[6] According to performance poet Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Hall "became an easily recognizable figure in the scene: pale, bald, dressed mostly in black and white, with wire-rimmed glasses and a porkpie hat.
Hall has long been a vocal opponent of slam poetry, taking issue with such factors as its inherently competitive nature[7] and what he considers its lack of stylistic diversity.
Within a year, I had, with some friends, developed a band called You Suck, where most of the people on stage didn't play an instrument.
We would do any bad song we could think of...[11]Over the objections of the band, Board released the You Suck single with a pornographic album cover.
[13] In 1986, feeling that "20 minutes of me reading poetry would be totally boring","[10] Hall asked his guitarist friend Dogbowl to augment his performances with original music.
Korbet, and xylophonist George O'Malley, King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) was born.
The band released two albums on the Shimmy Disc label, 1987's Fluting on the Hump and 1988's They, and then dissolved because Dogbowl wanted to pursue a solo career.
[13] Hall dubbed the new lineup King Missile, dropping the parenthetical "Dog Fly Religion" subtitle "since that was [Dogbowl's] idea.
[13] On the strength of the single "Jesus Was Way Cool", the album hit #1 on the CMJ charts, and the band was signed by a major label, Atlantic Records.
King Missile was featured in the 1990 documentary CutTime which chronicled the East Village music scene at the time.
[16] Nonetheless, after the commercial failure of King Missile, the band was dropped from Atlantic, and they broke up shortly thereafter because, according to Hall, "there was no reason to stay together.
The album featured considerable input from multi-instrumentalists Sasha Forte, Bradford Reed, and Jane Scarpantoni.
With these musicians, as well as They cellist Charles Curtis, Hall formed a new band, King Missile III (pronounced "the third").
I find a lot of humor in shocking or so-called taboo things: castration, excrement, violence (usually self-inflicted or inflicted on the narrator, '[Martin] Scorsese' being an exception), sex and sexual perversions...
[13]Other recurring subjects of Hall's work include religion and spirituality (e.g., "The Fish That Played the Ponies,"[20] "Jesus Was Way Cool,"[21] "The God"),[22] nihilism (e.g., "No Point,"[23] "Ed,"[24] "Jim"),[25] and masochism (e.g., "Pickaxe,"[26] "Take Me Home,"[27] "My Lover").
[28] Hall's writing varies in format from straightforward narrative to abstract, disjointed free verse.
The writing frequently contains absurdist imagery (e.g., "A giant testicle rolled over a Waffle House, killing several clowns")[29] and/or adynata (e.g., "P]igeons came along and ate his eyes, and seagulls ripped his stomach out, and pelicans ate his liver, and his spleen popped out all on its own and turned into a harmonica and played a pleasant little tune.
[25] Hall's performance style is also eclectic, his delivery ranging from a deadpan monotone to melodic tenor singing to overwrought screaming.