The Cool Kids — The Bake Sale
“We’re Just Better at What We do Right Now”: An Interview with the Cool Kids - Passion of the Weiss, 2016
Son of the City: An Interview with Dante Ross - Passion of the Weiss, 2023
An Interview With Bryson the Alien - Passion of the Weiss, 2023
The Cool Kids were either throwback or revolutionary, depending on your age. As a high schooler I was in the latter camp. They changed everything. Because of culture’s inevitably cyclical nature, by the mid-2000s hip-hop had both progressed and returned to the flashiness of its origins. Beats were big and expensive. The dust had been blown away, replaced with a synthetic gleam. Morgan Spurlock didn’t make a difference; rappers’ outfits and egos were super sized. Until Chuck Inglish and Sir Michael Rocks came in, somehow raised up their legs in those skinny jeans and kicked hip-hop in the face, crumbling it down to the foundation. All Chuck needed was his mouth and a bell, and beyond that just 808s and a few synths. He and Mikey talked about riding Dynos, which was somehow cooler than talking about flying on private jets, because it felt more realistically attainable. They weren’t lounging on yachts with strippers, but they were as aspirational and motivational as Jay-Z or Rick Ross, because they were so comfortable being themselves.
I had heard older people talking about Run D.M.C. doing the same thing in the early 80s. In an era when rappers wore extravagant costumes, Run D.M.C. dressed the way their audience did. They simplified music, delivering real and relatable lines in a straightforward manner over sparse production. The Cool Kids did almost the same. But they couldn’t be dismissed as a pure throwback novelty act, the way Joey Bada$$ would be a few years later. They weren’t Run D.M.C. clones but they had the same effect: by rejecting the conventions of the time, they transformed music for decades to come. It’s unsurprising that Dante Ross (interview linked above) loved them and tried to sign them. Ross was around New York when Run D.M.C. first burst on the scene, but he still recognizes The Cool Kids as their era’s undeniable innovators.
The Cool Kids weren’t the only artists at the time breaking down established musical standards. The internet ensured that anyone anywhere could contribute to the dismantling and rebuilding of conventions. Soulja Boy was also doing this in what as a fellow high schooler I always thought was rural Tennessee, but now the internet tells me must have been Mississippi or maybe even Atlanta. Who knows. I can’t remember shit when it comes to details about my youth, but the feelings music gave me back then will never leave. Those memories are in my body, not my head. “BAPES” and “YAHH BITCH YAHH” will be rattling around my bones for millenia, as will “Mikey Rocks” and “Black Mags.” Those songs stood out because they were the opposite of polished. Soulja Boy screamed into the mic, but the beat was already clipping. He and Arab were kids our age, similarly from a nowhere, literally unmemorable town, making the kind of music young teenagers found fun and funny and good. Chuck and Mikey were a little older and wiser, and more calculated and refined in their approach than Soulja Boy. Like him, though, or punk rock, or Run D.M.C, the Cool Kids were another example of how anyone could make music. Of course, many tried, and no one could do it like them.The Bake Sale EP came out in 2008, but I don’t recall thinking of it as the time as an album. It was more of a collection of loose singles. The Cool Kids weren’t an “album” artist, in my mind. Just like Soulja Boy never was. The idea of selling a full-length project was the antithesis of what made them compelling.
I remember The Cool Kids being, after Soulja Boy, one of the first groups that I didn’t need a full length project to latch onto. I could be a fan of them without that tangibility. Looking at dates, this again is inaccurate. Music consumption and distribution had been fundamentally altered by the time The Cool Kids came around. According to Metallica or whoever, the industry was dying and maybe already dead. Radiohead put In Rainbows online in 2007, and Bomb the Music Industry! had been utilizing the pay-what-you-can download model that Thom Yorke supposedly invented for years prior. I’d been combing through my brother’s Napster library, and cultivating my own Limeshare collection, for a while. By the time The Bake Sale arrived in 2008 we were, unbeknownst, reaching the peak of what a podcast I still haven’t listened to yet would call The Blog Era. Mediafire and Rapidshare were our greatest pals. So The Bake Sale collecting songs that most fans had already downloaded was almost a strange misstep.
In retrospect, the sequencing of The Bake Sale, and its presentation as a finished product, and preservation in the post-Blog Era, is what gives it the “undisputed classic” designation that a handful of downloadable standalone singles could never earn. It was, IIRC (which you know I don’t, at least not C) marketed as a sort of “official debut,” until the full-length When Fish Ride Bicycles came out three years later. Revisiting it now, forcing my cyclical self to again sit with a project and listen to every song rather than jumping around like a maniac, the sequencing is impeccable. “Gold and a Pager” hits just as hard whether you scroll-wheel play it from your iPod or let it come on 8 tracks into a 10-track project. In the second scenario, it hits way harder because of the context. Just when it seems like the Cool Kids’ formula is running thin, and their self-produced beats are not enough to sustain an entire thirty minutes, they drop in their most explosive hit of all time.
Paradoxically, the album’s opener, “What Up Man,” is by itself the definition of an undisputed classic. It might be the most perfect song of all time. It’s at least the purest distillation of Chuck Inglish’s power. He made the beat with his mouth and a bell, and somehow had the remaining lung capacity to deliver one of his greatest verses of all time. The following lyrics, and the way they slot in perfectly around a beat he also made with his voice, will forever cause my brain to melt, even if it can’t remember why it’s doing so:
“I could build a sand castle without bringing a pail / and go catfish fishing and come up with a whale / But you know what, that was easy as hell / Well maybe not the line about me catchin’ a whale / But if I did it then it’s nothing then I did it as well / Probably easy as it is to move slow for a snail.”
If Cassidy three years earlier saying “I’m a hustla, I could sell salt to a slug” (which I know is a reference to something somebody else said earlier, which of course my brain can’t access right now) was enough to blow my mind, Chuck Inglish’s Class Gastropoda (Phylum Mollusca) bar was enough to put it back together in a more powerful form, like a lyrical Dr. Frankenstein.
In my above-linked interview with The Cool Kids from 2016, I mentioned that I used to have “What Up Man” set as my ringtone. I would wake up to Mikey Rocks talking about milk, milk pouring into his bowl, but often I would let the track play out through Chuck’s verse before I got up for some cereal myself. As much as I now despise getting startled out of a restless too-short slumber by the standard iPhone alarm jingle, I never tired of “What Up Man.” I’m getting old, but that song isn’t.
I didn’t remember much about “One Two,” “What It Is,” or “Bassment Party” the other day before putting The Bake Sale on for a drive to a Koreatown BBQ spot. But the entire tracklist holds up as an undisputed classic. I instantly became a teenager again. I can’t remember what that’s like, but I can feel it. Windows down, The Cool Kids on, driving toward possibility.