Kool Keith US Hip Hop 17 Items

In a world full of cheesecake rappers, one man has assembled a phenomenal team to bring you madness. The original originator, ultramanetic, high-wire rap legend Kool Keith brings a star studded album to the fore. "Feature Magnetic" highlights MF Doom, SLug of Atmpshere, Mac Mall, Necro, Craig G, Dirt Nasty, Ras Kass and more. This special edition 24 for '24 Artist Series Vinyl also features original oil painting art by KipDaFog for this oen time pressing on tri-color canary cake vinyl.

Plug in your ethernet and dial up to travel through Kool Keith’s multi-verse. Featuring Ice-T and Marc Live. Black Elvis 2 is here.

Written with a libidinal urgency that has come to characterize Kool Keith’s legendary lyricism, “Keith’s Salon” explores our current obsessions with luxury, beauty, and notoriety. But rather than fetishize the beautiful dum-dums who walk red carpets in black Prada gowns,

Kool Keith's most recent studio album shifts our attention to the work and workers that underpin our fantasies of American excess and the good life.

As such, the album is also a timely meditation, during quarantine, on the economic precarity many of us now find ourselves in. Having doubled-up with Triple Parked, the production team of avant-techno maven Bruno Pronsato and Benjamin Jay, “Keith’s Salon” moves between halcyon sonics and atonal warlord dystopia, while keeping beats minimal for Kool Keith to spread extra ketchup on the hamburger. An album at once topical and futuristic, lush and bizarre, "Keith's Salon" is about the business of making people beautiful. It's time to work.

Kool Keith is Dr. Octagon, Black Elvis, and Dr. Dooom. 3 personas on a road trip together from Miami to Reno. Inner conflict makes the ride a schizophrenic battle for the attention of their riding partner, Lucy. Musical backing provided by psychotic hardcore bass/drum duo THETAN. Multiple etchings across both sides of the vinyl, including a playable etching, and a moving animation etched around the circumference of the record. All this plus the A side is a multi-groove cut, meaning that when you drop the needle, you have a 50/50 chance of hearing the song or the instrumental. Comes with a download card.

Multi-Etched Vinyl including Playable & Animated Etching, Parallel Multi-Groove, download, limited to 2000

feat. MF Doom, Guru, Sadat X, Sir Menelik, ...

Arguably poised as Kool Keith's most sophisticated release to date, Saks 5th Ave serves as both a stepping stone forward in the artist's prolific career, as well as a much-needed reminder that the world's most innovative emcee has a thorough grasp on far more than your average rapper. Touching on everything from the use of high fashion products to personal experiences including a near fatal car crash which occurred in 2017, the 16 track studio album produced by the versatile beat maker Dean ''Landon Price'' Trotter channels Keith in a smoothly conscious state while laying down effortless bars over modern yet timeess hip hop production. From the artist who brought you Dr. Dooom, Sex Style”, Keith and everything in between, Saks 5th Ave is the latest and greatest haute couture in a world of Gap and Old Navy hip hop.

It’s been more than forty years since Kool Herc starting throwing parties in the South Bronx, and so you could forgive the casual fan for thinking that nearly every permutation of hip-hop has already been explored. But KEITH, the new album from the iconic rapper Kool Keith and the master producer Psycho Les (due out July 12 on Mello Music Group) argues just the opposite: that what’s absurdly funny can also be sinister and strange, that the form can still be broken in new and radical ways. Keith is, of course, one of the pivotal figures in the history of hip-hop, and has been one of the genre’s most singular writers and original voices. The Bronx native was a founding member of Ultramagnetic MCs, whose debut album, 1988’s Critical Beatdown, served as a blueprint for both internationally famous acts like Public Enemy and for the entire future of underground rap. But Keith’s solo work, which began in earnest in the mid-’90s with Dr. Octagonecologyst (released under a pseudonym, naturally) is even stranger, more experimental, more brilliant. He will enjamb seemingly unrelated ideas and images against one another with a poet’s love for language and a pornographer’s knack for camp. Subsequent records like 1997’s Sex Style, ‘99’s Black Elvis/Lost In Space, and 2000’s Matthew were hailed as instant classics; Keith has spent the last several years crafting expertly written records that are rewardingly bizarre, unlike anything else on the rap landscape –– and KEITH is a crown jewel in that excellent late-period run.

