Happy 25th Anniversary to Kool Keith’s fourth studio album Black Elvis/Lost In Space, originally released August 10, 1999.
It’s hard to know what to make of “Kool” Keith Thornton at times. He’s an artist with limitless creativity who seems to lean into his complete weirdness, but also seems uncomfortable with his audience viewing him as an oddity. He comes up with outlandish concepts that appear to be made with his tongue firmly in his cheek, but then professes to take the premises completely seriously. He was instrumental in developing a model for rappers building their own lanes without the help of record labels, but then, at his artistic peak as an independent artist, he signed a deal with Sony Records. Which is how Black Elvis/Lost In Space, released 25 years ago, became part of Kool Keith’s legend.
Keith got his start as a member of Ultramagnetic MCs, a group that pretty much invented left of center hip-hop. After the group functionally ran its course, he began recording and releasing music independently, first and most successfully as Dr. Octagon. With the help of Dan the Automator and DJ Q-Bert, he released his debut solo album Dr. Octagonecologyst in 1996.
With the attention that Keith had earned through Dr. Octagonecologyst, it made sense that he’d draw the interest of major record labels. The short-lived musical arm of DreamWorks would reissue Dr. Octagonecologyst, but that relationship quickly soured. At some point, Keith linked with Sony and Columbia Records to distribute a new album.
Ever the creative mind when it came to aliases, Keith crafted the Black Elvis character, a megalomaniacal rapper with a rock star mentality. He then recorded a new album, produced entirely by himself, with some assistance from “KutMasta” Kurt Maitlin, who he’d already collaborated with on Sex Style (1997). Black Elvis/Lost in Space is about the closest approximation of “commercially friendly” Kool Keith had embraced up to that point in his evolving solo career.
Black Elvis/Lost In Space is a slick, well-made project, which presents a polished version of Keith that in some ways appealed to a wider audience. However, Keith also displays more than enough of his character eccentricities so that it never feels watered down.
Of course, Sony/Columbia Records had no idea what to do with the album. Its release was delayed many, many, many months. Frustrated with the delay, Keith recorded and released a whole other album while waiting for Black Elvis. The two characters even shared a rubberized Elvis Presley wig for “their” promotional photo shoots. In some ways, the two alter egos were mirror images of each other, but more on that later.
The album is functionally split into two halves, leading off with the cosmic-oriented Lost In Space side, back when “sides” were still a thing. Only Kool Keith would work hard to develop an outlandish character like Black Elvis and then send him to outer space, but that’s just what he does on the album’s first and only single, “Livin’ Astro.” Keith as Black Elvis professes to live a futuristic lifestyle while other wannabe pop stars are trapped in the past. Over layers of pulsating keys and synths, Keith raps, “Mad atmosphere, riding first class on British Air / Lobster and steak, while y’all back in time, doing remakes / I’m futuristic: ’99 to the year 4000 / I make announcements, drop skills, then I bounce with / Fly young ladies, AMG kicks, two thousand Mercedes.”
Listen to the Album:
Since the days of Ultramagnetic MCs, Keith has always had a knack for creating bizarre love songs. Black Elvis’ version is “Supergalactic Lover,” where, over a sample of Teddy Pendergrass’ “Come and Go With Me,” Keith fantasizes about tooling around the galaxy in his spaceship, with his interstellar lover at his side. It should be noted that although Black Elvis is devoid of Keith cursing (a rarity for him), “Supergalactic Lover” does sound as suggestive as possible without getting filthy. On a different note, I continue to wonder what the color “monkey green” looks like.
Keith uses the album’s futuristic spin to target phonies and fakes, a frequent target of his ire. “I’m Seeing Robots” has Keith lambasting scenester drones, pretending to have material wealth, sacrificing quality of life for the appearance of material success, looking ridiculous all the while.
Keith holds down Black Elvis mostly on his own, but enlists a few guests. “Master of The Game” features a posthumous appearance by the great Roger Troutman, who had passed just months before the album’s release. I imagine in a world where Columbia hadn’t continuously delayed Black Elvis’ release, the song would have been one of the album’s singles, as it’s easily the most radio friendly song that Keith recorded during this time period. He flexes a double-time style throughout the song without sounding self-conscious or dated.
“Static” finds Keith joining forces with Sadat X, a unique lyrical force in his own right. With his off-kilter delivery, Sadat can be every bit the character as Keith, and more than holds his own while trading verses with Black Elvis. Even on a pretty strange album, Sadat shines and in some ways out-weirds Keith, as he raps, “I want the whole world and my old girl back / She left me for the postman; now she send me letters.”
