This is nerdcore
"Rappers in Middle Earth costumes, rhyming about Star Wars, getting into beefs with Wired magazine ... Welcome to the nerdy face of hip-hop, says Marcus O'Dair
In a few weeks' time in Florida, there will be an entire festival dedicated to one musical sub-genre, a sub-genre that was regarded as a joke when it first came to attention at the start of this decade. Now, maybe, the joke is on those who laughed at nerdcore. Where conventional hip-hop celebrates wealth and sex and drugs, nerdcore eschews gangsta themes for "geeksta" interests - its MCs rap about Star Wars, about World of Warcraft and about computer coding. If that's what you want from a festival, then get along to - you guessed it - Nerdapalooza. Or just hope that the talk of a Nerdapalooza UK proves to be more than idle speculation.
The festival isn't the only sign that nerdcore is in rude health, eight years after its birth. Scene stalwart MC Chris has recorded with the acclaimed rapper Talib Kweli and has reached the hip-hop Top 10 on iTunes. Nerdcore MCs have been played on MTV. The main nerdcore internet forum, Rhyme Torrents, is thriving. And, most tellingly, this spring saw two documentaries about nerdcore screened at US film festivals.
Nerdcore Rising focuses on MC Frontalot and his first full US tour in 2006, as he attempts to turn a hobby into a career. It sounds like a pipe dream for a bespectacled man in suit and tie, whose sole concession to stagewear is a headtorch. But when I meet him at the film's premiere at the SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas, he assures me that the move has been successful - his income has doubled annually since he made the leap. In Nerdcore for Life, an overview of the movement, the similarly square MC Chris recounts a similar tale: "My name is MC Chris and I'm a full-time rapper, crazy as it sounds. That's what I do for a living." Dan Lamoureux, the film's director, says that although these two and MC Lars are the only artists able to ones able to turn a career from nerdcore, "I think a few artists are on the verge of taking the plunge and try and make a living off their music."
"This really is the dawning of nerdcore," agrees Jason Christie, featured in Nerdcore for Life under his stage name High-C. As founder of Rhyme Torrents, he has probably played as big a role as anyone in the growth of the scene. "It is spreading far and wide, internationally: my server stats show regular visits from just about any country you can care to name. And when people do discover nerdcore, they now enter into a vibrant scene with many diverse artists - a far cry from a scant two years ago, when the only nerdcore artists anyone knew of were on Wikipedia, and numbered eight in total."
Obviously, that doesn't mean there were only eight people rapping on nerdy themes. Jazzy Jeff was doing just that a full two decades ago, and the lineage runs through MC Paul Barman, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, various Madlib and Kool Keith projects and even Lupe Fiasco. Yet these aren't nerdcore artists, not least because they never claimed to be; nerdcore, Frontalot tells me, is strictly an "opt-in identity".
Nerdcore began with Frontalot's 2000 tune, Nerdcore Hip Hop. Subsequent milestones for Frontalot - at least according to Nerdcore for Life - include performances at the Penny Arcade Expo video game convention in Seattle and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That news of these performances spread over the blogosphere points to one of nerdcore's key strengths: the internet, now fundamental to the dissemination of all music, is presumably embraced more warmly by nerds than by anyone else on the planet. This, after all, is a scene whose biggest bad boy is a convicted hacker and self-proclaimed "digital gangster" named YT Cracker.
Technology doesn't just help in spreading the nerdcore gospel. It also makes the creation of the music itself cheaper and more accessible than ever before. Perhaps most importantly, it allows artists without record labels, and operating within what is still a highly underground scene, to tap into an international audience. As MC Frontalot says, he might only have one fan in every town but when you add all those together, "you create a very shallow but incredibly wide-reaching fanbase.
"It means it's hard to look at the sort of deal that's traditionally been offered by a record company and see it as a good idea. A record company sells a CD for $16.75, and the whole band gets $1.20 out of that, but my margin is completely the reverse. I spend $1.20 producing the physical CD, I sell it for $14 and pocket all the rest. I've sold less than 10,000 copies of either my albums, but they've been paying my rent for the last two years." As we are told on Nerdcore Rising, "without the internet, there would be no MC Frontalot".
