Kool Keith

Black Elvis 2 (2023)

John Gentile

Kool Keith put out something like four albums this year, though Black Elvis 2 is supposed to be the main one, I think. A resurrection of one of his many personas, and the one that is easiest to comprehend, Black Elvis is Kool Keith as the crème-de-la-crème rappers. He’s stylish, he gets girls, he’s a master wordcraftsmen, and his weirdness lips out when he doesn’t want it to- all things suggested by the, um, “white” Elvis.

What many people fail to realize about Keith, mainly because he rose in fame in the ‘90s, is that he’s much older school than it appears. He goes back to the mid-80s, which places him just after the rise of Run-DMC and just before the creation of boom-bap. Now consider Kool Keith in light of his contemporaries and it’s astounding how long he has lasted and how many grounds he has crossed. Some of his fellow Hip Hop schoolmates are playing casino club shows or have been lost in history, while Kool Keith is still pursing the next phase of Hip Hop.

Black Elvis 2 shows this mainly on the beat side of things. A lot of tracks here are driven not by drums or percussion, but sci fi squeals and bleeps. At points, he goes strictly acapella. The whole release is seeped in Keith blade runner/Terminator 2 sci-fi varnish. Robotic machines whirl away off in the far distance. Sounds are big and spacey, often feeling like you are floating through the solar system alone.

And in that darkness, Keith packs his fancy wordwork. As always, he crams concepts inside of jokes inside of homages inside of string-of-conscious realizations. Really, in this age of mumble-rap, or post-mumble rap, it’s crazy how much CONCEPT is crammed in each bar here. Because Keith snaps from one idea to the next so rapidly and so breathlessly, one wonders if Keith is just throwing off things off the top of his head or if he works late at night crafting and re-crafting and re-recrafting the perfect line…

“Kindergarten adults” and many other tracks, find Keith being playfully self-aware/ On that track, he comments on how an audience didn’t get what he does all while calling back to first wave of hip hop all against a spartan modern robo-beat. It pretty much encapsulates Keith and what he’s doing on this album.

As with all KK albums, BE2 is dense and finds Keith collaging images together to the point where there’s a concept, but its really like 12 concepts stitched together. Sometimes, one does wonder why KK isn’t mentioned with the absolute legends and groundbreakers like NWA, KRS-One, Beastie Boys, and Public Enemy. (Ice-T shows up for a cool guest spot, here). Certainly, he’s as groundbreaking. But then again, he’s a lot weirder and his songs focus on dense wordplay over catchiness. Is that intentional, or is he just exploding with so much energy and material that he can’t slow down enough for the rest of us to catch up and instead puts out four albums in one year… five if you include the Ultramagnetic Emcee reunion album?