Saga of the Simian Samurai
Threshold
{grate 3}
Every morning when Kool Keith wakes up — after the hip-hop
sandman has tired of slipping LSD under his lids and before he’s ready to start
slurpin’ on a bowl of Planet-Os — the loony-bin old-timer takes another new
day’s giant, messy, wonderfully worthless crap and calls it an album. An album
to to which he doesn’t even raise a nostril before sending it down the sewer
pipes, where it can mingle in the stink of every other fartsy art-rapper
testing the waters of weird-hop.
But seriously — Keith has whipped out over two dozen
full-lengths in the past five years alone. So once every few sunrises, if only
by odds of luck, the former Ultramagnetic MC manages to work up something
really absurdly hot. Unfortunately, no one has stuck around long enough to feel
the heat — last year’s fetishistic, moon-romping Return of Dr. Octagon received
microscopic recognition compared its hailed original. And nothing was slept on
like Project Polaroid, produced by some skinny kid named TomC3 who’d crawled
out of a conspiratory space-lab somewhere, balancing on his shaky skeleton an
angry funk-tide and drum so heavy it’d mash any other white kid into sidewalk
chalk.
Thankfully, Tom made friends with the right street freak —
Keith decided to open half an eyelid one morning and kick the kid’s stormy
science experiment square in its overconfident jaw. And thus Project Polaroid
was born, a barely heard feat in grime that oozed its way through the dankest
of back alleys for only the strays to love.
Prince Po should have known better. You’d think a guest spot
on Polaroid would have been enough for the second-best Organized Konfusion
dropout — but apparently, Tom’s costume box was too shiny to keep his paws off.
It’s difficult enough to avoid imitating the king of strange even when steering
clear of his beats and topics; here, Po slips down a rabbit hole montaged with
every character Keith has ever played. Finally, his highness (joined by a
heated Motion Man) stops by for a cameo: “Everybody’s baby fat puffed up like a
furry rat/ You say to yourself ‘Somebody’s gonna need a dump truck, a
bulldozer’/ F that,” Keith growls. “Buying the same black coat your friend got,
where’s the success at/ It’s like a hundred million rappers rappin’, but
nobody’s got the best rap.” Po is nothing but a kid in somebody else’s candy
store — and when Keith is that Wonka, better watch out for the razors inside.
