It seems intriguing when in your na’veté you agree to do it, but going to a concert for a band you don’t know is pretty much always annoying.
It’s all right for the first half-hour, even entertaining perhaps, but then your feet start to hurt, someone farts next to you and you can’t point out who it is, the songs all begin to run together and you kind of have to go to the bathroom, but can’t leave your friends because you’ll lose them. After 20 minutes of hoping every song is the last, you convince yourself it was a good idea to go anyway because you like having new experiences, but secretly feel guilty for wasting $20. This fate is uncompromising and inevitable, unless you go to a Kool Keith concert. I knew it would be interesting right away when the rapper, also known as Dr. Octagon, came onstage with another rapper and two guys who didn’t really do anything except wave their arms around and threateningly hop back and forth. One of them was a 17-year-old Hispanic kid who took intense sips of a water bottle to the beat, as if he were actually rapping and that was his microphone, and the other one looked like the Unabomber.
The two rappers were plowing through a painfully long medley of selected choruses, while the jumping clowns jogged in circles across the stage. I wasn’t sure what this all was supposed to mean, but the audience was apparently eating it up. They would cheer every time a new chorus began (every 15 seconds) and a small man in a brightly-colored hoodie in front of me was clapping some rolled up paper extremely hard.
One of my friends, who also agreed to attend out of ignorance, told me that she felt like the whole scene was being played out in some different language that she couldn’t understand. But while the gestures were incomprehensible, the actual lyrics of the songs weren’t so obtuse. It seemed as though most everything had to do with sex, aliens or drugs. Especially when they performed songs from Dr. Octagonecolegyst, which is all about him being an extra-terrstrial time-traveling surgeon who has sex with his patients and nurses.
When the two rappers ended their medley and began rapping entire songs, I noticed the connection with the theme and the disc jockey, who was probably trying to look goofy but to me looked like a Tusken Raider from “”Star Wars.”” He was wearing some kind of beanie over his face that had tiny eyeholes and a circular mouth, coupled with possibly fake dreadlocks and a baseball cap, all the same color and indistinguishable from each other.
In between songs, the DJ would scratch out insanely loud bursts of sounds every time Kool Keith made a joke. This happened often, because at least half of the show was taken up by the two just talking. During one never-ending conversation about clothing, Kool Keith asked the audience if they shopped at Mervyn’s, and the Tusken Raider raised his hand. When they began to rap again, an audience member started screaming “”battle”” and subsequently was invited onto the stage to freestyle about her birthday and the fact that we should have peace on earth. This was great, because not even she knew what song she was performing, so we were all on the same page.
After a few more songs, the rappers started talking about something for awhile, and then just left the stage. I wasn’t really sure if it was over until the lights turned on and the security guards started bossing people around. It was kind of anti-climactic, but I’d rather end on that note than wet pants and a faint fart smell you don’t know what to do with. Hey, Kool Keith was actually pretty kool.
