A couple of weeks ago, an expert on the Harry Potter series told an audience of high school kids how lucky they were to have this Big Shared Experience--these seven books and 41,000 words in common. What does Harry Potter have to do with hip-hop in 2008? In an age when many year-end lists should be subtitled "Ten More Albums You've Never Heard of and Will Never, Ever Hear," plenty.
Technology has made the world smaller, and in response, we've found smaller and smaller worlds to inhabit. Thin
Photo by Hryck.
Chuck "Chuck Inglish" Ingersoll (Michigan) and Antoine "Mikey Rocks" Reed (Illinois) - the Cool Kids, to you - may qualify as the 00s' biggest teases. Since 2007, they've unleashed a cavalcade of individual tracks and mixtapes, massaging Internet buzz into a sort of droning hum: 80s babies building a name with hot sixteens full of 80s signifiers and 80s-aping flows over 80s boom-bap beats. (See "Black Mags," which was featured in a late 2007/early 2008 Rhapsody commercial in tand
