Kool Keith: Still Ultramagnetic

2013 has been the year of the hip-hop reunion – everyone from golden age innovators such as Big Daddy Kane to silver age heroes like Jurassic 5 have resurfaced and hit the road, playing to nostalgic fans and a new generation of rap enthusiasts. The latest group to announce their return to the live arena are the Ultramagnetic MCs, the group consisting of Kool Keith, Ced Gee, Moe Love and TR Love, who released their ground-breaking album Critical Beatdown in 1988.

Comprised of rapid-fire samples programmed into the SP1200 drum machine by Ced Gee, also a key creative force behind much of Boogie Down Productions' 1987 classic Criminal Minded, and the densely-written, often surreal braggadoccio of Kool Keith, the album was a unique and powerful statement, even in the intensely creative period in which it surfaced. Despite all that, Kool Keith is not happy with being called a legend.

“I'm basically current, you know. We don't put stigmas to ourselves like that,” he explains in a laconic, relaxed New York drawl. “We don't really want to be called legends. There are a lot of groups who came up with us who really live off of those stigmas from the past, they see themselves as legends. Me, I don't like to be called a legend. I don't like that drag on me.” The reasons for getting the old gang back together were less about a nostalgia for their classic albums, and more to do with wanting to create new material. They plan to follow up their first new track since 2007, Let the Bars Go, revealed online last month, with a series of singles and an EP.

Keith is working on a new solo album as well, his passion for hip-hop completely undiminished. He has been dabbling in production: “I stay on new beats, I try to evolve and be brand new. That's always been a part of me. I don't have no ending. I'm the number one producer, and I don't make toilet tissue music. My production rumbles.”

With a fearsome reputation as a solo artist – his 1996 album Octagonecologyst, released on the British Mo' Wax label, still crops up frequently on hip-hop all-time best-of lists, while subsequent collaborations and projects saw him find favour with fans on tracks with The Prodigy, Princess Superstar, Kutmaster Kurt, Tim Dog, and a whole host of others – Keith is in no danger of slowing down, despite officially announcing his retirement on last year's Love and Danger, on a track called Goodbye Rap. “Rhyming is like basketball. If you don't practice for a while, you get stiff,” he says.

“That's what happens to a lot of rappers from the past, they get stiff, their cadence can freeze up. I've always got a modern cadence, it's always ahead of it's time. There's never a glitch in my cadence. There's never a stiffness. I always flow smooth and modern over tracks, from day one. A lot of artists were behind, but I was never behind. They were good in their time, but they can't adapt to the new cadence. They can't flow with it. They just can't play no more. They just don't have that ability to push that ball up the floor no more. So they got to perform those old records for the rest of their life.”

"You can put me in the hall of fame, but that's not the end of it" – Kool Keith

Hence the new recordings, which in Keith's mind justifies the reprisal of Critical Beatdown, and earn he and his group the right to hit the road again. “It's cool to do old records,” he says. “You can put me in the hall of fame, but that's not the end of it – it's not the end of my music. I don't need all that, because I don't want to live off that. I don't want to be [retired baseball players] Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle.” His rap contemporaries, he feels, are just trading on their pasts, and ignoring the present and future. “A lot of these motherfuckers, they're gonna live off that. And it's sad.”

There is more than a hint of the classic hip-hop brag in his banter about tired contemporaries, and before you know it, he's off on one of his famous rants. “You have to start looking modern. People are jealous of me and Ced Gee because we're still slim, we look like we're twenty years old. The average rapper, he got a giant big belly, he got a Yankee cap on, he got like three pig feet behind his neck. He has to look like, grey hair growing, the face like, 'That's it for me.' He has that look already of like, your fellow classmates. Nobody has to do that. You see Sugar Ray Leonard, he don't box, but he look just as young as Floyd Mayweather. You know what I'm saying?”

When Keith calls rappers fat, he isn't spelling it with a 'ph.' His voice drops an octave as he mimics sad, ageing, defeated hip-hop stars: “Everybody feels like, you know, 'I have to eat barbecue ribs and let myself go. I'm looking for a group that's old, wrinkled, fat, overweight... I'm eating everything, not taking care of myself, going into obesity because I'm a legend. I'm old school. That's it for me, I got my wife and kids. I'm supposed to just sit around the house and barbecue all day and all that, because I'm a legend. I'm gonna eat poorly and let myself go, let my belly grow and my beard come out...'”

So what makes the Ultramagnetic MCs a different proposition? “We stay away from that miserable movement, like all those backpackers and all that who hate everything commercial.” His enthusiasm for the possibilities inherent in the current hip-hop landscape is infectious: “You can rap on what you want, there are no limitations. You can rap on a bassline with cowbells. It's cool, it's open-minded. Kids now, everybody's open.”

It hasn't always been a smooth ride in the industry for Keith. He's seen other rappers with less talent get rich, and even Octagonecologyst, his most successful album in European markets, passed almost unremarked in certain quarters of the US scene. “You've got people who were following us, but they don't even know about Octagon,” he says. “They don't know I was on a record that sold three million. They don't know I'm recording with Future People, and other projects... They're so slow they're like people walking around with an afro and a beatbox, stuck in time.”

Will the UK crowds be treated to some classic solo tracks on the Ultramagnetic tour? “I might perform Blue Flowers,” he says with an audible grin. “That's cool, but I'm really focused on Ultramagnetics. We're focused on our modernism and everything like that. Nothing's a comeback. Everything's just what we are supposed to be doing. We're not like the Five Blind Boys getting back together for the telethon. We're not forming back up so that the climax can be a telethon show. We're not doing all the industry stuff.”

Asked about Ced Gee's legacy as a producer, Keith reflects on the disposable nature of most modern beat-makers' work. “I give Ced credit as a producer who could do a whole album,” he says. “Most of the producers now are just beat throwers. I still think about Cameo, doing a whole album with his sound. Back then, everybody had a sound. The Jets had a sound, the Moments had a sound, the Delfonics had a sound. Nowadays you've got these superstar producers who do tracks with everybody. Most of these producers now don't want to be album producers, they want to be superstars. To me they get no credit.”

Yet again, he's on a roll: “They kill me, trying to act like they're the best producer. They might come up with a sound that becomes a trend but they don't have no long-term jeopardy. They're hot for a minute, then a new person comes in. And it's like, whoever Spuds MacKenzie [a dog used in an 80s Budweiser commercial] produced, he's hot now; so now everybody gotta get a track from Spuds MacKenzie.”

Still incredibly driven, he refuses to be drawn on his own extra-curricular activities. “I'm just writing and recording and staying current, eating well, apples and vegetables, making sure I don't go to barbecues and cook til I look like the Nutty Professor,” he says with another gentle chuckle. “I'm staying in shape in case I have to smack the shit out of somebody."