“You’re three feet and sinking/The tribes are lost and everyone’s breath stinkin’” – Kool Keith on Ultramagnetic MCs ‘Pluckin’ Cards’, 1992.
As pointed out in Angus Batey’s revisit of Funk Your Head Up in 2012, Keith continued the Ultramag party line – first witnessed on Tim Dog’s ‘I Ain’t Takin’ No Shorts’ – that the Bronx bombers had no time for all the Happy Rap of the time:
Fairly or not, Keith – who was careful not to take aim at the Jungle Brothers – felt Tribe, De La and even X-Clan were diluting rap’s raw essence with what he later described as a “neo-soul” sensibility. “I never liked that era of rap that comes and goes – that neo-soul type of sphere,” he told me. “I just didn’t like that whole aura. It was like I was just against Native Tongues by myself – the whole aura of that type of rap. I was mad because I thought they didn’t respect what I was doing at that time. They got more centred into that rather than what rap was. It takes away from rap itself – it takes away from the Just Ice. It takes away from the Tricky T. It takes away from Eric B and EPMD.”
This quote is amazing for a number of reasons – not least for the fact that he name-checked fellow Bronx resident Tricky T who dropped ‘Johnny The Fox’ and ‘Here Comes The Drums’ with Mantronik in the mid-eighties. As Angus notes, Keith’s disdain for the new breed of experimental rap was ironic considering how much of an inspiration his own abstract flows had inspired De La Soul in particular.
But history has showed us that it’s still par-for-the-course as each new wave of MC’s to be dismissed by the previous leaders of the pack, as we saw Kurtis Blow diss Just-Ice1 and Melle Mel refuse to make room for BDP and PE. And while not a lot of people publicly dissed A Tribe Called Quest2 and De La, they weren’t immediately embraced by everyone. I still recall the story of a hardcore rap fan who was so sickened by the colourful imagery that adorned the cover of 3 Feet High…And Rising that he felt compelled to snap every copy that he saw on the record store racks in two!
The Jungle Brothers were of course exempt, since they both crews were part of Kool DJ Red Alert’s extended family and the JB’s had named Ultramagnetic as ‘The Future’ on the liner notes of their second album, while the X-Clan thing may have been a rejection of their heavily-marketed image rather than the music itself…or it was just part of the rich history of The Bronx vs. Brooklyn rivalries? It’s actually Big Daddy Kane, another Brooklynite, who catches the worst stray here: ‘I see light in my lamp, but not on the mic/How could I diss myself in front of Dolemite?’ Ouch.
Kool Keith would later go on to explore a wide variety of alter egos and personas in his work, showing that he wasn’t adverse to reinventing his own image with each release like some kind of Rap Game Madonna, but at least he wasn’t ever posing as a stinking hippy or bohemian!
Of course, it wasn’t anything too serious, as Keith explains in the same article:
“‘Pluckin Cards’ was just raw dissing – a straight-up record, me goin’ against people. It was made more on a humorous level. It was just what I saw. But that was that time.”
The jury is still out on whether or not Rakim ever responded to Keith’s jabs on the Critical Beatdown album, but as Keith explained in another Angus Batey interview, those lines were about one-upmanship, not disrespect:
“I don’t really dis anybody on the album. They’re not really disses, they’re more competitive lyrics. Even with Rakim. He wrote a rap that went something like, ‘I can see as far as the planets’, about ‘balls of clay’. He said ‘As far as the eye can see, not even a satellite…’ So I said, ‘Your satellites are weak, I can see your balls of clay’. I just dissed the line: I said something bigger. They were more lyrical battles than personal – it was about topping the line he said.”
It wasn’t until the third Ultra album that a Keith line resulted in a recorded response, when Freddie Foxxx took umbrage to the line, “How can you put up a fox against an alligator?” and recorded ‘Crazy Like A Foxxx’, which features an entire verse detailing about how he planned on hunting down Keith, Ced and Moe as revenge. Keith and Freddie later bumped into each other on a plane flight and got everything sorted out, and nine months later a beautiful baby Halfsharkalligatorhalfman was born.3
Originally posted as part of The Eight Pint Hype newsletter. Go and subscribe for free to read these early.
- More on this next week [↩]
- With the exception of those Beatnuts subliminals! [↩]
- It’s unclear if Keith just pretended that he was randomly rapping about animals and reptiles to placate an agitated Bumpy Knuckles, but that’s the story he’s running with now so we’ll have to take his word for it. [↩]
Always good to read about Keith