The album’s second half, the “Black Elvis” side, features a less rough version of the type of content that audiences had come to expect from Keith on his independent projects. On the title track, Keith fully assumes the role of Black Elvis, bathing in excess, touring the globe in a neon green bus, and recording music all while presenting himself as the idol of millions. As mechanically precise synths pound out a rumbling rhythm, Keith raps, “Roadie cases for eight months, Samsonite suitcases / Rappers coming home with no money on the red eye with dead eyes / Stadium tickets, watch scalpers get wicked / Pull up in my limo ejecting your demo.”
On “Keith Turbo,” Keith seems to adopt yet another persona, this one obsessed with speed, be it from the cockpit of a jet or behind the wheel of a racecar. While it’s certainly entertaining to hear him kick aerial and auto-related metaphors over a rhythmic keyboard track, Keith is at his most entertaining ad-libbing during the track’s chorus. Not only does he promise to “throw a 100,000 pound walrus right through the walls,” he professes to be “mad like five gorillas in the vocal booth.”
It’s the extra flares of personality and seemingly bizarre asides that really solidify a Kool Keith album. He adds a few more of these touches on “Girls Don’t Like the Job,” where he imagines himself as an international mogul and power broker with a tentacle-like reach into many fields of power, including technology, banking, music, and sports. The track’s oddball highlight comes when the beat randomly shifts to a baseball stadium broadcast, complete with an old-timey organ in the background, as he tries to broker a multi-national auto distribution deal. And this is after he’s discussed Compton real estate with Al Sharpton.
And of course, Keith engages in his favorite pastime, lambasting wack emcees and the record industry as a whole, multiple times on the “Black Elvis” portion of the album. On “Maxi Curls,” Kool rides a finely chopped sample from Charles Earland’s “Snake,” rapping, “Digital thinking, you’re blinking, career sinking / Old like Mod Squad, you rap like Lincoln.” He’s also probably the only rapper to throw “remote controlled alligator” into a hook, while also mis-identifying former defensive linebacker Joe Klecko as a quarterback. I don’t think Keith much cared though.
“All the Time” seems like the most audacious track on Black Elvis, if for no other reason than its musical choices. Keith does a masterful job at throwing stream of consciousness disses at fake emcees who pretend to be rich but still live with their parents, but he does so while rapping over a sample of Faith Evans’ “You Used To Love Me.” It’s the exact type of thing that only Keith could make work.
The album ends with “I Don’t Play,” where Keith wades fully back into his Black Elvis persona, conveying the woe of the mega pop-star who has his every move scrutinized by obsessed fans and media. The song is like an alternate reality version of Dr. Dooom’s “Leave Me Alone,” where that version of Keith rhymes as a jaded industry vet, while here he fashions himself in the mode of Michael Jackson. He also makes sure to mock his aspiring peers as he raps, “I come to boo you, best believe, I’m a damager / Cancel shows, interviews, I don’t need no manager / Slash fan, half of y’all think I’m the Elephant Man.”
Keith dropped the Dr. Dooom First Come, First Served project a few months before his Columbia Records effort. Some say the original plan was to release it on the same day as Black Elvis, but the scheme was foiled due to the aforementioned delays. Though there was some bleed between the Black Elvis and Dr. Dooom characters, they also represented drastically different musical philosophies. Whereas Black Elvis was about giving the record label something they could work with, Dr. Dooom was violently non-commercial, almost completely inaccessible to any Johnny-Come-Lately that thought Keith sounded cool on Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up.”
Black Elvis proved to be a headache for Keith, and served as another example of why he should maintain his independent route. The story goes that at the last moment, according to KutMasta Kurt, the whole thing was the idea of a “shady” manager who Keith hired, and who’d negotiated the major label deal without dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Black Elvis received little promotion outside of the one video for “Living Astro.” Otherwise, the audience wouldn’t have known it had any sort of major label muscle behind it.
In the two decades since Black Elvis was released, I believe it’s safe to say that none of the dozens of albums that he released have been supported by a major label. But, from the artistic standpoint, Black Elvis was a total success, and demonstrated that Kool Keith would always be Kool Keith no matter where he was signed and how big of a budget he received. And that’s always refreshing.
LISTEN:
Editor's note: this anniversary tribute was originally published in 2019 and has since been edited for accuracy and timeliness.