Kool Keith is finally delivering a sequel to his 1999 fan-favorite Black Elvis album — over 20 years since it was released.
Announced in a press release on Thursday (April 27), Black Elvis 2 is set to arrive on June 16 via Mello Music Group and will feature the likes of Marc Live, Raaddrr Van, Dynamite, L’Orange, J. Stylez, Agallah and Ice-T. The effort is described as being “equal parts street and space.”
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The first offering from the project, the L’Orange-produced “Black Elvis 2” (Intro),” was released alongside the album announcement.
Check out the album’s intro below:
In a conversation with HipHopDX in 2017, Kool Keith discussed the success of his prior albums and how he feels too many features ruin a good project.
“Features kill an album,” he said. “I think an artist nowadays can’t hold an album by themselves. I was on the whole [Dr. Octagon] album, maybe [Sir] Menelik was on a couple tracks. Production was all Automator. It wasn’t two tracks from this person and two tracks from that person.
“Kool and the Gang was all Kool and the Gang. James Brown was all James Brown music. It wasn’t a feature over here and feature over there, and if there was a feature, it wasn’t a predictable one. Those are good things. Most commercial features are pretty much predictable. That’s cool once in awhile, but I think people get carried away with that stuff.”
He continued: “So many features makes it seem like the artist can’t handle his own. He’s not interesting enough to carry his own, so you have to flood him out with a bunch of features, and soon the features become the stars on their own album. You start thinking the guest wrote the album.
“It’s the image, too,” he added. “Rap came too far to dumb it down. That’s why people don’t take it seriously. People got their stereotype on rap. Like, ‘Oh, rappers look like they’re going to snatch my pocketbook.’ A rapper not supposed to really look like that. They supposed to be the star.”
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Check out the tracklisting for Kool Keith’s Black Elvis 2 below:
1. “Black Elvis 2 (Intro)”
2. “MAX”
3. “E-L-V-I-S”
4. “First Copy”
5. “Kindergarten Adults” (Feat. Raaddrr Van)
6. “The Formula” (Feat. Ice-T & Marc Live)
7. “Black Presley”
8. “All Marvel”
9. “Without My Culture” (Feat. Dynamite)
10. “Feelin’ Me”
11. “Love Infringement”
12. “Space Mountain” (Feat. Marc Live)
13. “Road Dog” (Feat.Agallah)
14. “Machinery” (Feat. Raaddrr Van & Marc Live)
15. “World Spin”
16. “Clifton’s Revenge”
You can pre-order the album here.
