When Shit Got Weird: The Cool Kids on Weed, Rap and Their New Album ‘Hi Top Fade’
It was November 1997. Chuck Inglish of The Cool Kids was in eighth grade and had been invited to a friend’s 13th birthday party. Everybody from his middle school class was there—the cool kids, if you will.
As they listened to the No Limit Records’ latest Tru album Tru 2 Da Game, specifically the song “I Always Feel Like,” somebody passed him an empty can of Miller Lite that had been MacGyvered into a smoking device loaded with, what he calls, “some seedy-ass, sticky-ass 1997 ass weed.”
That was it.
“I went from giggling to snacking on some Werther’s, and I fucking hate Werther’s, so I knew I was high. Werther’s pissed me off. My homie just started launching Werther’s in my lap. I’m listening to this song and I’m watching the Werther’s fly in slow motion. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is what weed is.’”
From there, Chuck made a promise to “smoke this shit again tomorrow.” His cannabis journey had begun and, unbeknownst to him at the time, would evolve into an on-again, (briefly) off-again relationship that would last decades.
For Sir Michael Rocks, Chuck’s rhyming partner and BFF, his first experience with weed didn’t come until his sophomore year of high school. It involved a busted Oldsmobile, Buffalo Wild Wings, a Philly blunt, Burger King, and…his mother.
“My boy Shorty K had just got a little broke down ass Oldsmobile car,” he recalls. “He came over to my house with the car and everybody was hype, because nobody really had cars yet. He’s like, ‘Yo! Let’s ride around.’ Then he pulls out an old Philly blunt swisher or some shit.”
He hit the blunt. He remembers the weed was yellowish gold, perhaps an early strain of kush.
“What’s about to happen?” he asked his friend, who said, “You’re about to laugh. It’s gonna be fun.”
With Lil Wayne’s mixtapes playing in the background, he and his friends started freestyling as they continued cruising around Tinley Park, Illinois. They made a stop at Buffalo Wild Wings, the local teen hangout, where they were asked, “Why you actin’ so weird? What’s wrong with y’all?” They were “looking crazy,” as Mikey put it. After a while, the munchies kicked in.
“We didn’t eat any food there at the Buffalo Wild Wings because we just giggled our way out of there,” he continues. “Then we went to Burger King and grabbed like four Whoppers a piece and it was so hard to order them because we were so high in the drive-thru. We just kept laughing, and the lady kept asking us to repeat it again and we kept laughing again. We eventually got the Whoppers, smashed about four of those, then went back to my house and watched Rugrats.”
Then his mom came downstairs, asking, “Why you keep slamming all the cabinets so loud? What’s going on? What’s wrong with your eyes?” Mikey was able to play it off by telling her he was simply tired. He woke up the next day and tried to find more weed.
“It was pretty tight,” he says.
Now in their late 30s and early 40s, Mikey and Chuck have lived several lives since then, and their relationship with weed has continued to change. After establishing themselves as hip-hop trailblazers (emphasis on blazers) in the mid-2000s with The Bake Sale EP and When Fish Ride Bicycles debut, the duo has delivered several more explosive projects all seasoned with their signature retro yet futuristic boom bap flavor. Their most recent album, Hi Top Fade, comes courtesy of A-Trak’s label, Fool’s Gold Records, and serves as the follow-up to 2022’s triple album, Before Shit Got Weird (Chapter 1), Baby Oil Staircase (Chapter 2) and Chillout (Chapter 3).
During the last three or four years, both artists have overcome significant obstacles to return to a place where they could move forward with another Cool Kids album. Chuck went through financial peril following a doomed deal with Def Jam Recordings, lost two of his grandparents and dealt with a period of extreme sadness. Mikey lost his mother in 2019 and was (and is) still learning how to navigate grief. But through it all, they maintained their tight friendship and eventually got back to making music again—and the result was Hi Top Fade.
Weed didn’t exactly play a leading role in the creation of the album, but it certainly didn’t take a back seat. Chuck has tried to quit before; he took a break when he temporarily moved to Miami, but it didn’t last long.
“I wanted to see if it would make my raps better or worse, so I stopped smoking for a while,” he says. “It was pretty easy because I was trying to do a bunch of new shit, like trying to be a vegetarian. Everybody around me was still smoking a bunch of weed and it was hard to explain to your friends like, ‘No, I’m good on the blunt.’ They would always pass it to me.”
Chuck slowly returned to smoking through spliffs he’d roll with American Spirit Organic tobacco and soon had his answer to his experiment.
“The first couple raps I wrote when I started smoking weed again were some of the best raps that I had ever written in my life,” he says. “So I was like, ‘OK, so the weed is actually good.’ It made my raps worse when I quit. I didn’t get in my head enough to push the boundaries.”
At this point in the conversation, Chuck and Mikey had arrived at their destination after a stop at the barbershop (sadly, they did not get hi-top fades) and some pregame burgers as fuel for their “95 South” video shoot. They had not yet smoked but were getting ready to light up.
“When I got back home to Detroit, my buddy from high school gave me like a McDonald’s Super-Sized bag of really freshly grown pre-rolls and they’re fire,” Chuck says. “I’ve been surviving off those. He gave me like 500 of them.”
While Hi Top Fade doesn’t have too many weed references, it’s not out of the realm of possibility for Chuck or Mikey to write more about smoking.
“It would take us being on vacation somewhere and recording to add in what the weed did or what the drink did or any sort of situation like that,” Chuck explains. “I think we were just so focused on how it sounds audibly and what you can take away from it. But if I got to smoke weed in Dubai, I would definitely rap about that [laughs].”
We couldn’t end the interview without talking about the strangest places they’ve ever smoked. For Chuck, it was the Natural History Museum in New York and Mikey admits he sparked up in a middle school (although he assures us the kids weren’t in session).
“I just smoked at a Detroit Tigers game,” Chuck adds. “Post-COVID, it’s really not that taboo anymore.”
Photos by Josh SPNR – @joshspnr
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