Happy 30th Anniversary to Dr. Octagon’s debut album Dr. Octagonecologyst, originally released May 6, 1996.
“Kool” Keith Thornton has been of hip-hop’s most unique and peculiar personalities for four decades running. He’s contributed to the hip-hop fabric as both a member of a group and as a solo artist. I’ve written about MF DOOM’s legendary run between 2000 and 2004, but between the years of 1996 and 2002, Kool Keith was an engine of stunning creativity.
I’ll repeat it again: Kool Keith helped invent left of center hip-hop as a member of Ultramagnetic MCs during the mid late 1980s. Starting with Critical Beatdown (1988), one of the best albums of all time, he made his presence known as one of hip-hop’s earliest bona fide weirdos. Over three albums, he became notorious for weaving unorthodox flows and off-kilter deliveries into his verses. He was ahead of his time and largely underappreciated, but still incredibly influential.
Kool Keith’s decision to record material outside of Ultramagnetic MCs wasn’t a surprise. By the group’s third release, The Four Horsemen (1993), it was pretty clear that Keith had become the best emcee in the group by a pretty wide margin. He was increasingly looking to record in forums beyond the group. While in the process of recording that album, he simultaneously recorded the Cenobites project with rapper/producer Godfather Don, which wouldn’t be released until 1995. Hence, the writing was on the wall that Keith was ready to move on from Ultramagnetic.
Even in the mid-1990s, Keith was no stranger to creating alter-egos, as he had started to refer to himself as “Rhythm X” on the second Ultramagnetic album, Funk Your Head Up (1992). He became increasingly comfortable associating himself with weird and vaguely disturbing imagery. The video for “Poppa Large” featured him rapping in an abandoned building while constrained in a straitjacket, even with a birdcage over his head. His verses and solo cuts on The Four Horsemen were also increasingly bizarre.
It wasn’t until Keith started his solo career that things started to get really weird. The Bronx-born emcee decided to lean into his affinity for grim and oddly titillating subject matter, often coupled with sci-fi sensibilities. These proclivities eventually led him to link up with Dan “The Automator” Nakamura and Richard “DJ Q-Bert” Quitevis and record with them under the alias Dr. Octagon. With their debut project, Dr. Octagonecologyst (originally released as Dr. Octagon), unveiled 30 years ago, they set hip-hop on its ear with one of the most singularly strange and overall dopest albums ever conceived.
Keith introduced the Dr. Octagon character on “Smoking Dust,” which appeared on Ultramagnetic MCs’ Basement Tapes (1994), a collection of the group’s unreleased material. It is appropriately odd and was apparently recorded during the Four Horsemen sessions. If you listen to it, you can hear Keith still shaping the character with his verses.
The first Dr. Octagon-branded songs were actually produced by Kutmasta Kurt. The two were recording songs together after the completion of Four Horsemen and put together “Dr. Octagon” and “Technical Difficulties.” The story goes that Keith began sending copies of the songs to radio stations and DJs across the country, and they found their way into the hands of Dan The Automator. Automator took an interest, which led to him collaborating with Keith. They recorded the project in a relatively short amount of time in Automator’s studio, bringing in DJ Q-Bert to lay down the scratches.
They first released the eponymous album through Automator’s Bulk Recordings. After the effort earned independent success, DreamWorks negotiated a deal to reissue the album (when the famed filmed studio first launched, it had a subsidiary record label as well), re-releasing it as Dr. Octagonecologyst about a year later. The reissue featured a few new songs/remixes in place of a few entries and a slightly reordered tracklist. I was first exposed to the Bulk Recordings incarnation of the project, so I’m in essence paying tribute to that version here.
Listen to the Album:
Dr. Octagonecologyst is a very…strange album, and unlike anything else that had been released at the time. Keith completely commits to the bit, assuming the role of Dr. Octagon. For those wondering, Octagon is a deranged, murderous, time-traveling, alien physician. On the mic, he strikes a strange balance between generating ridiculous, almost juvenile imagery, and being genuinely disturbing. Keith vacillates between surreal and ridiculous, describing bizarre creatures and medical conditions that could either be generated from the mind of a deranged killer or a precocious eight-year-old.
