WLUW’s Weird Kids Night with DJ sets by the Cool Kids, Jake Austen, and others
INFO 773-276-1411
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The Chicago sound hasn’t reached a lot of people, but it’s reached the right people. Local acts have thoroughly exploited hip-hop’s embrace of MySpace over the past year or so, using the Web to market themselves to a nontraditional hip-hop crowd and get noticed by bloggers with genre-straddling audiences. Flosstradamus in particular have blown up like nobody else in the Chicago indie scene. Their mixes have rubbed off on DJs on several continents, and their preferences in club music–they like big, cheesy, high-energy sounds and privilege goofy fun over stylistic elegance–have proved just as contagious. They’re tastemakers to the tastemakers, followed closely by DJs who gather to nerd out about music at influential Web sites like Philly’s Fathertronix message board or Sweden’s Discobelle, and like little Kanyes they’ve used their gravitational pull to slingshot other acts into orbit.
The Cool Kids are one of those acts. Mikey (aka Antoine Reed) is a 19-year-old from the south suburbs, and Chuck (aka Evan Ingersoll) is a 22-year-old import from suburban Detroit. They have yet to put out a CD, a 12-inch, or even a cassette–everything they’ve released so far has been posted to their MySpace page or distributed to blogs as an MP3–but in the past year they’ve gone from making beats for each other to dropping verses alongside the biggest rapper in the world.
And people are listening. After reviewing a couple Cool Kids tracks, Pitchfork gave the group a coveted spot at next weekend’s Pitchfork Music Festival, where the main-stage talent includes GZA, De La Soul, and Clipse. The Kids have plans to put out a proper full-length CD–originally it was going to be an iTunes-only album, but they’ve changed their minds–and of course they’re going to keep posting jams online so DJs from all over the world can work them into their sets.
At the time I was worried that this verged on the feverish hypothesizing of a conspiracy freak. But it turns out I was underestimating the majors. On June 27, SF Weekly broke the news that a new start-up webcaster called Slacker.com has “stated in the press that it made direct license deals with the majors that have saved it the hassle of paying higher royalties.” Reporter David Downs is calling the setup “dark payola”: the labels have indebted the company to their wishes with rate cuts rather than flat-out giving it money.
