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"Lost in Space/Black Elvis" is Keith's star turn, self-produced but released by a major label, packed with music-industry jokes and rants about the price of fame. But it's not a pop move by any yardstick -- Keith's last album featured a song called "No Chorus," and this whole record could be called "No Hook." Aside from the improbably lovely almost-ballad "Supergalactic Lover" (Keith as a project-dwelling ladies' man driving a "monkey-green ragtop Seville") and the funky "Master of the Game" (featuring the vocodered lilt of late, legendary Zapp frontman Roger Troutman, the missing link between P-Funk and Daft Punk), these songs are as unmemorable as the cash-in junk Keith cut with indie-poppers Getaway Cruiser.

Kool Keith "Lost in Space/Black Elvis" Red Ant/Columbia

The trouble is, Keith's a brilliant rapper but a merely adequate producer. His crowning achievements, from the 1996 don't-call-it-a-comeback-album "Dr. Octagon" to this year's blood-splattered, "American Psycho"-in-the-PJs excursion "First Come First Served," have been collaborations with like-minded sickos. Notoriously difficult in the studio, Keith's endured acrimonious public divorces from several producers, including Dan "The Automator" Nakamura (whose haunted-asylum beats for "Octagon" demonstrated a knowledge of old-school Hammer horror flicks that would shame Rob Zombie) and his most recent enabler, "First Come" beatmaker Kut Masta Kurt. Even a surgeon of Keith's caliber needs somebody to pass him the scalpel.

The album is split into two parts, both of which feature separate themes. The "Lost in Space" concept -- Keith lives in a world of fake-assed "Westworld" robots, so he feels like an alien -- is cool with this sci-fi nerd. But listeners who bugged out to the old stuff will recognize these cyber-rhymes as standard deviation, minus the kinky/disturbing gynecological subtext of "Octagon." And for a base pimp narrative, the "Black Elvis" half can't match the filthy-mack-nastiness of Keith's 1997 indie album "Sex Style."

That record, practically a long-form phone-sex wank set to wax, overflowed with power-drunk playerism and fantasies so lewd you could practically smell them. Keith held a cracked mirror up to "real rap," desperate to shatter the genre's tough-guy perma-sneer, to rub the music's face in its own bullshit. Like Prince Paul's "comedy" album "Psychoanalysis," it got less funny and more tragic every time you played it, a painfully disillusioned parody fueled by the frustration that drives the best satirists. (Paul widened that angst into the hip-hopera "Prince Among Thieves," on which Keith cameoed as "Crazy Lou," "an ex-Marine captain who got discharged for sexual misconduct with a deadly weapon.")

On the brilliantly oblique Octagon single "Blue Flowers," a sampled voice implored "Let me show you something," over and over, and after we submitted to the request, Keith kicked rhymes about voodoo curses, health insurance, Evel Knievel-- the night-blooming underbrush of a perv poet's brain. On "Lost in Space," Keith's still got the skills -- a dis like "You are the monsters of the original Mr. Softee ice cream trucks" shut me right up -- but he can't remember what he used to do with 'em, and ends up coming off like just another mad rapper bending your ear at the bar: "Hey -- remember me? I used to be weird."
salon.com | August 20, 1999

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