The album’s production, credited almost entirely to Automator, keeps pace with Keith’s madcap tone. It floats across multiple genres, from straight hip-hop to psychedelic horrorcore to drum and bass to heavy metal. At other times, it seems lifted from the scores of obscure 1970s sci-fi flicks. DJ Q-Bert is a constant presence throughout much of the album, as the three-time DMC champion demonstrates the skills that made him one of the faces of the turntablist movement throughout the 1990s.
Keith does his “world building” throughout Dr. Octagonecologyst through the skits. Alternately he narrates sketchy commercials for his medical practice and describes his unsettling practices in minute detail. Though the malevolent doctor seems to be mostly interested in gynecology, particularly acting out his perversions on women patients. Throughout various skits and commercials for his practice, he explains that he specializes in “rectal rebuilding, relocated saliva glands, chimpanzee acne… and of course, moosebumps.” He treats “bees flying around your rectum.” The album also features frequent samples of medical fetish-themed adult entertainment, to make the proceedings even more sleazy.
Dr. Octagonecologyst begins with “3000.” When the album was recorded, rappers were beginning to voice their obsession with the coming dawn of the 21st century. Meanwhile, Kool Keith saw himself as existing 1,000 years in the future, travelling back in time to wreak havoc.
“Earth People,” the album’s first proper single, further establishes the Dr. Octagon character. Keith rhymes over gothic sci-fi funk, heavy on the synthesizers, describing how he traipses the cosmos stoned on “aluminum intoxicants” and “armed with seven rounds of space doo-doo pistols.” The “Earth Planet” remix of the song is an even more fascinating creation. Automator crafts a track practically devoid of anything musical aside from a thumping drum track, a groaning bassline, and occasional stabs of keys.
“Blue Flowers,” the album’s inexplicably deranged second single, encapsulates Dr. Octagonecologyst’s overall vibe. Automator builds an unnerving track from violin samples and pulsing synthesizers, while Keith pieces together seemingly non-sensical verses laden with allusions to medical treatment. I seriously doubt there’s any deep meaning behind lines like, “Cybernetic microscopes and metal antidotes / Two telescopes that magnify size of a roach,” but that’s pretty much the point. It’s more about the feeling created and the flow of the language.
Keith offers a slightly more straightforward performance on “Technical Difficulties.” The gritty track sounds like it is emanating from damaged speakers from the Doctor’s waiting room, filled with static and whistling pops. Here Keith is determined to show the lyrical dominance of his alter ego, rapping, “As Dr. Octagon, walking through a polygon / My first impression was to give patients a lesson / Who's the best to put me to the test? / I’ll battle Ultramagnetic, my own self as well.”
“Girl, Let Me Touch You” is one the first released occurrences of what would become a standard for Keith’s solo career: the alternately suggestive and vaguely disturbing sex track. Keith details his explicit exploits as an “orthopedic gynecologist,” manipulating female patients into engaging in various freaky exploits. “Did he lick you there? Percolate your atmosphere?” he asks. “I got a mask at home, boots, and some leather gear.” The track would serve as a prelude to his Sex Style (1997) album, produced by Kutmasta Kurt.
Other tracks on Dr. Octagonecologyst are more confrontational. “I’m Destructive” is built on a pounding electric guitar sample, as Keith wreaks lyrical mayhem over the track. The song features my favorite Kool Keith opening line, as he ponders, “Think about it, if you was there standing looking at me: What would you do, if I hit your face with dog doodoo?”
“Wild and Crazy” was designed to evoke Kool Keith’s Ultramagnetic years, as he drops verses to the “Synthetic Substitution” drum break, the backbone of the Ultramag song, “Ego Trippin’.” Stylistically, Keith’s verses are a throwback to his years with the group, utilizing flows and deliveries that he first flexed in the late 1980s that sound futuristic even today.
DJ Q-Bert’s presence is integral to the success of Dr. Octagonecologyst. From a pure skill perspective, DJ Q-Bert was considered one of the best DJs drawing breath in the mid-1990s. He displays his ample skills throughout Dr. Octagon. His extended scratch solo that closes the eerie “Real Raw” exhibits his mind-blurring hand-speed. The instrumental “Bear Witness” allows Q-Bert to have the spotlight to himself, scratching phrases and sounds to a hollow-sounding bassline and atmospheric chirps.
