Home > Chicago Music > CD Review > The Cool Kids, 'The Bake Sale EP'

Backstory: Antoine “Mikey Rocks” Reed and Evan “Chuck Inglish” Ingersoll hooked up in 2005 when Mikey discovered Chuck’s beats on his MySpace page. By 2006, the duo was playing shows around Chicago with other underground favorites like rapper Kid Sister and DJ duo Flosstradamus. This EP, collecting some of the group’s best existing tracks, should help keep the buzz building while they work on their highly anticipated debut, due out by the end of the year.

Why you should care: The Cool Kids’ old-school sound has attracted the notice of everyone from Rolling Stone, who called them “Chicago’s next great hip-hop duo,” to Kanye West’s DJ, A-Trak, with whom they performed at Miami’s Winter Music Conference last year.

Verdict: At times, “The Bake Sale” sounds like a lost hip-hop compilation from about 1990. Chuck Inglish’s skeletal, trunk-rattling beats are equal parts Eric B. and LL Cool J circa “Walking With a Panther” (from which the track “Jingling” cribs its female vocal hook), while the rhymes are a cagey mix of b-boy posturing (“Gold and a Pager”) and Pharcyde-like, self-deprecating humor (“A Little Bit Cooler,” on which the Kids ‘fess up to eating Fruity Pebbles before cautioning the haters: “You judgin’ me, dawg? Please…you shop at the mall!”). The crucial track is “Black Mags,” which sounds like a straightforward brag track about Chuck’s pimped-out ride, until you realize that his ride is a BMX bike. That’s the Cool Kids in a nutshell: classic beats, faux-gangsta attitude, nerdy charm and a sly sense of humor that puts a funky-fresh spin on some of hip-hop’s most shopworn clichés.

X-Factor: The Cool Kids appeared earlier this year in a television ad for Rhapsody, alongside breathy balladeer Sara “Love Song” Bareilles. To quote “A Little Bit Cooler”: “How gangsta is that? Not gangsta at all.”

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