Negin Farsad, director of Nerdcore Rising, certainly endorses that theory. "Nerdcore seems a natural and cultural embodiment of the entire tech revolution that's created a sea change in the way that we live," she insists. "Frontalot has grabbed hold of the zeitgeist and recognises that hip-hop and technology aren't going anywhere - they will emerge and converge in the form of nerdcore, whether we like it or not."
In Nerdcore for Life, MC Chris makes a similar point, noting that mainstream hip-hop is getting geekier, to the point where even Jay-Z records now contain references to comic books and superheroes. High-C takes the argument even further: "The whole definition of a nerd is expanding. Everybody in the US uses computers, a great many of them play video games, and comic books are really coming back for adults. So there's a little bit of nerd in us all."
Nerdcore has no shortage of critics, though. For some, it's just too jokey. Others suggest that nerdcore, as a largely white and often humorous take on a predominantly black genre, carries racist undertones.
Dan Lamoureux, whose Nerdcore For Life depicts black and Asian as well as white nerdcore artists, responds thus: "I spent more than two years studying nerdcore, and never once did I encounter anyone that I thought was trying to insult or disparage people of another race. The genre is not a parody. A lot of the music is very witty, but the primary goal isn't to make people laugh. I think that the confusion comes from the antiquated and prejudiced assumption that hip-hop is 'black' music and shouldn't be attempted by people of other races. The whole point of hip-hop is that it's supposed to be the voice of the people. It's evolved into a truly global art form, and the music is so ubiquitous that it's even permeated into geek culture."
Indeed, if a key tenet of hip-hop is "keeping it real", then a fantasy obsessive is being less true to the genre by pretending to have more bullet scars than 50 Cent than he is by rapping about Lord of the Rings. Though admittedly, Lords of the Rhymes, who in Nerdcore for Life do exactly that while dressed in Middle Earth costumes, remain on the wrong side of the crucial distinction made in the same film by MC Lars: between being "fun" but still being taken seriously, and being "funny", and hence perceived as a joke.
The simple truth is that, as with many genres, nerdcore has both wheat and chaff, and with time, the lesser acts will fall by the wayside. What's remarkable is that the scene's strongest artists do now have a chance of forging a sustained career - at least as long as there are fans as ardently loyal as the girl in Nerdcore Rising who travels for 19 hours to see Frontalot perform. Yet the same strength of passion can also manifest itself negatively: Nerdcore for Life gives a glimpse of nerd in-fighting so ferocious it makes the beef between Death Row and Bad Boy look like a schoolyard scrap. Similarly, both Dan Lamoureux and Wired magazine have found themselves the subject of "diss tracks" for their coverage of the scene, MC Router's verbal assault on Wired featuring the charming line: "What the hell's going on with this shitty magazine? You want this motherfucking knife in your fucking spleen?" Just like "real" hip-hop then.
Where to hear nerdcore
Sadly, neither of the nerdcore movies has a UK release scheduled. But you can still catch up with the main players. MC Chris has three albums available, including this year's mc chris is dead. You can buy all three from his website, mcchris.com. If you are feeling cautious, you can hear seven songs at myspace.com/mcchris. MC Frontalot has two albums, and you can buy his most recent effort, Secrets from the Future from frontalot.com. Or you could just download the 53 tracks available for free on the site. YT Cracker - "the undisputed king of nerdcore" - has a vast digital archive available at ytcracker.com. For further information, rhymetorrents.com rightly proclaims itself "your source for nerdcore" and has links to blogs, podcasts, artists' sites and downloadable music." - Marcus O'Dair / The Guardian, Friday 30 May 2008
MC Chris website
I am a famous internet rapper, except that I am not very famous. It is possible that I get more google results than your mom. Unless your mom is genuinely famous. In which case I am humbled. By your mom
MC Frontalot on Facebook
Schaffer the Darklord (or STD) is a New York City-based rapper and comedian with subversive material best-suited for brainy and/or decadent audiences. With manic energy, verbose vocabulary and cartoonishly commanding stage presence, STD skewers such topics as religious zombies, sci-fi sex fantasies, grammar snobbery and obsessive cat-enthusiasts. Imagine a Frankenstein-esque monster assembled from equal parts Bill Hicks, Eminem, Prince, Ozzy Osbourne and Darth Vader, stitched together inside the shell of a maniacal heavy metal ex-patriot.
Schäffer The Darklord on Facebook
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