Geek hip-hop

Wikipedia is a funny thing: you can end up far from home, without intending to.

While I was waiting for my day's Dissertation work to back up, I thought I'd take a quick look at Wikipedia to see which Weird Al Yankovic albums I was missing (and if he'd done one since Straight Outta Lynnwood). That took me to a cameo he'd done in a documentary called Nerdcore -- which led me to the entry on nerdcore as a music genre.

Apparently, there's a burgeoning sub-genre of hip-hop called ''nerdcore'' -- where the lyrical content tends toward geeky stuff like computer programming and Dungeons and Dragons and science fiction (and etc.). MC Lars is one of the more recent guys (I have one of his albums; good stuff!). Apparently MC Frontalot is one of the earlier guys, including coining the term.

One of the tendencies of nerdcore is to self-release your songs (often for free) on your own website, rather than being on an actual label.

As an example: a guy named Monzy is working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science, and has a rap about it (most of which I don't understand). He has an ongoing rivalry with another nerdcore rapper called MC Plus+ (which is actually a pretty clever rap name for a computer dude).


According to the Wikipedia "nerdcore" article, there is even a sub-genre called ''geeksta rap'' -- a play on the term ''gangsta rap'' -- where instead of bragging about their money, cars, toughness and guns, they brag about their coding powress and their bleeding-edge hardware.

Oh... my...


--GG