When Rakim made his triumphant return to the New York stage a few months back, the stage was so crowded with admirers-- everyone from Kool Herc to random nobodies-- that the man himself was barely visible. Off to the left of the stage, a naggingly familiar figure in a bright-orange jacket struck poses. "Kool Keith in the house!" Rakim yelled, and it was like: Oh, right, Kool Keith is a rapper.
Keith isn't doing much rapping these days. On The Return of Dr. Octagon, he's mostly ranting beatnik spoken-word stuff about aliens and Richard Gere and trees going extinct. It's getting more difficult to remember the fact that back in the 1980s this guy was one of the first to weave surrealist gobbledygook into old-school boast-rapping, and that he changed underground rap forever with the first Dr. Octagon album by abandoning any connection to the genre's concrete-narrative roots.
The difference is that both Critical Beatdown and Dr. Octagonecologyst were both rap albums. The Return of Dr. Octagon is something else entirely. Case in point: "A Gorilla Driving a Pick-Up Truck", wherein Keith mumbles about a primate motorist in a fake dusty-cowboy voice over eerie slide guitars and harmonicas: "I was moving fast/ He got up in front/ The gorilla looked at me and passed/ He was on my ass." It could be a Buck 65 parody, but after a few listens, it starts to sound like the work of another black man with O.G. outsider-artist ranter-status and a white fanbase whose giggly appreciation never moves too far from look-at-this condescension: Wesley Willis. Of course, Willis's mental problems were well-documented, while Keith's are just a rumor. But it's still a little troubling to hear Keith leave rap alone and get completely unhinged ("Get off the ship and walk to motherfucking 42nd Street like a motherfucking sailor"). It's like Keith has realized that a huge chunk of his fanbase could really give a fuck about rap, that they just want to hear the funny weird black guy say funny weird stuff. It may be a shrewd move on Keith's part, but it makes for an oddly deflating listen.
There's a world of difference between Dr. Octagonecologyst and The Return, and most of the divide comes from the production. On the first LP, Keith's lyrical insanity was balanced out by the RZA-esque sensibility of Dan the Automater, who anchored Keith in hip-hop without tying him down to it. On The Return, the Germany-based production trio One Watt Sun replaces Automator and abandons his minor-key synth zooms and damaged piano-rolls for brittle, artificial electro and kitchen-sink eclecticism. It's not all bad; "Trees" has a nice synth-bounce, and "Al Green" rests on an itchy, jumpy disco bassline. But more often than not they lean way too hard on obnoxious blurting keyboards and tinkly lounge-jazz pianos, and so we mostly get Keith ranting over halfassed IDM.
On a couple of songs, they chop up Keith's vocals into word-fragments, unfathomably using the album's longest track to showcase the nonexistent skills of Princess Superstar, who I didn't even realize was still trying to rap. The Return is supposedly a Kool Keith album, but four of the 14 tracks are skits, two mangle his vocals so the producers can show off their DJing, and one is a Princess Superstar song with Keith on the hook.
Keith himself is responsible for all of the album's good moments. Even when he's in unhinged-rant mode, Keith's imagery often remains lucid. And so the album's best song is "Ants", where he comes off frantic but omnipotent, comparing the humans infesting Earth to ants in a colony, enthused and disgusted at once: "Ants work together, jerk together, do concerts together, cry and get hurt together." It's dense and fascinating stuff, a tantalizing glimpse of what might've happened if Keith hadn't treated the reemergence of his most popular persona like an easy payday.
