dan because he was a
friend of mine, we were music friends. Long story short, he didn't want to pay
me my royalties. I'm like, "Dude, you're my friend for years." I was thinking,
"Am I really going to have to sue you? You made hundreds of thousands of
dollars off that record." I got the whole thing started and really got nothing
directly out of it. He ran with it, but he never gave credit to the person who
threw the ball. At the end of the day, I actually had to sue the guy. They
settled, but I actually had to file. My reason for going public was to warn
people in the industry. Dan did well and good for him, but you meet the same
people on the way up as you meet on way down.
AVC: So what's next?
KK: King Service, my own solo album. I'm going back into my
essence, my Bronx rap style. I want to go back to rapping and saying just
regular shit again, just normal things that come up in my mind, more than a
conceptual project. More urban things about normal stuff I do in New York. I
want to use beats that are just rugged. I want to be very industrial and I want
to come with lyrics that are just edgy. I want to write just straight off me. I
got tracks done. I'm just picking out the top ones and focusing on the essence
of me rhyming to give people a picture of my life. Different than Dooom or
Black Elvis. I got a lot of tracks the public hasn't heard. People don't know.