Kid Sister, Flosstradamus, and The Cool Kids Are the Next Wave of Chicago Hip-Hop Artists Aiming to Break Big

By Jim DeRogatis

It’s March 2000, and South Side native Lonnie Rashid Lynn, better known as Common, is onstage at the House of Blues in Chicago. Hailed by knowledgeable fans since the early ’90s as one of the most talented freestylers in hip-hop, he’s the best known rapper the Windy City has produced at the time—though his fame, as well as his album sales and concert draw, lag far behind his superstar counterparts from the East and West Coasts, or even the so-called Dirty South.

As Common performs songs from his new album, Like Water for Chocolate, a skinny, geeky, high-energy twenty-something bounds into the box where several local critics are reviewing the show. Waving his new mix tape, which he doesn’t bother to distribute, he’s literally vibrating with excitement as he announces, “Y’all gonna be hearing about me real soon, ’cause I’m gonna break big, and I’m taking Common and the rest of the Chi with me!”

Sure enough, the story of hip-hop in Chicago now can be divided into the years “B.K.” and “A.K.”—Before Kanye and After Kanye—because that eager self-promoter was, of course, the loquacious, egotistical, and absurdly talented Mr. West. After making his name with productions for superstars such as Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel, and Nas, then establishing himself as a multiplatinum-selling performer in his own right with The College Dropout (2004) and subsequent discs, West made good on his promise to shine a spotlight on other local rappers, crafting tracks for Common, Rhymefest, and Lupe Fiasco. Just as importantly, though, he proved that his hometown is second to none when it comes to nurturing world-class hip-hop talent.

Which brings us up to the present, and the next wave of Chicago artists poised to break big.

Though their sounds are diverse, Kid Sister (rapper Melisa Young); the Cool Kids (the rhyming duo of Evan Ingersoll, a.k.a. Chuck Inglish, and Antoine Reed, or Mikey Rocks); and Flosstradamus (DJs and producers J2K—Melisa’s younger brother Josh Young—and Autobot, a.k.a. Curt Cameruci) do share several key traits. Like Common and West, they have a no-nonsense Midwestern sensibility that eschews empty boasting and nihilistic gangsta bravado in favor of stories of real-life challenges and triumphs. They understand hip-hop history, but their grooves and attitudes nonetheless seem fresh, immediate, and absolutely relevant today. They’ve all achieved significant national attention even before releasing their official debut albums, all of which are finally expected this fall. And they all have ties to Columbia College.

“I never met Melisa, Josh, or the Cool Kids through Columbia, but we all went there,” Flosstradamus’s Cameruci says. Cameruci earned a B.A. in Interactive Arts and Media in 2005, a degree he values, although not in the direct sense he might have imagined. “I’m doing creative, fun stuff, even if I’m not officially doing interactive multimedia. But aside from that, Columbia is what brought me to Chicago from Kalamazoo, and I met some awesome people there who are doing incredibly creative stuff. That holds so much more weight to me. Even though I do have a degree, and I’m proud of it, just being able to go there and meet kids who are doing stuff inspired me to one-up what I’m doing and keep pushing myself.”

Flosstradamus was the first of the recent wave of local acts to make a name outside Chicago, rising from raucous house parties in Wicker Park to the stages of giant festivals such as Coachella, Rothbury, and Lollapalooza. The duo also helped to give the new scene focus by championing a unique rhythm called Chicago juke, a sped-up, hypersexualized update of the city’s classic house sound. “Flosstradamus is definitely the quarterback of the team,” Cool Kids’ Reed told Billboard magazine. “The whole scene formulated around them and their parties.”

In the summer of 2005, Cameruci and Young, who studied Audio Arts and Acoustics at Columbia, were drawn together by a shared love of turntablism and scratching after a mutual friend noticed they both were spinning similar sounds. They began hosting a series of parties that eventually were christened “Get Out the Hood,” and the word soon spread far beyond Chicago via their MySpace page. They’ve since gone on to craft tracks for artists like Kid Sister and the Cool Kids, and to remix De La Soul. But until recently, with the completion of their own studio in Chicago’s West Loop, they barely had time to focus on putting together an album of their own.

Why have Flosstradamus, the Cool Kids, and Kid Sister all been so slow to release full-length recordings?

