The Bake Sale

The first words you hear on the Cool Kids' The Bake Sale EP-- out now on iTunes and in stores early next month-- are as follows: "tick tick clap, tick tickticktick clap." The beat for "What Up Man" is classic minimal 808-heavy mid-1980s shit, the sort of thing Rick Rubin might've spent 10 minutes slapping together for an LL Cool J B-side, except that in place of actual hi-hat ticks and handclaps, we get the words tick and clap (and bass). That pretty much perfectly encapsulates the Chicago duo's approach right there: They semi-faithfully recreate the music of rap's low-budget bubbling-under era, but they do it with eyebrows arched and quotation-marks firmly in place. On "88", they make their aims explicit: "Do the smurf, do the wop, baseball bat/ Rooftop like we bringing 88 back," itself a quote from an unashamedly retro 2002 Nas single.

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