Album Review: Rocks, Paper, Scissors: Choices by Sir Michael Rocks
The Cool Kids co-founder’s solo album is a south-suburban hustler’s diary with the names left in. The family stories and robbery narratives pull rank on the brand-name flex every time.
In 2009, a kid from Matteson, Illinois was stitching sweatsuit samples and mailing them out of a suburban garage while the blog-era hype machine moved on to its next obsession. Sir Michael Rocks had co-founded The Cool Kids with Chuck Inglish, watched MySpace turn two teenagers into a national act, and dealt with a label dispute that delayed their debut for years. He kept going. Solo tapes, a clothing relaunch, a triple-album series with Inglish in 2022, a Cool Kids reunion in 2025. Rocks, Paper, Scissors: Choices, released through Andrew Barber’s Fake Shore Drive, drops with no press cycle, no plan, and nobody asking for it. Twelve tracks, and every one of them is about money, women, or both.
His Auntie Greta was the weed lady. On “Expensive Taste,” Rocks tells the story. She opened the garage to black trash bags stacked to the ceiling, patted his back, slipped him fifty dollars, and said, “Act like I’m chillin’.” The verse that follows chases the feeling of seeing duffle bags full of cash. That memory—a family matriarch running a side business out of her garage, casual and unbothered—does more to establish who Rocks is than any amount of Prada name-drops or Porsche references. The rest of the song has both, and they’re fine, but the Auntie Greta section is the one you remember.
Rocks is a better rapper when he commits to a full story. On “Last Dub,” he gives you names. Tenille left her keys, forgot about a stove, climbed through a window, and people were watching from the shadows. They cleaned the place out. Video games, jewelry, brand new iMac computers, Tenille’s clothes.
“The money vanished out the vault
Man, I was frozen, couldn’t walk.”
He raps that whole stretch in the same even tone, like he’s still trying to believe it happened. It’s a good song. And Bruiser Wolf’s verse on the same track comes from a different zip code entirely—he’d ask the plug for consignment, run it back up, body parts in different time zones. I don’t think two rappers have ever answered the same question so differently on one track; Wolf’s verse is so much wilder that it throws Rocks’ plainspoken grief into sharper relief.
Half the tracks run on a player code Rocks inherited from his father. “My poppa was a player, I’ma keep it on the P side,” he says on “Sneak N Geek,” which is entirely about sneaking around with a girl whose boyfriend monitors her every move. The same frankness shows up on “For the Money.”
“My first love was a hundred bucks
So puttin’ you over cash is a heart I could never crush.”
He admits the lie right there in the verse. “She Don’t Wanna Ride” says the same things differently. Her man calls the plays; Rocks can get her a new whip in ten minutes. Discretion is everything, loyalty is law, and the songs that bother giving these premises a real voice (the spoken sections, mostly) hold up better than the ones coasting on the formula.
Tavaras Jordan and Geeohhs produced most of this, and honestly the beats do what they need to do. Jordan keeps the drums simple on “For the Money” and “Sneak N Geek,” bass warm, kick low, giving Rocks room to talk in that half-rapping, half-conversational cadence he defaults to. Geeohhs goes moodier on “Expensive Taste” and “Soda Club Pelle,” where the hook about his big cousin relieving somebody of a Pelle Pelle jacket sits heavier than anything the drums are doing underneath it. DJ Fresh tags “500K.” Beat sounds like 2012, the exact year Rocks is rapping about. Cracking cards, car-dealership scams, guys getting large, guys getting locked up. Playa Haze closes things out on “Walls,” a faster tempo with Rocks naming Ghazi and Toosie and stacking scenarios quicker than they can resolve.
I kept waiting for the guest verses on “All the Chips” and “Mind Yours” to say something I’d remember. They didn’t. Brand references multiply, and the bars could belong to any mixtape from any year; The Musalini raps about steak dinners by the lake and stock going up, Skooda Chose pulls up in a Cadillac asking everyone around him why they’re broke, Valee on “In Solace” buys Chanel and flies to Monaco. Not bad verses. But try describing a single image from any of them to somebody else.
Rocks remembers his old man’s Ford Explorer on “Talkin’ Legit,” the red Aurora with the TV screen, being a teenager who thought he looked good. He wears Marriani down to the boxers and socks, smokes avocado chocolate. “That’s boys leading boys, that’s why you niggas ain’t growing,” he says on the hook. That’s the line that sticks with me. He’s been at this for twenty years, and the Marriani sweatsuits are older than most of his peers’ publishing deals. The avocado chocolate is a nice touch.
Favorite Track(s): “Expensive Taste,” “Last Dub,” “Sneak N Geek”