Flying Yolo: An Interview with Kool A.D.

WARNING: This interview was conducted in late 2014 and concerns Kool A.D.’s novel Not OK, which at the time was known as O.K., but is now the unpublished prequel to OK, which is just out from Sorry House. If you are the type of reader who prefers interviews about published books rather than those about unpublished prequels, you are advised to pursue other interviews. 

KOOL A.D.’s debut novel, O.K., is reminiscent of the drawings of visual artist KOOL A.D. as well as of the music of rap artist KOOL A.D. If you don’t know, you better ask somebody. If you’re asking me, I’ll tell you what’s distinctive about the work of KOOL A.D., no matter the medium, is its eclectic and idiosyncratic melange of people, images, sounds, ideas, and references. His source materials are as broad as you could hope and the consciousness he filters them through is witty, playful, political, subversive, and deeply intelligent.

If you’re someone who has been waiting for the novel in which Anne Carson appears “in a pink velour FUBU tracksuit sniffing poppers,” your wait is over. If you’ve been looking for a book in which large reptiles are taxis, O.K. is also that book. Celebrities you’re not sure if you’ve heard of on Hunter Thompson-drug binges channeling theorists you haven’t read? Plenty of that.

The novel is as fluid as its narrator, who metamorphoses (a la Kafka’s Gregor) into LL Cool J, Steve Buscemi, Donald Duck, and many others, or more often combinations thereof. It flattens any neat distinctions between fantasy/reality, online/offline, thought/action, exposition/plot, intoxication/soberness, and perhaps most fundamentally dreaming/waking. There is no way to read it but to jump in and move with the dream-logic. For this reason, I found Chuang Tzu, of the philosophers invoked in the novel, the most helpful, in particular his butterfly dream, after which “he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.” Subjectivity in O.K. is a function of environment, needs and desires, and the present moment. The notion of stable identity over time doesn’t begin to obtain.

While the shifting self is culturally produced from our everyday world and the book is therefore of pop culture, it isn’t for it. Rather, it sucks up the textures and personalities of pop, de- and recontextualizes them, subverts their cliches, and empties them of signification. Justin Bieber is Adorno is Tupac’s hologram. If Reality Hunger were a recipe, O.K. would be its cake. You can have yours and eat it too.

We conducted this interview over email. I used my computer. He used his phone.

—Scott Parker

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