Chicago's Cool Kids bringing retro hip-hop to Lollapalooza

Remember the cool kids at school? They were the ones with style and charisma, seemingly endless resources and uncontested adulation. They were friendly with everybody, but were like nobody else.

The Cool Kids chose their name well. The Chicago hip-hop duo met in 2005, when South suburban kid Antoine Reed (aka Mikey Rocks) and Detroit native Evan Ingersoll (aka Chuck Inglish) bonded over a love for old school beats and rhymes. They recorded and aired a few singles via MySpace and tastemaking music blogs, where their unique take on sparse, 1980s-style production and straightforward rapping attracted the attention of such influential DJs as J2K of Chicago's Flosstradamus and A-Trak, Kanye West's turntable master of choice.

It wasn't long before the buzz reached fever pitch. The Cool Kids recorded a collaboration with Lil Wayne and a self-released EP, "Totally Flossed Out." They delivered galvanizing performances at last year's Pitchfork Music Festival and CMJ Music Marathon, which led to a tour with hot British MC M.I.A. and a contract with Chicago-based label Chocolate Industries.

So far this year, Chuck and Mikey have toured Australia, released "The Bake Sale" EP collecting many of their popular tracks and featured on several dates of the touring hip-hop festival Rock the Bells. The '80s fashion-clad duo headlines Lollapalooza's BMI Stage, where they will surely air songs from their brand new mixtape "That's Stupid" (a link to the free download is on their MySpace blog), as well as from "When Fish Ride Bicycles," their debut LP due later this year.

Following is an edited conversation with Mikey Rocks (M) and Chuck Inglish (C).

Q. You remind me of the hip-hop I was into when I was a kid in the '80s. Did you intentionally set out to evoke that era?

M. Even though I wasn't around when it first came out, I grew up on it, too. That's all I heard when I was little. I didn't grow up on old James Brown and stuff like that. Most people would say they had to find out about hip-hop, but I was born into it. That's all my parents would listen to, and I didn't know that stuff was old until I went to school.

C. We didn't really know what we were doing or that it would be taken as this, like, classic, renaissance hip-hop. The point was that was the music we loved, so we wanted to make that. That was all I listened to, I didn't listen to the new stuff. Those are the type of beats I like to hear rapping over. I wanted to make rapping cool again because no one wants to be a rapper, they're businessmen who do music. Rapping was cool at one point and I just wanted to make sure that it got the shine it deserved. At the time we started talking about that stuff, everybody thought it was kind of weird or wack to be wearing all of that again. To us it never went out of style.

M. That's just what appealed to our ears. Some people like distorted guitars that are loud and crunchy, some people like really airy, spacey synthesizers and electronic drums. That's what sounds good to them. The instruments and sounds we chose to use sounded good to us.

Q. You guys have a pretty big fan base coming from the indie rock scene, but how do you go over with a core hip-hop crowd?

C. Once you do an indie rock crowd first and you're a rapper, what else is there to overcome? You just gotta go in there the same way you went in there the first time. The hip-hop kids, they want to hear what you got. The indie rock kids, they don't care, you're just opening up for a DJ or a band that they like. All those kids, we were cool with them, they understood that and we understand the feeling that has to come out of your music for anybody to relate to it. It ain't about what it sounds like, it's about what it feels like, and we try to make sure that it feels good every single time. We ain't into spreading a message, that's not our thing.

Q. The Cool Kids don't really fit in with the slick mainstream hip-hop stuff or with the indie "backpacker" stuff, you have your own thing going on. Is that important to you?

M. Of course, man. You've got to be who you are. You can't just hop into a crowd just to say you're in it. You can't really worry about who you're associated with or how people think of you. As soon as you get caught up in that, you get distracted from the stuff that's really important. You're not really thinking about music, you're thinking about who to hang out with and who took control of your songs and whose party you're going to. It's like high school. I don't get caught up in that.

Q. Tell me about the new mixtape.

C. There was a point while we were touring where I wanted to chop up some samples and use them, not go through all the hassle of clearing them and sorting the good (stuff) for the album. We started making songs that were above and beyond where we thought "The Bake Sale" was at, that's now kind of old to us. We wanted to show people that a mixtape don't gotta be like people rapping over other people's (music) and a DJ screaming and songs that are kind of half-assed. We put some effort into those songs and we just wanted people to have them. Plus, doing new songs at your shows is always fun.

M. Our new stuff is way better. We're a lot more comfortable with ourselves musically. We do what we wanna do and we're figuring out more and more ways to make stuff cooler, messing around with different sounds and different kinds of songs.

Q. Is there a physical version available or just the free download?

C. Just the download. Physical versions, we're gonna do sooner or later just for novelty. To spread it faster, there ain't no way for us to get it to everybody. When you're doing things on the Internet, you gotta use it for what it's good for. Everybody hates on digital music, but think of how fast it spreads, think about how many people we can get songs to in a matter of minutes. We'll still do physical albums, but digital mixtapes are where it's at because the music spreads. You want people to have it, you don't want people to go out and buy it. It's free, so what's the point?