If you work long enough in the music industry then urban legends tend to form. When you’re an artist like Keith Matthew Thornton, aka Kool Keith, those stories seem to get larger and more diverse as the years roll on. His artistic approach has fuelled the fire through the adoption of personas like Dr. Octagon, Kool Keith, and Dr. Dooom. The first one is an extraterrestrial time traveling gynaecologist and surgeon from the planet Jupiter, the second one loves girls and doesn’t mind saying so, and the third one is a serial killer who murders Dr. Octagon on his first recorded outing. It’s all a little esoteric and bizarre but that’s where the genius resides.
Thornton’s work has been nothing if not provocative and he always pushes the envelope. His first Dr. Octagon album, Ecologyst, was one of my favourite albums of the nineties and it was with a sense of anticipation that I picked up the phone to call him. After some time to get comfortable, chatting about what sort of weather he can expect when he visits Australia this time and the difference between his lifestyle in New York and LA (different girls apparently), we start to talk about what he is working on currently.
“I gave myself a break from rapping on tracks and a lot of other people’s tracks. I mean, I do a verse here and there but I just took a break doing projects and collaborations with people,” reveals Thornton. “I’ve been kinda taking notes on what’s going on out there and listening to what’s happening for a minute.”
That consideration has yielded one conclusion: “I notice from my observations of the music industry that everyone is scared of an intimidating bassline. That’s what I specialise in. Everybody is usually on the light side of things musically. Everybody wants to be sweet with the key but I use a lot of horror elements and stuff that sounds creepy at night. A lot of my music is intense because I like intense, you know. A lot of guys write intense lyrics but the music behind them doesn’t sound intense. I want the music to be as intense as what I’m saying.”
Continuing to talk about the elements in his songs Thornton continues: “I think those two things work together. It’s just that when I meet a lot of other producers they don’t seem to understand that. They just want to give me a beat but they’re not listening to what I’m saying. It’s an element of the feeling. It’s like when you travel places, and you work with producers, they don’t know what kind of element I’m coming out of. You know, I’m walking around the Bronx and I just heard a couple of gunshots, and people going through poverty, and everybody is looking mean and mad. And the producer might be somewhere else or not in that element. The music I’m trying to make fits the element so people around the world can get a feel of it.”
The eternal challenge for artists is to evolve and take their audience along with them. A lot of people got stuck on the Octagon material and it is something that Thornton continues to rail against. “Dr Octagon was good. It was sci-fi written and we soaked our minds into the element of the record, and we talked some hi-tech stuff,” he tells me.
And that time brought some very original approaches: “I was the guy who created the sci-fi thing and the backpack and the king of the underground stuff. But I think when Sex Style came out critics were claiming that I had lost my crown as king of sci-fi. I was hearing that other people were taking over my reign.” And that kind of talk can really throw off good creative energy.
But for Thornton, he wanted to move on. “I kind of got tired of being known as a sci-fi rapper all the time – I did that, I mastered that, I was a blue belt, a black belt, green belt, whatever,” he says. “So I showed people that I could master something else. I have a very broad imagination. Like when I did Sex Style, I did a record about my California life – taking pictures, girls, and partying – and some days I got songs where I’m talking about street issues.”
He is quick to qualify that time and correct the perception: “I wanted to do some other stuff – that doesn’t mean I fell off. I just switched – I wanted to rap about anything; girls, ass, whatever. I didn’t want to limit myself to sci-fi but then again I’m from the Bronx. You know, I still rap with street slang and all of that. I don’t have to rap with big words for the rest of my life because I already did that.”
“I’m here writing cool shit that I wanna write, you know. Records like Matthew. But people thought I lost the crown again after Octagonecologyst. But I didn’t want to have to prove myself again – I could do that space shit any time in my sleep. People felt that I fell off or that I was smoking drugs or something. I was reading articles that I haven’t been good since Octagon. That was the public’s opinion which is stupid to me. There were a lot of clones coming out and people started liking the clones.
So Thornton brought back Dr Octagon in 2006: “I started reading a lot of these articles and I was just like, ‘Let me go do Octagon and take this crown and shut it down’. I didn’t have anything to prove at that point but I did because a lot of those labels had a lot of artists popping up out of nowhere. And after I did that everybody shut up for a long time.”
He uses a sports analogy about The Return Of Dr. Octagon: “You know, I did a Michael Jordan! I won two championships with the Bulls and I went to play baseball. And the critics started talking. But I came back and won another championship! They can’t take it.”
While Thornton is known as a lyricist, he is also an adept producer. In-between his Dr. Octagon and Kool Keith projects he invented the Dr. Dooom persona. “On the first one I did most of the production. First Come, First Served was a slap in the face cause that’s when Black Elvis was coming out. Sony took a long time with that and I snuck out the Dr. Dooom record at the same time. I thought Sony were going to keep Black Elvis on the shelf so I went out and made Dr. Dooom. I came out independently with First Come, First Served.”
Looking back at his career Thornton has definitely made his own luck and worked hard to push his music. “With a lot of these records people forgot that I didn’t have a record company then,” he says. “You know, the record companies get credit later but I popped out with these records independently. That’s what I was trying to tell a lot of people. I kept my own career burning, my own career going. I popped these records out of nowhere. When Dr. Dooom came out – the first record, not the second album.”
And his determination comes from trials and tribulations in his own life. “We made records in the projects and we grew up in inner city street life. We made Critical Breakdown when we were living in the projects, with people shooting drugs and guns, and getting on the elevator with people listening to hardcore records and everything. We just did our own thing because we were focused.”
“We were totally urban – we were more urban than people who rap urban. We were living urban conditions – junkies, crackheads, gun shots. But I look at rappers who make records under really bad terms and they can still focus on making something positive. I could have written a typical record like ‘I’m livin in the hood, life is hard’ but I didn’t do that. I chose to write some sci-fi stuff.”
As for whats coming up: “I got a lot of tight, brand new stuff I’ve made that I haven’t showcased yet. I’m always making new stuff; creating and making things that are totally different from everybody else’s stuff. Because you know, sometimes I go into the studio and make things for myself. I have lyrics that I write at home. A lot of producers just want me to rap on stuff but I’m not really into just doing that. I rap professionally but sometimes I want to put a theme behind my own work.”
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Simon Hampson, Simon Hampson. Simon Hampson said: Check out my Kool Keith article in Beat (Melbourne) & The Brag (Sydney) or at Symbiosis http://bit.ly/dimH78 [...]