Psycho Les is a founding member of the Beatnuts, who were first notable as the only Latino members of the Native Tongues, the collective of groups that pushed hip-hop to its avant edges in the early ‘90s. They were staples throughout that decade, both with their own albums and via the production they did for artists as disparate as Fat Joe and Common –– as well as for their work pioneering the remix. The Beatnuts’ music had in its foreground cramped house parties and reckless debauchery; Les developed the unique ability as a producer to merge that abandon with technically rigorous sample manipulation and unique arrangements.

If you’re worried that two artists who have been working at this for so long would be tempted to rest on their laurels or make music that’s predictable, disabuse yourself of that notion. Keith opens the album with a tangent about Foot Locker –– not about buying shoes, but about lusting after the footwear chain’s employees, with their tight, referee-striped shirts and form-fitting black pants. It only gets stranger from there. His Lamborghinis aren’t just green, they’re pistachio green; his head is perfectly round like Charlie Brown’s; his handkerchief is worth your per diem. And as a vocalist, Keith is still as slippery and innovative as ever: see the way he slides right into an unorthodox flow at the beginning of “Slave Owner,” only to thin out his writing to allow for a string of insults from the titular slave owner.

KEITH is a laser-focused, remarkably vital work from two artists entering the fourth decades of their respective careers. If nothing else, take as an example a couple of the guests who appear here: there’s Jeru the Damaja, who represents the true-school ethos of New York in the early ‘90s, but there’s also Paul Wall –– he rides shotgun on “Foot Locker” –– who broke through more than a decade after Jeru, as the woozy, laconic Houston scene of the mid-2000s briefly stole the national spotlight. Both serve as ideal foils for Keith: they’re somehow tethered to Earth as we understand it, while he’s free to orbit around them, and us, in a path that only he will ever understand.

Limited edition of 500 copies!

This limited 20th anniversary edition of Kool Keith's impossibly raunchy, "porno-core" 1997 classic, “Sex Style”. Includes instrumentals, limited to 500 copies worldwide.

He comes in many forms and many incarnations, but his style is distinctly his own. Just as there's no mistaking his smooth lyrical delivery and searing hip-hop prose with its underlying edgy beats, there's no denying the incredible force that is Kool Keith. Whether as a founding member of the legendary Ultramagnetic MCs, or in the guises of his renegade rap personas Dr. Octagon and Dr. Dooom, Keith has established himself as an innovative lyricist whose erudite raps push the envelope to the limit. When Keith Teams up with KutMasta Kurt on the production - they arguably create the best albums in his catalog.

21 Copies made with Threshold Test Labels

Reissued on colored vinyl, numbered edition of 550 copies. That's some sexy shit right here!!!

For the second time on tape. Yellow shell. Only 50 made, again. Worldwide.

Original Tape from the crates of Kutmasta Kurt

Original Tape from the crates of Kutmasta Kurt

Kool Keith is an educated man, boasting a pair of doctorates — one in Dooomology and another in Octagon Mathematics. With this immense medical and scientific background at his disposal, Keith has come to operate. Production on Keith’s albums is eerily evil; his music is an LSD experience gone horribly wrong. Bizarre, ethereal sound effects and tight, piercing drum loops prepare the listener for a down and dirty lyrical delivery that’s been cultivated since Keith first arrived on the rap scene with the Ultramagnetic MC's. Verses contain unique rhyme structures and original metaphors, and range from classic emcee braggadocio to tales of robbery and street sex. Keith’s latest LP “Mr. Controller” entirely produced by Junkaz Lou is yet another work of art. No MC on the planet is so grimy and yet so polished — after years in the rap game, Kool Keith’s as unique as ever.

Plug in your ethernet and dial up to travel through Kool Keith’s multi-verse. Featuring Ice-T and Marc Live. Black Elvis 2 is here.