Best Rap Boomlet: Hipster Hop

Mikey Rocks wrote his first rap when he was 9 years old. “I was a real homebody,” he says. “I’d stay in, play video games and watch cartoons. So, when I started writing rhymes, they were about three things: girls, video games and ninjas. The thing is, I’ve stuck to the same stuff ever since.”

Mikey, 20, is one half of the Chicago rap duo Cool Kids, and while he’s only partly serious—to date, the group’s catalogue includes no rhymes about nunchucks or Power Gloves—he and his partner, Chuck Inglish, 23, aren’t afraid to get their geek on. They wear pastel windbreakers, thick-rimmed glasses and giant high-tops. Their breakout single, “Black Mags,” is an ode to BMX customization that features a MacGyver reference and lines about killing time before class. “I love Young Jeezy,” Chuck says. “His first album is the dopest thing ever. But for a stretch, it seemed like you needed ‘drug dealing’ on your resume if you wanted to be a rapper. Hip-hop started off as party music. When did it become about standing on a corner with a bunch of dudes, looking pissed off?”

Recently, a loose confederation of MCs—spread out among Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Chicago—has been posing versions of that same question, and finding a widening fan base (one that includes Björk and M.I.A., who have taken some of them on tour, and Kanye West) in the process. Besides Cool Kids, there’s Kid Sister, 27, a Chicago MC who raps about pedicures over frenetic electronic dance beats; in Baltimore, the duo Spank Rock put a hyper-lewd, off-kilter spin on their city’s homegrown “club” scene, while the teenage Rye Rye offers a sassy, PG-rated version; and in Brooklyn there’s Santogold, a girl who sorta sings, sorta raps over dazzling, vertiginous digital hodgepodges: Her “Creator,” coproduced by M.I.A. collaborator Switch, was one of 2007’s strangest gems. These rappers frequently share stages, producers and color palettes (awesomely hideous Day-Glo), and all share a similar notion of what a rapper should be: a fun-loving, party-rocking, what-planet-did-you-come-from? weirdo.

Many of these MCs come from middle-class, culturally mixed backgrounds. “My mom’s white, my dad’s black and I grew up listening to stuff from each of those cultures,” Kid Sister (born Melissa Young) says. “My grandmother took me to a Baptist church that sang gospel. My mom played classical clarinet. My father played drums in a Talking Heads cover band. My cousins gave me Biggie mix tapes. And I played Yenta in Fiddler on the Roof. That’s who I am.” In high school, both Cool Kids recall hanging out with blacks and whites, computer nerds and football jocks, and suggest that this influenced their music as much as anything. “I was cool with everyone,” Mikey says. “And that’s how our music is.”

Distributing singles via MySpace (where the Cool Kids originally met), connoisseur MP3 blogs and small labels like Fool’s Gold and Mad Decent, these artists have produced the most exciting sounds to emerge from hip-hop’s indie circuit in years. To listen to Rye Rye’s “Shake It to the Ground,” which rides the lo-fi pound of Baltimore club, or Kid Sister’s “Pro Nails,” a hyperactive cuticle-maintenance jam, is to hear music at once a million miles away from mainstream hip-hop and thoroughly enamored with it. When Kanye West first heard “Pro Nails”—West’s DJ, A-Trak, produced it, dates Kid Sister and co-owns Fool’s Gold—he decided to record a rhyme for it. “One day,” Kid Sister remembers, “A-Trak called up and played me Kanye’s verse. I dropped to my knees, did the pee-pee dance—it was a dream come true!” For their part, the Cool Kids favor a spare production style—drum machines and buzzing synths—that suits their futurist nostalgia: They wear gold dookie ropes, but their breezy, intricate rapping is wholly contemporary. “I don’t wanna be retro,” Chuck says. “That’s novelty. But when hip-hop first came out, the MC was just a dude with a mic who kept everybody in it, and I like that: just marrying your voice to the beat.”

So far, this music has attracted an audience that, for the most part, doesn’t look much like the kids who show up to cheer on 106 & Park. “It’s more white kids than black kids at our concerts, for sure,” Mikey says. One reason for this, he notes, is that white fans “picked up on us first.” Chuck says it also has to do with hip-hop provincialism. “People will complain, ‘That’s not hip-hop’,” he says, adding that an artist like Kanye has done much to challenge that kind of attitude: “He’s got people in hip-hop clubs dancing to Daft Punk!” Kid Sister is understandably ambivalent about being pegged a hipster act. “Hipsters come out to the shows,” she says. “But I hate being called a hipster. I go shopping at Target with my homegirls. I hang out at the Cracker Barrel. I prefer the term ‘ghetto nerd.’”