MiC K!NG & Chum WERE Cool-Aide

Chum and I no longer work together but we did an amazing album and it’s my birthday so I’m giving it to you for free. Well not totally. It’s gonna cost you a tweet or facebook post. Get your copy of MiC K!NG & Chum WERE Cool-Aide now.

These were exciting times, I’d went up to Chum’s and played him some of the stuff I’d been working on for the Robots with Hearts project and I’d say like a year before I’d described the “Cool-Aide” idea to him. It was a skeleton vision where I imagined us making music people could relate to more. I’d always been big on other genres like Disco, Soul, etc and I wanted to incorporate those. I wanted to write in such a way that I split the difference between being overly dense and being relatable. I wanted to have fun but not have to sacrifice my ability to rap too much. I also wanted to sing a little bit and I wanted to have Blue Raspberry in the group. I wanted to do a record about being cool through adversity. Literal “Cool” “Aid” if you will. We’d kicked around the ideas for awhile but never really acted on it.

At some point in there I had written that “Third Renaissance” article, Chum started spinning hipster music, and I started working on a lot of different stuff like Robots with Hearts and “The Season of Our Discontent” records I was doing with Blastah Beatz.

Finally Chum and I decided we were gonna make a follow up to “Mike and the Fatman.” The plan was to make some really dark music. He sent me a couple beats, one of which Dos-Noun and I wrote a track to but then I went up to his crib and I played him some Robots with Hearts shit and he played me some beats and I think we laid a rough draft of what ultimately became “Kind of a Woman” — A song I was initially kinda shaky on because I thought it was way too simple.

That night I left with that song and a beat cd of all types of stuff from Chum’s stash. I’d listen to the tracks on repeat with an excitement to create that I hadn’t had in years! Instead of laboring over verses at home I kept ideas floating in my head and just let the beat knock in my wheel on the way to the studio then rush to jot it all down when I get there.

We started from beat cd and then moved to me picking random records off the wall and going through samples and he put tracks together with my input.

For the first time in our collective creative career we were on the same page and we were making some really dope music.

We had big plans. Or at least I had big plans. I mapped out a dope marketing plan and I wanted to get a band. I wanted to perform the album with an orchestra and put out a DVD of it. I wanted to hire dope flavor of the month musicians for remixes. I had all types of ideas I wanted to bring to life to really make the record stand out.

Obviously being that you’re about to download this for free, none of that is ever happening with this album.

To be continued….

-MK