The Cool Kids and the Jerks

By Bill McMillan

Q&A with the Cool Kids

The Cool Kids

3 p.m. – I’m backstage at Juice Jam 2009 with my friend and journalistic comrade Nathan Mattise (Nate for short please). Nate and I are walking over to The Cool Kids’ bus and I’m starting to feel nervous--I’m about to encounter their entire posse in a cramped space with just one ally.

I step on, turn left, and hear…nothing.

There they are, about ten people just staring at us, like when a dog is confused and cocks its head to the side. All of their heads seem cocked to the same side.

“Hey, I’m Bill,” I say to the group’s manager, a semi-muscular six-footer with a well-groomed, red-brown-blonde beard. He’s wearing baggy blue jeans and a grey hoodie, hood up. He looks up from underneath it.

“Whatsup bro?” he says as we share a handshake.

“Thank you for your hospitality brethren,” I think to myself, subconsciously giving the Vulcan salute.

I make my rounds, Nate makes his, and we sit down. Actually, I sit down in a chair and Nate crouches in the aisle.

And so it begins…

Jerk: You’ve done a lot of collaborations recently. Is there anyone you’d like to collaborate with in the near future?

Rocks: Not really. We’re going to master our teamwork first and then we could think about working with other people, but right now we’re collaborating with each other on every song. So we’re going to kind of master that and then you can worry about all that other stuff.

Nate: I think one of the things I love about you guys the most is that you’re so different than a lot of the other rap acts out there now in that you keeps things really minimal – it’s about the beats, it’s about your lyrics – and I feel like a lot of rap today there’s lots of production, lots of orchestral arrangements, and Autotune. What made you guys want to go minimal?

Inglish: We never started that way. I mean, you do what you listen to. I don’t listen to that shit, so I wouldn’t make it. I listen to shit that everybody knows is A plus. I grew up around systems and trucks and people that play the dopest shit while they drove down the street, so I’m trying to contribute to that. And that involves no orchestration. I’m the captain of subtraction. I will take away to the least amount just so that it knocks. If you don’t need it then I don’t want it.

Nate: How’d you guys think the show went? I feel like going into today, on campus, maybe not a lot people heard of you, but you guys had a big crowd, it seemed like they had a good response.

Rocks: Yeah it was decent.

Inglish: You can tell when people kind of don’t know, but that’s good for us. It means we’re at a better point than we were when a lot of people found out about us. So the new people get more of a treat than they did when they were a little younger.

Jerk: You pull a lot of influences from the golden age of hip-hop. Do you foresee another age like that in the near future?

Inglish: The people who need to rap, rap. You know, there’s a couple of us, but the golden age was the golden age because money wasn’t involved. People didn’t [rap] cause of skill, cause of talent whatever. They were rapping cause that’s what they were doing and they was good at it.

Well, we are rapping cause we do what we’re good at it. We’ve seen everybody fuck up. I’m not going to fuck up, especially if everybody else already did it. I’m straight, everything I want to buy I can buy. If I really wanted to buy it all I have to do is say, “Look, I don’t need to buy it right now.” So, I’m definitely not gonna rap with the intentions of making money to buy some shit.

Nate: I think you kind of see it in your lyrics. You’re not political, you’re not rapping about money. You’re rapping about being cool, ironically – The Cool Kids. That’s intentional then?

Inglish: That’s what we do. It’s easier to rap about some shit you do then some shit you don’t do. So if we’re kicking it and discussing certain shit, and the way we write about our interactions with girls, we’re not making that shit up.

Rocks: I’m not rapping about really anything that’s unattainable. It might be unattainable if you don’t know where to go; if you don’t know how to find it.

Nate: How come you [Rocks] get a song but Chuck doesn’t have a song?

Inglish: I made that song. I came up with that song.

Rocks: He did.

Nate: You’re selfless then.

Rocks: It was some word that I had already said and he chopped them up and that was it. He brought that song to me. It would be weird if I made that song up, like I was like, “Hey I want to write a song about me, make me a beat about me.” You know, I would never do that – that’s not in my personality and he wouldn’t do that either. Unless I find a song for him, we're just going to keep doing what we're doing already.

Jerk: Is there anything that makes The Cool Kids angry? Anything that pisses them off?

Inglish: Being pissed off is like showing your cards man. Like you could be pissed off inside your head, but it’s not something everybody else is supposed to know.

Rocks: Man, there’s a couple things that piss me off. Let me see. Waking up early in airports and shit.

Inglish: Oh yeah, airport days. Those suck ass.

Rocks: Yeah, airports suck. I hate asshole cab drivers. Man I could go on, there’s all kind of shit. But there’s nothing that really, really pisses me off though. That’s just like annoying stuff. There’s not too much that’ll really get me ready to kill somebody. I’m pretty much chill.

Jerk: You release most of your stuff through MySpace. What do you say to people who say this cheapens the musical process?

Inglish: It did, but it got us known, so what else were we gonna do? We still put a CD out. So if you didn’t want it off MySpace, you can go to the store and buy it. Or you can just shut up and download it like everybody else did. People just need to stop complaining. That’s what they need to do. Once that stops happening, the world will go to a place that it hasn’t been yet.

But MySpace did a lot for a lot of people and a lot of groups that came before MySpace – they rode that nice express walkway to where they are right now. Like do I think, “Yeah, it kind of made things a little bit too much?” Yeah, because when you allow everyone to do it, it’s a watered down market and it doesn’t matter how good you are.

People get tired of seeing everyone trying to do it too. Once people realize like, “Yo, let me go get a regular job and leave this music shit alone,” probably music will go back to where it’s supposed to. But you got reality stars got albums, football players got albums, mother fucking college professors got albums. Then when we put out an album it’s like, “Oh yeah, we got an album too.” I don’t drive a semi. I let semi-truck drivers drive semis.

Jerk: So you agree that’s it kind of flooded the market too much?

Inglish: Hell yeah, man. Everybody wants to rap. Everybody’s got an R&B album, rap album, dance record, auto tune.

Rocks: Once everybody stops rapping, then things will get a little bit more normal, a little bit more authentic, and just less bloated man. Everybody does it, so everybody already kind of predetermines that shit’s gonna suck if it’s new cause usually it does.

A lot of new shit will suck, if it’s coming from people who aren’t genuinely interested in music then they have no choice but to really suck. It kind of throws a little bit of salt on other people who are kind of, might be talented, trying to do the same thing.

Until next time Jerks

Image courtesy of http://badicalbeatsrecordings.com, licensed under creative commons.