1. Ego Trippin’
The thing about the Golden Age is, we didn’t know it was the Golden Age.
You’d hear a song on Marley Marl’s show, out of a car driving by with the booming system, somebody would put your mans on to a record. Holy shit, what the hell is this? We didn’t have algorithms or The Source, just the occasional Nelson George or Greg Tate Village Voice joint or Reefer Madness type beat network news coverage about this violent, dangerous jungle music that was coming for your children. (I can’t find any contemporaneous reviews of Critical Beatdown at all, they’re all retrospective hagiographies.)
This is why rappers said their names so much, why they shouted out their posses — underground communications, samizdats, your tags had to go all city. You went to the record store, you looked at the covers (what, exactly, is Kool Keith doing with that pose?) It’s of the times, Dapper Dan gear, generic urban background. It doesn’t tell you what’s actually going to happen when you drop the needle. You flipped the record over, read the tracklist, see if you recognized any names or those listed under Special Thanks To or Can’t Forget About!!! You had to get forensic, real Sherlock Holmes hours.
Among the classics of the era, Critical Beatdown isn’t often placed on that snowy mountain, those Rushmores. It was like living through an accelerated Cambrian explosion, evolution on a monthly basis: suddenly, here come the Jungle Brothers. Dawn breaks: there was Eric B. & Rakim. How is it possible that so many young innovators with so much incredible talent emerged so quickly in one place? The thing is, ‘Golden Age’ implies a pinnacle, everything after is downhill — we don’t call 1992–94 the Silver Age or 1996–98 the Bronze Age. It hasn’t been downhill at all; it’s been a steady progression since. So we could call 1987–89 the Golden Hour: the perfect conditions of weather, location, time and light to bathe us in lapidary radiance, captured on ebony vinyl instead of silver nitrate.
2. Watch Me Now
Beatdown wasn’t the capital-R-revolutionary tornado of boom of Nation of Millions, or the OG hardcore of Criminal Minded, or the rap-as-arena-rock of Raising Hell. They didn’t have the Adonis charisma of LL Cool J or Artemis sultriness of MC Lyte. It didn’t have the spirit-moving-on-the-face-of-the-waters Genesis 1:1 godliness of Paid In Full. They weren’t invited to be on “Self Destruction.” You couldn’t pin down one essential character of the MCs, and they didn’t have the Janus interchangeability of EPMD.
Nobody tried to do what Ultras did, but a lot of cats did in different ways. The compressed, fractured stream-of-consciousness inform Ghostface, Monche, Aesop Rock, De La Soul, and all the weirdo/space/paranoid underground shit like Jedi Mind Tricks and their legions; DOOM, Company Flow, and everyone they birthed — Ultras are the Godfathers, Part Zero.
In production, they were the amphibian leap from loops and breaks, between Old and New School: Ced-Gee’s chopping, panning, sequencing and arranging of hundreds of samples. No Ultras, no 3 Feet High and Rising, no RZA, no — everything. And De La, Tribe and others seemed to spring forth fully formed in the new sound, like Athena from Zeus’ skull, the Ultras show how we got from the yes yes y’all era to there — but also veering off at drunken speed in their own lane.
The Ultramagnetics were a molecule of the Five Elements: Kool Keith was a breakdancer; TR Love was a record crate carrier for the Zulu Nation; Moe Luv was a DJ and beatboxer. (And graffiti? The spirit of Rammellzee is a tau neutrino at the core, crosstown psychic transference of gothic futurism.) They came together in 1984: that time of the transformation of basic, available materials into something impossible and beautiful, with next to nothing: your body and a piece of cardboard, a couple of spray cans and caps, two turntables and record with a three second break, a microphone and a sound system. Ced-Gee said:
Our local DJ, DJ Chuck-a-luck, he was trying to do what Herc did, playing outside in the neighbourhood, and me and my friends used to watch from the window. Then in ’82, while our parents were sleeping, we’d move to the fire escape…then we started climbing down…then we elevated that to sneaking around the corner to watch him.
Power from the streetlight made the place dark.
3. Ced-Gee (Delta Force One)
Chuck D said that Yo! Bum Rush the Show was Public Enemy’s Raising Hell, but Critical Beatdown’s sound pushed them harder and further to create the onslaught of Nation of Millions.
Ced-Gee co-produced BDP’s equally seminal Criminal Minded, uncredited. There are a handful of times where one producer creates two distinct sounds for two classics in the space of a year—the Bomb Squad’s Fear of A Black Planet b/w Amerikkka’s Most Wanted; El-P with Cold Vein b/w Fantastic Damage.
Ced got involved because, as KRS says in Check The Technique:
So we ran over to Ced-Gee’s house and were like: “Yo, Ced, we need that SP-12.” Keep in mind that at the time Ced-Gee was the only person in the Bronx with an SP-12, and he was the absolute man.
A tsunami of raw talent is reinventing music production and birthing the next step in a new musical genre which will sweep the world, and only one guy has this crucial piece of gear. This is like Vermeer saying: “Well, I went to Rembrandt’s spot because he was the only dude in Holland who owned a paintbrush.”
The Dutch Masters (not the blunt) made their own paint; powdering charred bone, crushing verdigris for green, swaggering that lapis lazuli for ultramarine. This was the grind of cratedigging for them — Moe Luv and TR hitting up Music Factory, Downstairs Records, K&R. In Dutch still lifes, you’ll see a twist of lemon peel; this yellow was rare and expensive, and so were lemons, so having lemon peel in your painting, how long it dangled – this was a mad flex. It was like having that rare break, that sample no one else had touched yet.
What Ced (and Paul C. McKasty) did with the SP-12 changed the sound: they ground up James Brown and pigments from across choice records, used these as instruments instead of rolling out the breaks. The SP-12 had a maximum sampling time of 5 seconds. They’d pitch samples up to fit more in, then pitch it back down in the mix. They almost created a black hole.
A fundamental limit exists on the amount of information that can be stored in a given space: 10 x 69th power of bits per m2. Regardless of technological advancement any attempt to condense information further will cause the storage medium to collapse into a black hole.
You can hear the difference on Criminal Minded — the basic AC/DC loops on “Dope Beat” against the mosaic of James Brown snippets, lemon peel flexes, on “Poetry.”
On a road trip down to New Orleans in 1987, I was in charge of the boombox. I’d taped Criminal Minded and somewhere on the highway I pressed record by accident for a few seconds, so then after “South Bronx” went:
Remember Bronx River, rolling thick —
Roadwind.
Roadwind.
Roadwind.
— was a kid named Flash
That was the trip where I met K. She worked at Café du Monde, had an old wine-leather barber chair in her house. She was thirty one and I was nineteen and she glittered like light dancing on the Mississippi. Her laugh was like the pouring of a delicious drink. I remember her hands on my neck as she cut my hair. I went back to see her in the summer; I literally rode the streetcar named Desire and laughed softly at this. I was on mushrooms and told myself people weren’t really staring at me, but they were, because I lit a match off the wooden floor and smoked a cigarette.
K. wore a lot of silver and rubber bracelets up and down both arms and I had to ask her to take them off because it was like fucking someone from The Road Warrior. We did ecstasy and lay together in that barber chair for a long time. After I left I’d call her for hours on payphones using bootlegged phone cards Easy Andy gave me. Did she move up to New York that autumn? Did it go that fast? I don’t remember. Real coup de foudre hours.
4. Feelin’ It
There’s a handful of songs from that time that make me feel stoned as hell: cotton muscles, a pastel febrile fog. That go ahead, what you feel and wisp of Jackie Robinson sample on “Moe Luv’s Theme,” a twist of gold foil spinning in the air. And the Kid Dynamite sample you’ve got the feeeeeeling, the graceful sax loop and horn stab on “Feelin’ It,” brings it all back.
K. and I lived in a basement apartment underneath an Italian family in Yonkers and smoked weed all day. She knew all the samples, she’d say, that’s Parliament, that’s Aretha, that’s the Temptations. She cooked jambalaya, gumbo, red beans and rice. Her mom always had to have a pot of red beans and rice for her father, no matter what they were having. Spaghetti and meatballs? Red beans and rice on the side for cher papa. Cuts are nice and smooth like rice and beans.
We dressed like weirdos, and the sullen boys of Yonkers used to throw eggs at us just on general principle. I mean, I used to walk around in blue Doc Martens and a PE t-shirt and a denim jacket I’d painted the Batman logo on the back of, Mardi Gras beads with a .44 Magnum bullet keyring around my neck. K. would give herself extensions down to her ass in bronze, in silver, in cerulean blue.
The story of K. has little to do with Ultramagnetics, but this song is a musical madeleine. Sometimes albums fit into our autobiographies in jagged ways. It’s a small part of the pantomime.
5. Kool Keith Housing Things
Kool Keith is always flying in a green light. People talk about his 58 different aliases, how he changes personas and identities on every record; Black Elvis, Dr. Doooom, Dr. Octagon, Crazy Lou, Rhythm X, Underwear Pissy, Exotron Geiger Counter One Plus Megatron, Mr. Gerbik, etc., but this is just mythologizing. He always does the same word salad tossing, don’t-know-what-he-said book. Sometimes, there’s more anal; sometimes, more aliens. What he lays down on Beatdown is the Dubliners for the Ulysses b/w Finnegans Wake of the fifty albums and 300+ features he’s done since. (Remember the who said it, James Joyce or Kool Keith web quiz?)
Kool Keith talks about germs and diseases so much, you wonder if he’s on some Howard Hughes shit. I wear a bag, four contraceptives / and aluminum, wrapped in all foil. If you heard he lived in a movie theater and wore tissue boxes for slippers, pissed in jars, and only drank milk brought to him by Mormon butlers, it would add up.
When you add in the crazy sex stuff, pseudoscience and aliens, these obsessions and his freewheeling cascade of cut-up non sequiturs make him a Bronx Burroughs. Listen to this freestyle where he raps normally for about six seconds and then goes full Exterminate All Rational Thought b/w Destroying All Germs 12”, break out the talking cockroach typewriter with a gaping anus or whatever that you have to put drugs into.
Or this freestyle where he just counts to 25 and later starts rapping about different kinds of sandwiches.
He is the King Weirdo of rap, and it’s all delivered with total authority. You never doubt for a second that when he says I am the oven / your brains I wanna heat up / mega-supersonic degrees, he means it. He’s sonically high bionically. We acknowledge now that sexuality is a spectrum, neurodiversity is a spectrum — Kool Keith is controlled by gamma light.
6. Ain’t It Good to You
I didn’t actually own Critical Beatdown for a number of years. Ultras were ‘Kings of the 12”s’ for their singles which dropped from ’84–87 until the album came out; all Old School was on 12”, there were few full LPs. They were down with DJ Red Alert and he gave them loads of airtime on his hugely influential KISS FM shows; him and Chuck Chillout; Mr. Magic and Marley Marl on WBLS — these were the Medicis, the Gagosians.
Those radio DJs also cut, mixed, blended, adding another level of transformation, juxtaposition and rarity — the original samples had been diced and pitched and sampled and re-assembled, then here was Red Alert scratching and looping further, crosscutting with another jam. And he did it live on air, so if you didn’t snatch it on tape it was gone forever.
Between ’87 and ’95 I made fifty tapes this way, hand on the pause/record, just the bits and songs I liked. I plugged the VCR into the stereo and laid in movie samples. I made covers without the titles showing; it was my version of soaking the labels off your best breakbeat records. I didn’t always know what a song was called or who it was. “Feelin’ It” is on the eighth tape from September ’88; I put it down as “A Glass of Rhymes, Shattering.”
One time K. and I were walking down the street, two dudes said something obnoxious, catcalling or some shit. I mouthed off something clever and they threw a bottle, barbaric glass, shattering. We held hands as we ran away, I wasn’t about to get my ass beat. Now you’re cut up, say what up.
K. used to get mad at me sometimes, accuse me of only being with her so I could write about her, even though until now I never did. Well, darlin’, here we are at last. She’d go off and throw plates at me — this was shocking not just because I didn’t want to get beaned in the head, but also we didn’t have that many plates, and also I thought that was something people only did in the movies. This stopped when she started doing a lot of heroin.
7. Traveling At the Speed of Thought
I like the story that while recording Beatdown, the Ultras were reading a lot of Popular Mechanics: “yo Ced, pass that joint and the August issue.”
Threaded inside the usual rap braggadocio and takedowns of the ducks/suckers/germs are meters and gauges, cranking up lyrical engines. Numerous drops of Excedrin, Anacin, penicillin — this is a few years after the Tylenol Killer put cyanide and strychnine in people’s painkillers, killing six, prompting nationwide panic and a massive recall. No one was ever caught. This is why we have those fucking child safety caps. I’m brain bustin’, so take a Bufferin quick.
Rakim said: Planet Earth, was my place of birth. There is so much interstellar travel, entire verses like on “Ain’t It Good To You” which shoot out into the solar system and into the galaxy ten years before Killah Priest did it on Heavy Mental. Radical, the replication of a quasar / A pulsar, immense to supplicate. They use Omega Supreme soundwaves. Rap is about escape from the concrete confines. On other planets, rhymes are flowing.
Think about how we only see visible light, but scorpions have ultraviolet markings they can see on each other. Mosquitos, snakes, bats can see infrared. An ET Cool J coming to Earth who only sees in radio waves, blinded by our stations.
I see your balls of clay with x-vision
I’m a scientist, your satellites are weak
They get dimmer every time I speak
On my gyroscope you hope to seek the style
I read a lot of science articles and I swear on God they’re just making shit up. There’s dark energy which makes up 68% of the universe, and dark matter is 27%, and the remaining 5% is all the matter and everything we can perceive? OK playboy. Now you’re in space, plus you’re folded up, like molecules of matter.
There are six flavors of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top? Those are all Kool Keith sexual positions. If the science on this record is absurd, all science is absurd.
8. Critical Beatdown
Like anything in rap’s quantum language, the title elicits multiple meanings, any of which may or may not be the right one, or all of them. A critical beatdown might be a savage beating that puts YOU WACK MCs in the ICU, or a scathing Mary McCarthy pan in The New York Review of Books.
Beneath that, it’s a play on critical meltdown — this is a few years after The China Syndrome, that movie which weirdly dropped twelve days before Three Mile Island, where a nuclear reactor almost melted down and turned the East Coast into American Chernobyl. With treble, dissolvin’ human skin / into liquid, flaming acid. If Kool Keith said he’s jerked it numerous times to Jane Fonda in this movie, it would make total sense. Pull out the fuel rods indeed. Actually, Barbarella is more his lane.
Everything about this record is hyperanxious, on edge. It swings, for sure, jittery and inescapable rhythms, but it’s like Eric Dolphy with a sampler and a mountain of meth. I’m boric, high computing acid.
It jangles with ’80s tensions, nuclear holocaust, Reagan joking near-on air: “We begin bombing in five minutes.” For the hour I will rain like a shower / Nucleon, cause you be on, fatal. “Ease Back,” with that whistle of falling mortar rounds, and the Missile Command sample: Thirty seconds to respond with our anti-ballistic missiles.
And what is Ultramagnetic MCs but a play on MK ULTRA (magnetic, magnetic)? What could be more Ultra than the CIA secretly experimenting for twenty years to try and reprogram people into assassins? The aim was to develop mind control drugs they could use to break Commie spies, mostly by dosing thousands of people with huge amounts of LSD.
I mean MKCHICKWIT? MKOFTEN? MKDELTA? These are the Killarmys of an Ultra spin-off crew that didn’t happen. Project Artichoke? The Stargate Project aka Gondola Wish aka Grill Flame? These are Ultra b-sides as well other secret projects where the CIA had an agent tripping for 77 days, research into psychotronic clairvoyant powers, remote viewing, because they thought the Russians were doing it. Agents who could be psychic spies and find nuclear submarines and Soviet operatives using advanced mental powers.
Operation Midnight Climax? The CIA used hookers to dose their johns with acid, agents filming them through one way glass. Sex Style indeed. Psychic driving? Psychiatric patients were dosed with LSD and paralytics, given electroshock and then subjected to a tape loop — hundreds of thousands of repetitions. Bonus beats.
January 1952 memo: “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature?” I like to dream that maybe one day we could all travel at the speed of thought.
All those decades of crazy, sick conspiracies, driven by Cold War paranoia: it’s deep in Critical Beatdown’s genome. Explorating, demonstrating, ruling, dominating, igniting, causing friction with nuclear alarms.
9. Kool Keith Model Android #406
Ultramagnetic’s raps are often just not quite right, not how a human uses language. A virus language, something infected and feverish in the tongue, malware.
I mean Keith’s style is made for soft ducks and pushed by bulldozers? Sure, I guess? It seems weird, your head is triangle / like a mango, somethin’ I snack on: Which Bronx tienda de comida sells triangular mangos?
It’s like Pinkydoll, the Ice Cream So Good Girl, a soothing loop of click-prompted demented repetitions, microtransactions hitting the pads on a human SP-12 to trigger bizarre vocal samples. Gang gang, gang gang. A livestream pantomime of a human pretending to be glitchy video game NPC. Make yourself into a piece of bad code for the Gram.
I’m obsessed with Twitter thot bots, fake accounts which follow in waves like Russian drone strikes, twenty at a time. Avatars ripped from social mediums: cute girls posing, in bikinis, demurely in the bathroom. Randomly generated names like Fianna Stridiron or Brittaney Downhour or Peter Fupocyupanqui. Some have a single post written in poetical porn bot, pulled through Google Translate too many times or burped from a dollar store AI. They say things like: Destiny consented to this irony.
What are they for? Who’s making them? Updated Numbers Stations, burner accounts for field espionage agents sending ciphers back to their handlers? AIs, sending their first tendrils into the internet, Terminator triffid hours?
They all posted just the once on July 22nd; I got paranoid the People’s Liberation Army Cyberwarfare Division was prepping a misinformation network for a Taiwanese invasion. The bots weren’t mobilized. They are waiting for the Ultramagnetic MCs to unleash A Chorus Line on all the germs, the ducks, the roaches and the suckers.
10. The Four Horsemen
There were seven Ultra albums after this, reissues, bootlegs; different lineups, partial reunions. 2023 saw a Ced x Keith reunion album that isn’t even on streaming. All that is footnotes, commentary, addenda.
I’m fascinated by those records which only happen once and can’t be repeated, the alchemical lightning strikes. How did they manage to capture it in a bottle? How does a cat like Ced-Gee change the sound forever, change the way people make music forever, then pretty much disappear off the face of the Earth? Clock the time to a point, a metaphysical radius.
The thing is, the record will always be there. Your young loves, your crazy times — they are gone. Like metal, crust to rust corrode.
Some years after it was over, I was in Laos drinking late into the night, and a fellow traveller said: “The man in black. Tell us your tragedy.” And I told the story of K. Everyone stopped talking for a while after that.
I don’t feel a type of way thinking about K. now. I don’t feel much of anything these days, I’m pretty much dead inside. It’s only music that still makes me feel a rush in the blood anymore.
