Better Known as Dolemite

This weekend, you can keep cool the old-fashioned way by parking yourself in front of an air conditioner (boring) or submerging yourself in your neighbor’s pool (and hoping their kids didn’t pee in it). Another option: you can beat the body heat like a tight soul brother from way back and let the Super Funk of Dolemite: The Soundtrack do the chilling for you. Dolemite, of course, is the big-boasting, ass-kicking, lady-lovin’ alter ego of legendary X-rated party comedian Rudy Ray Moore, who devoted several LPs and two very, very weird low-budget “blaxploitation” action-comedies to the character back in the early ‘70s (you can get ‘em both from Xenon Pictures), and whose elaborate and profoundly obscene routines influenced a generation of rappers and players from Ice-T to Snoop Dogg.

Unless you’re down with the cult scene, the movies are acquired tastes, but the CD, freshly released from Relapse Records, is a goldmine of killer funk and soul grooves, heavy on the Hammond organ, fat bottom rhythm, and wacka-wacka guitar (future mellow soulster James Ingram is among the credited performers). Rudy Ray contributes his air-raid-siren raps on a handful of tracks, including the original radio spots for Dolemite and its even more surreal sequel, The Human Tornado (“From the first to the last/I give em the blast so fast/That their life is past/before their ass/has even hit the grass!”) and even a respectable Isaac Hayes style dark chocolate croon on the honey-dripping “Miss Wonderful.” If you’re any kind of a crate digger or can claim the dustiest fingers on your block, I encourage you to not be a rat soup-eating, born-insecure, no business, junkyard muthafucka and pass this CD by.

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