David Cohn, better known as Serengeti, has a lot of characters living in his head. “Kenny,” a northwest-sider with a mustache as big as Mike Ditka’s forehead, likes to lounge around the house in Zubaz pants and owns all of Brian Dennehy’s and Tom Berenger’s movies on laser disc. When he’s not playing softball with the guys he’s cruising around town looking for a decent Pontiac Fiero with a for sale sign.
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“I’m starting a new genre,” Cohn says. “It’s called black emo. Or negro emo rap.” He pauses. “Negro thug street emo? I don’t know, something about something emo. All this started when people kept asking me who I sounded like. Ja Rule? I’m like, ‘No. I think emo is what I sound like.’ It started off as a joke, but I’m gonna run with it.”
Calling Cohn “emo” only makes any sense at all because rappers like Slug from Atmosphere have already been saddled with the term–Cohn, like Slug, covers his share of personal and emotional material (that is, between all the clowning and surrealistic rambling). His lyrics can make a political statement and a vulgar joke in the same line, but on the whole Cohn is neither thug nor activist–with his tendency toward introspection and his equally ingrained habit of self-doubt, he’s probably more existentialist than anything. It sometimes takes a while for what he’s really saying to sink in, but his sound is immediately accessible, with poppy hooks sampled from all over–soul standards, Phish jams, indie folkie Mike Ill, even the sound track from the Orson Welles vehicle The Third Man.
Cohn is all about the nonsense, and lots of it–off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness rhymes that, although meaningless on their face (“I wear big watches / I looked in my bedroom, all I saw were Sasquatches”), hang together to create a more or less coherent context. Cohn’s second release, Noodle-Arm Whimsy, reissued by Day by Day on January 25, is the best case in point so far–it feels so effortlessly tossed off that it’s hard to imagine how it came together at all, but the longer you listen to it the more inevitable it seems that the album turned out exactly the way it did.
Sorta like the career of Luke Perry
Cohn’s also hard to market because he doesn’t fit into any of the prefab identities out there for MCs. He detests both the gangsta roots of mainstream hip-hop and the battle-rap roots of old-school hip-hop. He makes fun of self-styled thugs who rap about gats, and he makes fun of backpackers and conscious hip-hoppers who rap against them.