Another of the key contributors to Dr. Octagonecologyst seems to have been all-but unacknowledged these days. It seems wrong that Rapper Sir Menelik (a.k.a. Chewbacca Uncircumcised a.k.a. Scaramanga) doesn’t receive his due, considering that he was part of the project before even Automator and DJ Q-Bert. Menelik is featured on four different songs on the original version of the album but was mostly excised from the DreamWorks reissue.
The best of the four is the album’s title track, which is one of the two original Kutmasta Kurt songs recorded. It features Keith and Menelik on stage at a fictional concert at the Great Western Forum, on the bill with Nirvana and Zapp’s Roger Troutman. The two trade verses to a sample of Young-Holt Unlimited’s “The Creeper,” as Keith raps, “Dr. Ludicrous, I turn into an octopus / Grab eight species, isolate like an incubus.”
Other songs appear only on the Bulk Recordings incarnation of the project. “Biology 101” features the pair operating “at forty thousand Kelvin,” pondering since-eternal scientific inquiries as to whether “science achieve a unified theory of complex systems” and whether “H20 is a glass or a liquid. “On Production” is a Menelik solo cut, where he speaks extensively (and competently) in scientific vernacular. Most of the content of his verses went over my head when I first heard them, but a bio major friend of mine once “translated” them for me. Menelik extensively details the discovery of a virulent parasitic alien virus, explaining how it functions and is ultimately treated.
Keith introduces other aliases on this album. On “Halfsharkaligatorhalfman” he climbs out the primordial sludge as Mr. Gerbik, Dr. Octagon’s “dangerous” 208-year-old uncle. Introducing himself with an unintelligible growl, he declares that he’s “half shark, half man, skin like alligator, carrying a dead walrus.” He describes wandering the streets causing mayhem and attacking various exotic animals.
The DreamWorks reissue ends with “1977,” the most fully Kool Keith track on the album. Keith transports himself back to the late 1970s Bronx-based park jams, delivering old school flavored rhymes with the properly dated cadence to the “Do the Funky Penguin” breakbeat. Automator lays on the atmosphere pretty thick, making the track sound like it was recorded live, as Keith boasts about his OJ with pink whitewalls, while shouting out local housing projects and early hip-hop personalities.
Dr. Octagonecologyst set the stage for the next three decades of Keith’s remarkably prolific and idiosyncratic career. However, Keith’s relationship with the Dr. Octagon character has been…complicated. And convoluted.
Keith’s relationship with DreamWorks quickly soured, and his taste for Dr. Octagon and working relationship with Automator soon followed suit. Keith later commented that he never received proper credit for creating Dr. Octagonecologyst’s sound. One of his alter-egos, Dr. Dooom, “kills” Dr. Octagon in the opening seconds of First Come, First Served (1999), seemingly putting an end to the character.
However, during the early to mid-2000s, Keith toyed with the idea of resurrecting the character. The albums Nogatco Rd. (read it backwards) and The Return of Dr. Octagon dropped within months of each other in 2006, though it should be noted that the latter is essentially an unauthorized album, even from Keith’s end. A couple of years later, Keith would murder Dr. Octagon again on Dr. Dooom 2 (2008).
Dan The Automator of course continued to enjoy great success as a producer, contributing to many great albums throughout the 21st century, including Deltron 3030 (2000) and Gorillaz’ self-titled debut (2000). He seemingly took the strained relationship with Keith in stride.
It would take another decade all together for there to be another “official” Dr. Octagon album, with Keith, Automator, and DJ Q-Bert contributing to the process. All three toured to perfect material from the album in the mid-2010s, and finally released a proper sequel, Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation (2018) through Bulk Recordings.
Though everyone is on decent terms now (or at least can work together professionally), there has long been lingering ill will regarding the construction of Dr. Octagonecologyst. Kutmasta Kurt ended up suing Automator in order to get a cut of the royalties for his contributions to the album. And along with continued grumbling about receiving proper credit for his production, he appears to resent that his solo career is associated by many with that one album.
Neither Kool Keith nor Automator nor Q-Bert may be defined by the success of Dr. Octagonecologyst, but it set into motion many great things for all of their careers. It still stands as a landmark in surreal hip-hop and one of the most influential “underground” releases in hip-hop’s history. So, it’s best to just enjoy the music and watch out for cirrhosis of the eye.
Listen: