[Cooking With Satan]

Lost Masters is great.

Trey Spruance review from 2004:

Lost Masters

You know what pissed us off? It was when that Dr. Octagon album came out ages ago and everyone liked it & that was all good. But then they released the "remix" album, which was just Dan (Automator) Nakamura's tracks without the rapping, and all the hipsters were saying how much "better" that one was — sure, it made them feel special that they weren't like all the other white & Asian kids who got into Dr. Octagon — they had the remix, wow. Horseshit. Kool Keith rules.

It's been a good long time, and the hipsters have completely lost interest in Kool Keith while he's been putting out some great CDs under their upturned noses. We don't care what anyone says, we've heard no one in the meantime that's come along who's as brilliant, lightning sharp, right on the money and hilarious as this guy — especially on the CD the Lost Masters. It's supposed to be a collection of second rate tracks, but I don?t buy it. There are some sequels theme-wise to some of the stuff on Spankmaster and Sex Styles, but when has that not been the case? That's how genius works. And it works to the point of being almost scary here. Now, we're as sick as anyone of the "vulgar" words being overused incessantly in our hip-hop saturated world. And lame-ass toilet humor is really tired, but man, don't put this into any category like that. There's mania here that goes way beyond shock/schlock or any other such lame crutch —at the risk of over-analyzing the sublime nature of the lyrics, consider for instance this chorus:

New York City
We piss in it
We live in it
We die...
We all take shits in it

You could be forgiven for writing this off at first glance as dumb poo poo humour and not the post-apocalyptic Haiku that is actually is. But as Keith delivers this unironic mantra repeatedly, he strikes some obscure vein in the cultural feng shui perfectly enough to trigger us into some kind of vortex state where it just gets more and more incredible, funnier and funnier, and more real and "in the moment" than anything previously imaginable. I mean, is that even funny? Read it again.

Keith has an unparalleled ability to deliver this kind of stuff. He takes us to a higher mental octave — and shit, piss, fuck etc. are there in that octave, so don't kid yourself. It's just that no one knows how to get there, so how would we know? Suck it in and Keith show you the way. Man, we haven't laughed this hard since Neil Hamburger came through town.