Dr. Octagon‘s medical credentials are highly suspect. He almost certainly never took a Hippocratic Oath, and any physician in good standing with the board of medicine wouldn’t send a referral his way. He’ll diagnose you with cirrhosis of the eye or moosebumps, and you don’t even want to know what’s on his scalpel. And that’s if—if—he sanitized it. His price is cheap, he advertises, but you might get more than what you paid for.
The arrival of the demented doctor—born on Jupiter and prone to Tom and Jerry levels of absurdist cruelty—is, however, one of the greatest acts of reinvention in the annals of hip-hop. The extraterrestrial sadist in scrubs was the first of what eventually became a long list of outsize personas adopted by New York rapper and Ultramagnetic MCs member Kool Keith, before he introduced Dr. Dooom, Black Elvis and Mr. Nogatco (Octagon backwards), as well as seeing his voice become even more ubiquitous as the sampled vocal hook in The Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up.” Dr. Octagon pushed the boundaries of how weird rap could be, as Keith proclaimed in the opening track of the project’s debut album, taking rap music to the year 3000.
The (far-distant) future of rap, in this case, came from a figure who helped shape its past. Kool Keith had been a member of Ultramagnetic MCs since 1984 and delivered one of rap’s seminal albums with the group in 1988’s Critical Beatdown. But where much of the Class of ’88 hadn’t commercially or creatively kept up with the new school, Kool Keith—after his group went dormant in the mid-’90s—took swings so wide they entered a new stratosphere. Where some of his projects indulged in contemporary sleaze, e.g. the pornocore of 1997’s Sex Style, he used his deranged-doc persona as a means of building a brand new identity, initially sending out tapes to radio with no mention of Kool Keith whatsoever, just Dr. Octagon.
Two early tracks recorded as Dr. Octagon with Kutmasta Kurt—who also produced Sex Style—eventually wound up in the hands of Bay Area producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, who produced 1996’s Dr. Octagonecologyst with some additional scratching from DJ Q-Bert, a remix from rising producer DJ Shadow before the release of his own Endtroducing…, and the two initial tracks produced by Kutmasta Kurt (who would eventually sue The Automator over the project). The finished, collaborative product fully fleshes out the Dr. Octagon persona with suitably space-age sonics and horrorshow beats, adding depth and dimension to its comic-book conceit.
Kool Keith doesn’t reveal the depths of his alien antagonist’s depravity immediately. While an intro cribbed from a hospital-themed porno clues us into the album’s profane pranksterism, the eerie sci-fi boom bap of its first track, “3000,” is a stellar showcase for his lyrical skills. His rhyme schemes twist and turn and get pulled through wormholes (“As space, I’ve shown participator acts walk up, clog up and mess up/Water down the sound, that comes from the ghetto/In the middle, the core you tour explore“) as he hypes up his collaborator behind the boards while dispensing dadaist disses (“Channels and handles/Automator’s on the panels/Turnin knobs/You suckers slobs like Baskin Robs/Carvel, don’t tell, your whole crew is ice cream fudge”).
It’s with the space-age electro banger “Earth People” that Keith showcases Octagon in his gruesome glory, his skin “green and silver, forehead looking mean” and “armed with seven rounds of space doo-doo pistols.” It’s a game of oddball escalation from there, offering a litany of threats and gross-outs in “Real Raw” (“you don’t want none, the vomit’s on your cinnamon bun”), flipping the bird at the Bard in “Blue Flowers” (“Shakespeare’s gone, don’t even think about it”) and walking the street with a live alligator in “Wild and Crazy.”
It gets weirder: Kool Keith adopts yet another persona in “Halfsharkalligatorhalfman”—Mr. Gerbik, the 208-year-old uncle of Dr. Octagon, whose skin turns “orange and green in the limousine.” And the grunge-rap vandalism spree “I’m Destructive” lives up to its name via threats like “Bash in your head with ten full cans of Campbell’s soup/I’m on the roof and I let the pigeons out the chicken coop.” Coupled with the silliness of a few choice skits like “General Hospital” (“oh shit, there’s a horse in the hospital!”) or “A Visit to the Gynecologist,” with even more medical-themed porn samples, it’s a potpourri of bad taste and good times. Keith is in his element when embracing the bizarre, pairing nimble lyricism with free-association spirals down mutant rabbit holes, impeccably matched by The Automator’s immersive and eclectic soundscapes. Whether or not he invented horrorcore as he once claimed, Kool Keith can most certainly lay claim to creating something richer and multi-dimensional with it.
I first heard Dr. Octagonecologyst as a teenager, which is the optimal time to hear a record this irreverently dope—though in all its zany, gross-out glory, it remains a classic of left-field hip-hop and a singular set of music. So much so that I’m still sore about the fact that a co-worker I once lent my cut-out-bin Music Trader CD copy of the album never returned it before he wrapped up his temporary summer shift. (I gave away all my CDs before moving across the country, but still—it’s the principle.)
Then again I’m not even sure if a CD is the optimal medium for experiencing such a twisted odyssey. It needs to be beamed in via hologram or sent to earth through the fax machine or implanted directly in the auditory cortex. Which I’m sure Dr. Octagon can do for a modest fee.
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