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By Stacey Dugan   Photography by Phil Knott

01/02/08 :: URB 151

It’s a frigid Friday night in Chicago—both the day after Thanksgiving and the season’s first snow—and a line of fans is wrapped around Sheridan road, pensively waiting for the Vic Theater to open its doors. Tonight’s concert is the second of two sold-out Chicago dates on M.I.A.’s North American tour. It’s a particularly special night for tour openers and Chicago natives The Cool Kids, whose reputation in this city precedes them: “I hear they get the crowd body surfing,” says one girl in line, her eyes wide with excitement.
     The Cool Kids are home, but this isn’t their usual hometown crowd. While the line is speckled with street wear t-shirted boys and spandex pantsed girls, this is mostly a 9-to-5 crowd, which means The Cool Kids aren’t just “hipster rap” anymore, if they ever were.
     “I didn’t even know what the fuck a hipster was,” says one half of the duo, rapper and producer Evan “Chuck Inglish” Ingersol. “I always did shit different, especially from other black kids. I came up the same way, but I didn’t dress or listen to none of the same shit they listened to. To go to a party with other black kids there, white and Hispanic kids there, and a Police song comes on and everyone knows the words, I was like, ‘Oh, this is tailor made for me.’ I didn’t know it was a culture with a title on it.”
     Though The Cool Kids can’t be swept into tidy categories like “club rap” or “mash up,” they’ve found a home comfortably with an audience shared by genre-melding acts like M.I.A. and fellow Chicagoans Flosstradamus and Kid Sister. Like those artists, they are famed dually for getting parties buck wild and drawing a zealously fashionable fan base, inspired by the rappers’ own unique sense of style. Ingersol and rapping partner Antwon “Mikey Rocks” Reed wear their influences on their sleeves. Hooks like “with a little bit of gold and a pager” (from the eponymous single) epitomize a personal fashion ethic that, like the line itself, is sampled from the era of N.W.A. Though they’ve ditched the gold rope chains of their early days (“Too many people started wearing them and they got played out,” says Ingersol), they’re still paying homage to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in stone washed denim, vintage Chicago Bulls championship wear, and press photos that put a contemporary twist on scenes initially created by EPMD. Their production follows suit: Plodding, methodical tempos measured in skeletal synth and drum machine structures rarely nudge the dial upwards of 80 BPM but still hit heavy enough to bounce a crowd. And Ingersol’s chatty party-and-bullshit lyricism balances Reed’s more conceptual storytelling style, which owes a debt to pioneers Masta Ace, Guru and KRS-One.
     “I wasn’t trying hard to fit into some retro style of rapping,” says Reed, who turns 20 in December. “It just came natural. My parents were a bit younger than most people’s parents, so I didn’t grow up on Isley Brothers and James Brown and all that. I grew up on Slick Rick, Eric B. and Rakim, Nas and Biggie. I remember I used to like Slick Rick’s ‘Children’s Story’ because he was doing the kid voice and I was a little kid. And then I’m looking at the album cover and my mom has the same hat and shoes and that red jacket and raccoon hat—all that shit that he had on, and I was like, ‘This dude looks like my mom!’”
     “A lot of people always say to us, ‘How the fuck did ya’ll know what was going on back then?’” adds Ingersol, 23. “But that’s the same thing people say about sampling disco and soul and Earth Wind and Fire. That was what you were born on. Try having someone older than you tell you that’s not what you came up on. I’m a reflection—a spitting image—of the first couple songs that I heard.”

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