Maybe there was just no possible way for last night's Kool Keith show to live up to my expectations. I'd never seen the many-faced MC perform before, but I'd heard tell again and again of his (most recent?) Seattle performance, possibly on the Black Elvis tour, when Keith pelted the hungry audience with buckets of fried chicken. I'd also spent about a year straight of my college career listening to Sex Style while playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater and smoking pot with my Olympia house-mates, such that a tiny sliver of Keith's recorded output still summons up vivid nostalgia for those days. A fan of music criticism maybe as much as I am of music, I'd also geekily thrilled to Rob Harvilla's Best Music Writing-certified take on the Kool Keith live experience, "Spankmaster & Servant," and I guess I was hoping for a show as neatly tied-up and complete as the one described therein. Maybe, while editing David Schmader's essay on the wide spread of multiple identity disorder in pop music, I'd read too much into the billing of "Dr. Dooom vs Dr. Octagon (aka Kool Keith)" and I guess I'd expected something a little more psychotically vaudevillian, with costume changes, inter-personality feuds, assassinations.

What last night's show turned out to be, though, was just a sold-out hiphop show starring a legendary MC—not bad for a Friday night, but somehow not as extra-terrestrial as I had imagined. Kutmasta Kurt, who transformed from regular dude to bizarro hasidic bar mitzvah DJ via the donning of a huge, scratchy-looking fake beard, warmed the crowd up with a DJ set in which he played a string of his own productions, then scratched and cut in to his sample sources, demonstrating for the crowd how he flipped each old funk or soul song into his own tracks. He chatted on the mic, engaged the crowd in call-and-response, and just generally drew things out (the show was 45 minutes behind the posted schedule at this point) until the fed-up crowd was angrily shouting for Kool Keith. Kutmasta Kurt has a fucking tough gig.

When Keith did emerge, preceded by unflaggingly energetic hypeman Dennis Deft, he was not visibly Dr. Dooom, Dr. Octagon, Black Elvis, or any other character—he was just Keith, in plain clothes and sunglasses, with his head wrapped in a gold sequined scarf, looking a little bit more like "Little Edie" from Grey Gardens than an intergalactic gynecologist. Keith seemed a little clocked-out behind the headwrap and shades, delivering his rhymes rote, not really talking much between tracks, letting Deft'scalls of "Seattle in the house!" and "It's a party, y'all!" do the work.

They ran through a couple Ultra-Magnetic MCs tracks, and even if Keith was phoning it in—or, generously, just revving up—the crowd was nuts for it, shouting along to the punch-lines and choruses. Keith did a little freestyle, starting to come alive a little, and Deft remarked, "That's just like what being with Kool Keith in the studio is like." Keith began to banter: "I'm not a real rapper. I just rap. But I'm not a rapper, I'm a regular guy...I write my own lyrics."

The bill's promise of multiple personalities was fulfilled only by Keith casually going through his extensive back catalogue, "switching" identities with understated announcements: "Octagon is not gone, 'cause he's right here now," "This is the Black Elvis part of the show," etc.

He did "Blue Flowers," "Girl Let Me Touch You", and "I Run Rap," with its sneering, sinister chorus of "Dr. Dooom is in the Room." In between songs, Keith passed out cds, and people were nearly trampling each other to get them. He did a song I don't know and can't seem to find that had a chorus about "no rap remixes" and which seemed to be talking shit about Dan the Automater and the other producers Keith's worked with. He did a medley of abbreviated versions of "I Followed You," "God of Rap," "Do Not Disturb," Take That Ride," and others. Some white beardos in the front row were mouthing every word, grinning maniacally.

It's been observed before, but he really does sound and act like some demented combination of Tracy Jordan and LL Cool J (and, you know, Keith can really rap once he gets going). At one point, he shouted cues to Kutmasta Kurt: "I wanna do an a capella with the crowd!" and then, when he wanted the beat back: "Music! Music! Music!" sounding just like Tracy Morgan's petulant man-child (or, you know, more likely, vice versa).

At some point, things took the inevitable turn for the porno-riffic, as Keith delved into tracks like "How Sexy" and "Freaks" before treating the crowd to his thoughts on a selection of "his own personal" porno magazines. This, really, is where Keith seemed to be a viking.

"How many people wanna see cartoon pornos," he asked, holding up some magazine (huge cheers). "This is a cartoon—it's exaggerated!" He riffed on some more magazine pages: "She's innocent, she's just going to school, she don't even talk to nobody!" "That's your neighbor!" As he handed magazines out to the crowd, fans shouted, "Sign it!" Keith's hypeman promised they'd do autographs after the show, that they'd be hanging out all night. Keith kept one centerfold ("that's for me").

He railed against text messaging: "How many people here masturbate? How many people say stop texting and start sexing? See we have a lot of people masturbating because of the texting. Because when you're texting, you can't hear that voice, you can't see the ass, you don't know who it is, you can't see—Stop texting, start sexing!" He played "G-Spot" and the Kool Keith mission statement "Sex Style."

"This is a confession: I buy about 75,000 pornos a week—do I have a problem 'cause I keep buying porn, or do you want me to keep buying it?" The crowd, of course, would like little more than to see Keith spend an entire economic stimulus package's worth of money on pornography (and, in fact, if Keith really was buying that much porno, it would probably be enough to single-handedly end the recession). The long show seemed to be yielding diminishing returns, so I split, even though I really wanted to see him do "I Don't Believe You" (did he?). On the way out, at Pike St Fish Fry, the fry cook was complaining dramatically about needed to close shop 15 minutes early to specially fry some chicken for Keith and his crew.

photos by Jackie Canchola