11. When I Burn
The thing about going out with an addict is that it’s like being in a relationship with two people: one is the addiction itself, who is a liar, a thief, selfish, driven, single-minded. All addicts are the same person, every addict is the same, it’s a closed loop on repeat. I guess being in a relationship with an artist is like that too: the self that’s present in the world, and the secret self that’s always thinking about the work, always wanting to be working, also selfish, driven and single-minded.
Being in a relationship with Kool Keith must be like…Jesus. I can’t imagine what that must be like. He keeps his records in the dishwasher.
This one time my mom gave us tickets to some Robert Wilson avant garde opera at BAM and just before it started K. says, “I have to go to the bathroom” and I was all “Yeah hmmmmm sure.” She came back and was nodded out for most of the show. At one point there was a live goat floating across stage on a pulley and she came to and says “There’s a goat.” Then she nodded out again for an hour and when she came to said “What happened to the goat?” And I said, “He’s fine.”
K. worked at a hairdressers down on Thompson Street run by a Brazilian guy named Romeo. Those hip glamorous Soho boho types couldn’t figure out why she was with me. Romeo would grill me about how good I was in the sack. “What happens, you stick it in and she spins you around like a pinwheel?” She started spending more time in the city, copping dope after work and going clubbing with them, then copping during work, then copping before work. Every pocket park back then had a couple of dealers in it, junkies on the benches, pigeons stitching around their feet. With a story, and through this auditory, Canal Street is my territory.
I used to hold K.’s arm for her while she shot up, instead of her tying off the vein with a belt or whatever. I always looked away, couldn’t watch the needle going in, the bloom of blood. I didn’t do dope myself. One time she did get me to shoot up with her and the next thing I remember we were in a bathtub of cold water, both naked. I guess I’d almost died. I forgave her.
12. Break North
K.’s habit got bad, multiple bags a day, I forget how many, too many. Somehow I convinced her that she had to get out of New York, go back to Baton Rouge and clean up. She called her mom and got a Greyhound ticket sent. I wasn’t going to let her out of my sight until she got on that bus, so we spent her last day going from spot to spot buying bags, squirreling away enough for the long ride and to taper off with when she got home. Avenue C and 11th, Rivington Street, somewhere off the FDR, on and off the subway. Put some stuff in garbage bags, time for a hit, time to go to cop again. This went on all day, all night.
We had a fight at one point, rolling around, both of us crying, her jade star pendant broke in half. In a lavender and tangerine dawn we were at Seward Park on Essex; this was the early morning spot, the worm-getting dealers. Except there were no dealers, no one at all, Panic in Needle Park, we were alone among the sickly peeling trees. A Chinese grandmother went by with her shopping cart, eyeing us coldly: she knew the deal, two gweilos fiending. Back on the F train.
At some point there was this creep tagging along with us, I don’t remember where the fuck he came from, type of guy they used to call a pogue or short eyes — that is, he looked like a child molester. Wavy combover, thick glasses, fleshy face and wet lips. K. was getting money off of him or some shit, probably leading him on for sex he wasn’t going to get. He had an old beat up Chevy and drove us with her stuff to Penn Station.
There was maybe an hour before the bus left. She didn’t want anything to eat, to take with her to eat. She went to shoot up in the bathroom. The pogue was still hovering around, I said something like: so, I’d like to say goodbye to my girlfriend, how about you fuck entirely off already? His leaky eyes went full rabbit. He fucked entirely off.
K. didn’t want to go, she wanted a last fuck in the john, I talked her out of it. Everyone shuffled past us in a blur, without a blink, pages turning in a book of human language, to and from their trains, you mind your own business, the river passes, everything passes.
She wanted to change her ticket, stay another day. I just wanted her to go. At the last minute she got on the bus, the driver listlessly watching our last desperate kiss, he’d seen it all before, a million times. Just another sad Greyhound scene. It was evening all afternoon.
13. Controlled by Gamma Light
CONTROLLED BY GAMMA LIGHT.