“You know, we have all been working hard, but we’re in this new era of music, and I think for all of us, every single one of us, when we started out were just broke kids,” Cameruci says. “When we decided to make this our bread and butter, we all had to quit our jobs, and that meant we had to work extra hard to make money [by performing], which didn’t leave anything for recording. But we all worked and worked and worked, and now we’re kind of comfortable, so we can actually buy new equipment and work on recording and releasing some music. Everyone is like, ‘Where’s your album? Where’s your album?’ But they don’t realize we haven’t been in the game that long. We were doing this for fun and it blew up, and now we’re catching up.”

The wait for Kid Sister’s first album seems to have dragged on even longer: The hip-hop world has been eager to hear a full disc since 2007, when it first fell in love with Melisa Young via the sassy and sexy single “Pro Nails” on a Kanye West mix tape. The star rapper, who also added a verse to the song, discovered the Flosstradamus-produced tune through his DJ, A-Trak, also known as Young’s boyfriend, Alain Macklovitch. Young says the many delays for the release date are due to the difficulties of securing final mixes from the long list of contributing producers, which includes Pharrell Williams and the Swedish House Mafia. But she notes that it’s all relative, since she really hasn’t been rapping that long.

Young studied film at Columbia, earning a B.A. in 2004, and set out for New York after graduating with the hope of building a career behind the scenes on movie sets. “I did a couple of projects in New York, but there’s not really that much work, and it’s very expensive to live there,” she says. “So I came back to Chicago, I didn’t have any money, and I ended up working on a reality TV show here called Starting Over. That made me want to start over: ‘Fuck this, this is horrible, five women, changing their lives in a house—snooze-fest, 2002!’” There followed a now-infamous series of dreadful retail jobs, including stints at The Limited, Bath & Body Works, The Gap, and Victoria’s Secret, before Young finally decided to listen to her brother.

“Josh was the one encouraging me from the get-go, and I saw what he did and I was like, ‘Come on! My brother is four years younger than me and he’s flying around the world and I’m working at Bath & Body Works. I was so jealous!"

"I had just graduated from college and I had my degree and I was like, ‘Argh!’” So Melisa Young began writing songs and performing wherever she could. “I was jumping on couches with a beer in my hand doing these random songs at Sonotheque,” she says, and, well, one thing led to another, and soon she was reborn as Kid Sister.

Melisa’s success has not been in the field she studied, and she jokes about not using that film degree. “Seriously, though,” she says, “I’m glad I went: I had a couple of great professors there who I will always remember, so I would never say I wasted my time.”

The Cool Kids’ Reed voices a similar sentiment, acknowledging the value of Columbia’s environment, its creative community. He only spent a year at Columbia, where he studied broadcast journalism, not music. “But I met a lot of people who we work with now while I was there; indirectly, it helped me out a lot. There was a lot of art going around, and everyone was working something creative. That overall environment lets you be inspired, and you’re more likely to get work done when you’re around like-minded people who try to do something creative, too.”

Reed grew up in Matteson, and he was in his last year in high school when he met Inglish after hearing a beat his future partner had crafted and posted on MySpace. The two began collaborating long-distance via the Net before Inglish moved to Chicago from Detroit and the Cool Kids began in earnest, updating the old-school sounds of rap pioneers such as Eric B. & Rakim and Run-DMC for a new audience. They scored an underground hit with the 2007 single “Black Mags,” a tribute to a BMX bike. An EP called The Bake Sale followed the next year, but the duo decided to dump its first attempt at a full-length debut, issuing it as the mix tape Gone Fishing instead. They returned to the studio to craft a different version of the first official Cool Kids album because,

“We thought we could do better, and we don’t want to do anything less than a classic.”

Pluck, persistence, and a devotion to their individual visions—these are three more characteristics that Flosstradamus, Kid Sister, and the Cool Kids have in common. As their comments about their college days might indicate, they’d be the last to give Columbia all of the credit for instilling those values. At the same time, they all agree those qualities flow freely through their alma mater’s classrooms, studios, and hallways, and there’s no way that some of it didn’t seep in.

Jim DeRogatis is the pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, the cohost of Sound Opinions on Chicago Public Radio, and, starting this fall, an instructor for Reviewing the Arts at Columbia College Chicago.