{"id":287293,"date":"2025-06-11T05:04:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T05:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/kool-keith-didnt-care-for-the-native-tongues-era-unkut-com-a-tribute-to-ignorance-remix\/"},"modified":"2025-06-11T05:04:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T05:04:00","slug":"kool-keith-didnt-care-for-the-native-tongues-era-unkut-com-a-tribute-to-ignorance-remix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=287293","title":{"rendered":"Kool Keith didn\u2019t care for the Native Tongues era \u2013 unkut.com \u2013 A Tribute To Ignorance (Remix)"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\u201cYou\u2019re three feet and sinking\/The tribes are lost and everyone\u2019s breath stinkin\u2019\u201d \u2013 Kool Keith on Ultramagnetic MCs \u2018Pluckin\u2019 Cards\u2019<\/a>, 1992.<\/p>\n

As pointed out in Angus Batey\u2019s revisit of Funk Your Head Up<\/em> in 2012<\/a>, Keith continued the Ultramag party line \u2013 first witnessed on Tim Dog\u2019s \u2018I Ain\u2019t Takin\u2019 No Shorts\u2019 \u2013 that the Bronx bombers had no time for all the Happy Rap of the time:<\/p>\n

\n

Fairly or not, Keith \u2013 who was careful not to take aim at the Jungle Brothers \u2013 felt Tribe, De La and even X-Clan were diluting rap\u2019s raw essence with what he later described as a \u201cneo-soul\u201d sensibility. \u201cI never liked that era of rap that comes and goes \u2013 that neo-soul type of sphere,\u201d he told me. \u201cI just didn\u2019t like that whole aura. It was like I was just against Native Tongues by myself \u2013 the whole aura of that type of rap. I was mad because I thought they didn\u2019t respect what I was doing at that time. They got more centred into that rather than what rap was. It takes away from rap itself \u2013 it takes away from the Just Ice. It takes away from the Tricky T. It takes away from Eric B and EPMD.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This quote is amazing for a number of reasons \u2013 not least for the fact that he name-checked fellow Bronx resident Tricky T who dropped \u2018Johnny The Fox\u2019 and \u2018Here Comes The Drums\u2019 with Mantronik in the mid-eighties. As Angus notes, Keith\u2019s disdain for the new breed of experimental rap was ironic considering how much of an inspiration his own abstract flows had inspired De La Soul in particular.<\/p>\n

But history has showed us that it\u2019s still par-for-the-course as each new wave of MC\u2019s to be dismissed by the previous leaders of the pack, as we saw Kurtis Blow diss Just-Ice and Melle Mel refuse to make room for BDP and PE. And while not a lot of people publicly dissed A Tribe Called Quest and De La, they weren\u2019t immediately embraced by everyone. I still recall the story of a hardcore rap fan who was so sickened by the colourful imagery that adorned the cover of 3 Feet High\u2026And Rising that he felt compelled to snap every copy that he saw on the record store racks in two!<\/p>\n

The Jungle Brothers were of course exempt, since they both crews were part of Kool DJ Red Alert\u2019s extended family and the JB\u2019s had named Ultramagnetic as \u2018The Future\u2019 on the liner notes of their second album, while the X-Clan thing may have been a rejection of their heavily-marketed image rather than the music itself\u2026or it was just part of the rich history of The Bronx vs. Brooklyn rivalries? It\u2019s actually Big Daddy Kane, another Brooklynite, who catches the worst stray here: \u2018I see light in my lamp, but not on the mic\/How could I diss myself in front of Dolemite?\u2019 Ouch.<\/p>\n

Kool Keith would later go on to explore a wide variety of alter egos and personas in his work, showing that he wasn\u2019t adverse to reinventing his own image with each release like some kind of Rap Game Madonna, but at least he wasn\u2019t ever posing as a stinking hippy or bohemian!<\/p>\n

Of course, it wasn\u2019t anything too serious, as Keith explains in the same article:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201c\u2018Pluckin Cards\u2019 was just raw dissing \u2013 a straight-up record, me goin\u2019 against people. It was made more on a humorous level. It was just what I saw. But that was that time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The jury is still out on whether or not Rakim ever responded to Keith\u2019s jabs on the Critical Beatdown album, but as Keith explained in another Angus Batey interview, those lines were about one-upmanship, not disrespect:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI don\u2019t really dis anybody on the album. They\u2019re not really disses, they\u2019re more competitive lyrics. Even with Rakim. He wrote a rap that went something like, \u2018I can see as far as the planets\u2019, about \u2018balls of clay\u2019. He said \u2018As far as the eye can see, not even a satellite\u2026\u2019 So I said, \u2018Your satellites are weak, I can see your balls of clay\u2019. I just dissed the line: I said something bigger. They were more lyrical battles than personal \u2013 it was about topping the line he said.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It wasn\u2019t until the third Ultra album that a Keith line resulted in a recorded response, when Freddie Foxxx<\/a> took umbrage to the line, \u201cHow can you put up a fox against an alligator?\u201d and recorded \u2018Crazy Like A Foxxx\u2019, which features an entire verse detailing about how he planned on hunting down Keith, Ced and Moe as revenge. Keith and Freddie later bumped into each other on a plane flight and got everything sorted out, and nine months later a beautiful baby Halfsharkalligatorhalfman was born.<\/p>\n

Originally posted as part of The Eight Pint Hype newsletter<\/a>. Go and subscribe for free<\/a> to read these early.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou\u2019re three feet and sinking\/The tribes are lost and everyone\u2019s breath stinkin\u2019\u201d \u2013 Kool Keith on Ultramagnetic MCs \u2018Pluckin\u2019 Cards\u2019, 1992. As pointed out in Angus Batey\u2019s revisit of Funk Your Head Up in 2012, Keith continued the Ultramag party line \u2013 first witnessed on Tim Dog\u2019s \u2018I Ain\u2019t Takin\u2019 No Shorts\u2019 \u2013 that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97529,117908,117909],"tags":[760,7972,13170,77487,6022,117910,4936,4998,7029,12866,117911],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-287293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-not-your-average","category-the-eight-pint-hype","tag-care","tag-didnt","tag-era","tag-ignorance","tag-keith","tag-kool","tag-native","tag-remix","tag-tongues","tag-tribute","tag-unkut-com"],"yoast_head":"\nKool Keith didn\u2019t care for the Native Tongues era \u2013 unkut.com \u2013 A Tribute To Ignorance (Remix) - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=287293\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kool Keith didn\u2019t care for the Native Tongues era \u2013 unkut.com \u2013 A Tribute To Ignorance (Remix) - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cYou\u2019re three feet and sinking\/The tribes are lost and everyone\u2019s breath stinkin\u2019\u201d \u2013 Kool Keith on Ultramagnetic MCs \u2018Pluckin\u2019 Cards\u2019, 1992. 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