In case you’ve been on Mars, Mikey and Chuck are the Cool Kids. After meeting online, the two linked up, their music blew up, they jumped on tour with M.I.A., and the rest is history in the making, with everyone from major labels to Justin Timberlake itching to get a piece of them. Our boy Flakez caught up with Mikey to get the scoop.
Is it true that you guys met through MySpace?
Well, we basically hit each other up and met up one day ’cause we were talking back and forth for a week or so. We were both making beats so we were planning to see what each of us was doing. I was planning to drive downtown and dropped by Chuck’s. I got there probably at 11 at night on a Saturday, like winter ’05. We were playing beats for each other, talking about making some mixtapes and how we could collaborate. Chuck played this one beat and I was asking him about his rapping. He was like yeah, but he kind of had put emceeing on the backburner. I ended rapping for like two hours, freestyling, and it was just me rapping and him making the beats. So he gave me like 20 beats to write to and it started from there. Eventually we flipped our original concept and both ended up rapping.
So tell us about the bike culture in Chicago. I know the lead single, “Black Mags,” has strong influences from there.
Yeah, man, bikes are huge in Chicago. You got all these people who ride for transportation, because they don’t like cars, like old school mountain bikes and fixed-up BMXs. Chicago is pretty much dominated by bikes and cabs; those are pretty much the two most annoying things to run into. The bikers don’t really follow the rules of the road so you always get into problems.
Most definitely. So how has the journey been getting to the point you guys are at now?
Well, it’s basically the same old story of coming up and grinding, doing shows for free just to get our names out there. Like we would do shows for dudes who would for some reason change their mind and be like, “We actually decided that we’re not going to pay you guys for tonight.” I mean, we’ve slept in cars on the road because we couldn’t afford to pay for a room in a hotel. We pretty much have the same story as all other artists. We’re not really pissed about it though; we didn’t look at it as bad thing. At the end of the day we look back at it and we’re glad people are digging our stuff.
I heard that some crazy shit went down recently, too.
Yeah, um, basically a couple weeks ago, Kenna had hit us up on the MySpace, asking what was good with us, label-wise. We told him we were just grinding. He was telling us that he was really into what we were doing, the route that we took and how we were taking steps that were very different from most artists in hip-hop. We told him we were coming to LA for a show so he wanted to meet up. After meeting Kenna, we ended up linking with Joel Madden and worked in Lionel Richie’s studio on some tracks. Then Kenna calls us back when he was at Justin Timberlake’s crib and JT jumps on the phone telling us that he’s digging our music. He went crazy over the video for “Black Mags.”
Are we about to see a JT x Cool Kids collab?
Maybe. We wouldn’t mind. We respect him as an artist and the music that he makes. We’re down as long it makes a song better because of the collaboration.
What has been the most memorable moment on the tours?
On the M.I.A. tour, the last show of the tour in Philly was amazing. The venue was huge and crowd was real live, going crazy, so there was this energy. Since it was the last day of the tour and because everyone had all gotten real close, it was pretty intense. But in Europe the craziest thing were the political riots going on outside our venues. Like people would be throwing Molotov cocktails, flipping cars, and other things rioters tend to do. It was NUTS, man! All the other people would just be acting normal, like, “Oh, just give them 15 minutes and they’ll calm down.” We’re just like, “Whoa, this is on some other…” It’s a whole different world over there.
