Kool Keith

After waiting nearly a decade to see Kool Keith in Toronto, the results were a little disappointing. I'm sure the occasional burst of pepper spray didn't help, but Kool Keith was more than an hour late hitting the stage and there wasn't even the common courtesy of an opening act to entertain the crowd. DJs are fine, but wasn't there at least one local act that could have opened the show? When Keith finally deigned to grace the stage, it was with a lame hype man and a DJ that changed CDs. But that's all peripheral because we're there to see Keith, right? And despite a skipping CD, Keith started hard by ripping into some classic Ultramagnetic MCs tracks like "Ego Tripping" and "Ease Back," and continued into Dr Octagon's "Blue Flowers" before stalling the show with a time-consuming and uncomfortably unrehearsed embarrassment to the girls on stage with "Girl, Let Me Touch You." But there was more cool to come with "Sex Style" and a Black Elvis track. Unfortunately there wasn't much more — a lot of short party interludes with cheesy beats throughout — but Kool Keith did freestyle over a few beats, including "Neighbors Next Door," a track from his Dr Dooom alias that deserved to be done live. In fact, there were so many tracks that deserved to be performed and weren't. Keith played nothing later than that one Black Elvis track, avoided Dooom with the exception of that one beat and didn't even play anything from his recently released comeback album, Diesel Truckers. And don't even get me started on the lack of fried chicken. Forty-five minutes and he was out. Or rather, selling CDs for 30 bucks a pop. But finally, Kool Keith!