Although he’s known as a co-founder of renowned, old school hip-hop act, Ultramagnetic MCs and for a lengthy solo career, in which he has taken up a number of aliases and personas while perfecting and expanding upon an imitable flow full of surrealistic and fantastic tangents, grim and nightmarishly violent imagery and pop cultural references — namely comic books and cartoons, Kool Keith may arguably be one of hip-hop’s most uncompromisingly weird and challenging artists. And interestingly enough 2016 may have also been one of the biggest years for The Bronx-based emcee, as the long-lost full-length effort Pimp to Eat from his collaborative project Analog Brothers with Ice-T, Pimp Rex, Marc Live and Black Silver was released earlier this year, along with his latest solo effort Future Magnetic, which had the incredibly prolific emcee collaborating with Ras Kass, Atmosphere’s Slug, MF Doom and Dirt Nasty.
In fact, last year, I wrote about “World Wide Lamper,” a single consisted of a menacingly sparse and hypnotic production featuring winkling synths and subtle yet propulsive drum programming paired with Kool Keith, B.A.R.S. Murre and Dirt Nasty trading braggadocio-filled bars full of insane punchlines that make references to pop culture, the profane, the grisly violent and the surreal. That single was quickly “Super Hero,”a single that pairs a production consisting of wobbling and undulating synths, stuttering drum programming and looped chiming cymbals around a wildly infectious hook with two renowned emcees trading verses full of super-heroes, villains and anti-heroes maneuvering through a comic book-styled universe.
L’Orange an up-and-coming, Nashville, TN-based producer, who collaborated with Mr. Lif on his The Life & Death Of Scenery, released a free EP Koala and is about to go our on tour with Wax Tailor, and in his free time, the up-and-coming producer remixed Kool Keith’s and MF Doom’s “Super Hero.” And with the L’Orange remix, the Tennessean producer pairs two of hip-hop’s most acclaimed emcees ridiculous rhyme schemes with classic, super hero/comic book dialogue and a production featuring twinkling keys, some old-timey clang and clatter, a distorted old school-leaning blues vocal sample, and tweeter and woofer rattling 808-like beats – while retaining the song’s hook. And in some way, the L’Orange remix manages to boldly and mischievously evoke film noirs, with an insane yet impeccably done ballroom caper — and you can probably picture the heroes (or shall I say, anti-heroes, in this case) narrowly yet confidently escaping capture.
