Kool Keith is your favorite rapper’s father. He went to outer space before Andre or Wayne, he rhymed the same word twice before Cam’ron or N.O.R.E. and he suffered from dissociative identity disorder before MF DOOM made it a business model. Two decades after the Ultramagnetic MC's crash landed on planet rock with Critical Beatdown, Keith aka Dr. Dooom aka Black Elvis aka Tashan Dorrsett aka Dr. Octagon (R.I.P.) is still traveling at the speed of thought.

Having just dropped Dr. Dooom 2, Keith sat down with HipHopDX to talk about basically anything but, instead outlining his new genetic theories about ugly rappers, Bigfoot and Cornell West.

HipHopDX: It's been about 20 years since Critical Beatdown. Did you expect to still be making music this far down the line?
Kool Keith: Of course I did. I just assume I'm gonna be making records. Everything is what it is.

DX: Compared to a lot of your peers, from that era you've done pretty well for yourself. Do you keep in touch with any of those artists from that time?
Kool Keith: I don't really meet a lot of my old school artist mates from back then. They talk about the past. I'm invited to a lot of conventions and stuff, but I can't seriously be stuck in that moment of what they were doing back then. They just kinda mad at the new school guys, so I don't go to a lot of those functions anymore. I try to stay away from that.

DX: So how do you feel about the new school guys?
Kool Keith: I like them. I'm like a professional in the NBA, they come into the league and I play with them also. I'm not doing what everybody else is doing no more.

DX: Do you hear your influence when you listen to younger artists?
Kool Keith: Yeah, of course, I set off a tone. Ultramagnetic [MC's] set off a whole lot of tones with the abstract. I had a lot of influence on all the artists coming up through the Lyricist Lounge, Project Blowed and that nostalgic group of people. Even with the Rawkus stuff, me and Godfather Don's collaborations, that evolved a lot of people. That's why you hear your Talib Kwelis [click to read] and the MF Dooms and all these groups that are coming out now are just coming through those trees. Those branches, those seeds we planted. We set a lot of tones for people, but they erased the history. And I moved on in my life and career, exploded into my world.

DX: Why do you think Ultra isn't mentioned as frequently as say a KRS-One or Rakim?
Kool Keith: I don't know. Ultra never had good publicists to really speak up and broadcast the truth, so people try to sweep them under the rug. Magazines will come out with issues and articles and do the "Top 10 Best Albums" and the "Best Groups of All Time," but they kinda... I think they was just jealous of Ultramagnetic. We wasn't copycats, we was always distinctive. Whereas other rappers had 20 rappers that sound like them, we never sounded like other groups. Take a guy like Rakim, he had like 20, 30,000 rappers that sounded like him. When he was out, everybody was [rapping] with the soft-toned voice. We were just hard to duplicate. I think people skipped a lot of history, even with Ced [Gee] You wouldn't have even heard of KRS-One [click to read] if it wasn't for Ced. That whole umbrella of Boogie Down Productions and Scott La Rock used to come up to Ced's house in the projects. "The Bridge is Over" [click to read] [used] the drums from "Funky." But people erase time and the past. A lot of people go into their life and their future and they forget everything.

That's another thing also that people have a bad habit of. How can you erase what you started? A lot of people don't want to remember, a lot of people pay publicists to cover the past. A lot of people have different issues in their musical careers that they, if you really go back and look at a lot of rappers before-and-after's you would be surprised. I mean, they got different parts of their careers that were different totally from their future. You see album covers all the time with different artists, they were different at a certain time.

DX: But you do that on a more open level with all your aliases, though.
Kool Keith: Yeah, but erase all my aliases and I'm still a distinctive person just within myself. Just Keith. It doesn't have to be different aliases, I did that on the strength. I show my own musical self.

DX: Are you ever worried about people losing the real Keith amidst all the alter egos?
Kool Keith: Of course, but then I'm not. I'm glad Lil Wayne [click to read] broke doors open because for a minute, the space thing became a myth. It's funny people jumped on him so late. I knew Lil Wayne was gonna prosper like 15 years ago. I knew he was gonna stand out with his youthfulness and ambition. So people are late. But I feel honored that he's doing space shit now, because a long time ago people used to come to me like [in generic thuggish voice] "Yo what's up with that space shit? that's some different shit, why you doin' that?” But now look, I'm like, "Now what you gotta say?" I'm glad that verdict is already taken care of. It's like God meant it to go that way. I already had that seed planted. People look at me now, they can't say shit. It's done now. It's equivalent. I was ahead of my time and now time has caught up and people are doing the same shit I've already tried to tell them. Now they seeing it. It took times and wavelengths. You know Andre 3000 [click to read] and OutKast was prospering, all that shit had to marinate just now for people to get in their heads. Especially black people, the urban world. It took years to let people know what I set off. The seed I planted, it took a long time to grow. Continued on page 2 »