Review Summary: This is Keith at his most vicious, warped, abstract, and interestingly enough, introspective.
Every musician reacts differently to fame. Some stick to the sound that made them famous, while some conform to a sound that will make them even more famous. Some respect their time in the limelight and humbly fade away, while some will pull any and every stunt in the book to remain relevant. Some form drug and alcohol addictions to cope with such a new and abrasive feeling, and some even kill themselves over it.
Kool Keith is not any of these people.
His record under the pseudonym Dr. Octagon, Dr. Octagonecologyst, was an underground smash. There was nothing quite like it at the time, and nothing outside Keith's discography to date has achieved its level of pure weird. His surreal and abstract lyrics were highly praised by critics and hip-hop fans alike, and Keith found himself with a modestly sized, dedicated fanbase. How does Keith choose to follow up such a strange, influential album?
He adopts a new pseudonym, Dr. Dooom, and kills Dr. Octagon in the very first track.
Keith doesn't want the fame, and if he has to murder the alias that made him famous to get that point across, so be it. Although he wanted to get back to “street-level” rap with First Come, First Served, his abstract and warped lyrics are still abundant on this release. Keith raps about pushing body parts in shopping carts, beating people up with steel cans, and even shaving his beard because he has a beard in his “wanted” picture in the paper. Keith is not only giving some of his weirdest and most descriptive imagery of his career, but a large portion of his lyrics on this record are also spent dissing other rappers. No Chorus is virtually two-and-a-half minutes of disses. Keith never specifies who he is dissing, but Keith points out every single aspect of this rapper's career and tears it apart. Keith proves with each track on the record that he's mastered the art of surreal imagery and diss tracks, but the real magic happens when he combines the two. For example, on the track Dr. Dooom's In The Room, he states “You couldn't rap with me if we was twins stuck together.” He's not just saying you're an inferior rapper, he's saying that even if you were a literally attached to his body, even if you shared the same organs, you still wouldn't be near as skilled a rapper as he is.
The production is pretty gritty throughout, ranging from sparse beats that are the perfect backdrop to listen to Keith's twisted mind (Mental Case, Leave Me Alone) to some genuinely catchy, borderline infectious beats (I Run Rap, Call The Cops). The choruses on this release, as with most other Kool Keith choruses, consist mostly of one phrase repeated over and over. This isn't done to any disadvantage for the most part due to the outright ridiculousness of the hooks, whether it be Keith's is-he-joking falsetto on “Brother's Feeling Fly” or the slightly frantic tone on Dr. Dooom Is In The Room. The choruses on Call The Cops, I Run Rap, and Neighbors Next Door break from the typical Keith hook, and they all soar as some of the best in Keith's lengthly discography. The only place it doesn't really work is the album's only slight falter, Welfare Love. This track is about his love affair with a girl, and it just falls a bit flat. There are a few great quotes, such as if some of her hair fell into his soup he wouldn't complain, but nothing too interesting at all is going on. It is shown later on the track Bitch Gets No Love that he is better at making diss tracks towards women than tracks about loving them.
Although First Come, First Served shows Keith at his strongest hook-wise, flow-wise, and lyrically, there is one thing he is on this album that hadn't been seen before on a Keith release: introspective. Leave Me Alone is about his experience with the music indusrty, and is a very rare track for Keith. It is also one of the best songs he has ever recorded. There are still references to not being human, being a monster, being insane... but here he's saying that it's how the industry treats him. He feels cheated. He feels like Jimi Hendrix when they talk about who started rock. He wants us to know he's just like us. He wears coats in the winter. He eats at beautiful restaurants. He is a human just like you and I, he just eats a lot more Flinstones vitamins than us.
