Story by Jacob O’Gara
Have you listened to “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang lately? It, the first hip-hop record, is a complete mess, and the full version is even worse: almost fifteen minutes of repetitive, tangled verses—full of “pop da pop dibbie dibbie”s and “boogie da bang bang da bong”s—that go nowhere, and when Wonder Mike does take us somewhere, it’s to his friend’s house where “the food just ain’t no good.” “Rapper’s Delight” is silly, childish nonsense, the result of an unrehearsed goof-off session in a recording studio. There is no social or political commentary to be found in the lyrics, and beyond its value as an artifact of music history, its cultural merit is questionable. And perhaps most damning of all, it is fun.
The Cool Kids recall this moment in hip-hop’s past, a moment that is sometimes easy to forget. Borne out of scruffy summertime block parties in the South Bronx, hip-hop was dance music, plain and simple. MCs would rap over the DJs’ beats to keep people moving. Any profound subtext, or for that matter any subtext at all, was usually accidental or imagined. These musicians weren’t in the art-making business; their point was to create breezy soundtracks for a specific time and place, by definition disposable. They had no idea of the revolution they’d started.
When Fish Ride Bicycles, released last Tuesday, is the first studio album by The Cool Kids, a rap duo from Chicago. In 2008, they debuted with The Bake Sale, a ten-track EP that was impressive enough to land The Cool Kids in the pages of Rolling Stone as a group to watch, and a single or two in a couple episodes of Entourage. They struck, and strike, a chord among critics and listeners for three reasons:
1. As far as hip-hop is concerned, The Cool Kids are as non-threatening as The Sugarhill Gang. They don’t rap about killing other African-Americans or hustling crack cocaine in America’s blighted housing projects, nor do they make jubilant, Lil Jon-like overtures about getting “fucked up” in the club or entertain ghoulish rape fantasies like the Odd Future crew. They also employ relatively straightforward rhyme schemes that are interesting enough to entertain the average listener, but simple enough to not make the average listener feel like he or she’s missing anything.
2. Because The Cool Kids are talented without being ponderous, buoyant without being trivial, and polished without being manufactured, they give great cover for those (mostly critics) who consider themselves above listening to music for pleasure’s sake.
3. The Cool Kids are actually pretty good.
Both The Bake Sale and When Fish Ride Bicycles would satisfy even the curmudgeonliest of the genre’s Andy Rooneys. Noise-wise, these albums take you back to the glory days of Ronald Reagan’s first term in the White House: they honk, slap, thump, and rattle, occasionally jabbed by fuzzy synth coils. The Bake Sale is the sort of album you turn on in a packed sedan as it rumbles down the avenue or as the background noise of a party at two in the morning. When Fish Ride Bicycles is summertime fare. It stirs up images of broken fire hydrants gushing water onto the blacktop, long afternoons spent at the beach or community pool, or 99-cent cans of Arnold Palmer.
Any song angling to be the cooler, less popular alternative to whatever 2011’s “California Gurls” is will have to compete with “Swimsuits.” Featuring a hook crooned by Mayer Hawthorne—a white R&B singer signed to Stones Throw Records—“Swimsuits” is a slinky, upbeat track that ought to be played on a boombox. It, “Get Right,” and “Summer Jam” form a triptych of what summer should sound like. The core message of When Fish Ride Bicycles, and of The Cool Kids, is to goof off like it’s 1979.
Hip-hop’s roughly decade-long tenure as the popular music genre did something to it. The music and the artists and producers who made it became a little buttoned-down, a little bland, a little serious. With great popularity comes great responsibility, after all. In other words, hip-hop lost the spirit that animated the DJs and MCs who brought the noise and got the damn party started so many summers ago.