Nerdcore Rap: Can it Stand the Test of Time?

More About MC Frontalot

MC Frontalot, born Damian Hess, Dec 3, 1973 and residing in Brooklyn, New York, Mr. Hess gradulated from Wesleyan University with degrees in English in Electronic Music. In 1999, he began his musical releases under the name MC Frontalot, and started gaining popularity ground as a repeat contestant in Song fight, which has competitions around the country every year MC Frontalot has won seven of the compeitions under his stage name, and in fact, has never lost a competition he entered under his stage name.

MC Frontalot's biggest break came has a feautred artist in March 18 2002 in the webcomic Penny Arcade Expo, where he has appeared every year from 2004 to 2013. The first show he did there brough him up close and personal with his first large audience of several thousand fans.

Hess uses beats and samples from many popular mainstream songs that are mixed and modified to fit his lyrics and sometimes beats and riffs from several mainstream songs are combined to produce a uniquely MC Frontalot rap. Hess's musical influences include, but are not limited to, "Paul Simon, They Might Be Giants, James Brown, Fiona Apple, and many others.^[9] He addresses his borrowing of various drum beats in the song "Good Old Clyde", a song commenting on and using the popular "Funky Drummer" drum break by Clyde Stubblefield.^[10]" Source-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontalot

Will Nerdcore Rap Go Mainstream and Replace Gangsta Rap

Unless you are a geek or a nerd, you've probably never even heard of nerdcore rap, but it's gaining strong momentum in the worlds of geekdom and nerdom. The word "Nerdcore" is attributed to one of the most prolifice and well-known nerdcore artists, MC Frontalot aka Damian Hess. Mr. Hess coined the phrase nerdcore hip hop in the year 2000, and probably was unaware at that time that his new word would become the trademark of nerd rappers and hip hop artists. Such as it was, now there are many nerdcore artists on the scene and they are becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Nerdcore rap lyrics are about things that are relevant to nerd life and that can be identified with by nerds and geeks alike. Lyrics are about such things as having your lunch or lunch money stolen, about being proficient at math, about playing computer games, about not being able to get a date, about being the last one picked to play a sport in high school gym, and about getting beat up by the greasers and jocks at school. It's about all things that nerds have been accustomed to dealing with during every day life, just as gangsta rap identifies with kids who turn to the streets to try to survive in life.

The #1 nerdcore rapper, MC Frontalot proclaims himself to be the world's 579th greatest rapper. Now, I don't really know where he came up with that number, if there is any statistical validity, or if he just pulled a random number out of his gluteus maximus. Be that as it may, as a white rapper, his name certainly is not yet as well known as Vanilla Ice. MC Frontalot has even been featured in a documentary film called "Nerdcore Rising."

Other artists of note in this relatively new genre, man of whom were included in Nerdcore Rising, are YTCracker, mc Chris, Optimus Rhyme, Beefy, MC Lars, MC Hawking, MC Router, Futuristic Sex Robotz, and Ultraklystron with some special alcolades to Badd Spellah who has made several contributions to the production of nerdcore rap and hip hop.

If you'd like to hear some bits from MC Frontalot, Listen now.

YTCracker (Whitey Cracker): Nerdcore Rap's Rising Star

The jury is out on whether YTCracker is moved ahead of MC Frontalot in popularity, but without a doubt he is certainly rapidly gaining ground. Born Bryce Case Jr, August 23, 1982, YTCracker skyrocketed to world notoriety when he hacked and defaced several high-level federal government and private industry websites at the ripe old age of 17.

"In 1999, Case gained notoriety, media coverage, and a restitution bill for defacing the web site of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center with a modified frontend for a commonly used msadc.pl exploit.^[4] Other United States government websites that were hacked include the Bureau of Land Management's national training center and the Defense Contract Audit Agency.^[5] At least 40 other websites were tampered with by Case, including Airspace USA, the bank Altamira, Nissan Motors, Honda, the monitoring station for the United States Geological Survey and the Texas Department of Public Safety.^[6] Case stated he believed he was "on the good side" as he broke into company websites to alert them of security problems, not to cause harm.^[7] In May 2000 Case was charged with criminal mischief and computer crime for breaking into the Colorado Springs city website, causing an estimated $25,000 in damages, though all $25,000 are costs of "time lost" to users.^[6]

These defacements launched him into the spotlight, making him a resource for the media, commenting on other hacking-related events, such as the denial of service attacks on Yahoo, eBay, Gay.com, and other well-known websites in 2000.^[8][9]"

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ytcracker

Hailing originally from La Mirada, California, Case claims to have started learning BASIC programming code at age 4, and soon after started learning MSDOS and System 5.

Case got his start in the music business as both an MC and DJ under the pseudonym YTCracker, and most notably associated with the nerdcore hip hop genre. Many of YTCracker's hip hop mixes were created by mixing the musical backgrounds from Ninetendo games to create the samples needed for his recordings and adding vocal tracks to them. (Very creative, I must say!!!) You can listen to some tracks (may contain EXPLICIT content) here.

MC Hawking aka Ken Lawerence, Better Known as the "Undistputed King of Gangsta-Theoretical Astrophysics"

MC Hawking's nerdcore raps come from the text-to-speech program Willow Talk, with DJ Doomsday providing the backing beats. Hawking's raps are a conglomeration of gangsta rap combined with scientific topics and quotations taken from Stephen Hawking himself. Many of the topics covered in Hawking's raps a relavant to scientific laws and theories, such as Newton's Laws of Motion, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the "Big Bang," laws of thermodynamics, and quantum physics.

Lawerence's background is in music composition, for which he earned a degree at Hampshire College. Hawking also does work with the heavy metal the band "Dark Matter," which mainly does parodies of Ice-T's raps.

"Stephen Hawking has said that he is "flattered, as it's a modern-day equivalent to Spitting Image".^[1] On the inside cover of A Brief History of Rhyme, Lawrence thanks Stephen Hawking "for taking this joke in the spirit that it was intended." Source-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC_Hawking

MC Hawking is nowhere near as well known as some of his contemporaries; however, he his making inroads into the nerdcore culture rapidly. Just as MC Frontalot, MC Hawking also makes appearances periodically at Song Fight!.

Summary: Nerdcore Rap and The Test of Time

The question of whether nerdcore rap can survive the test of time, is more a question of whether geeks and nerds are here to stay, or whether they will eventually wither into extinction. As long as there are computers and computer games, I believe that nerds will still walk among us, but how long that will be remains to be answered. Eventually, some more powerful gadgets may replace computers and computer games, which may have an adverse impact on the nerd culture. As any antropologist knows, cultures eveolve and change constantly over the course of history. In the context of time ad-infinitum, geeks and nerds have only existed for a scant moment in time, and how long those cultures will survivie will answer the question of how long nerdcore rap will survive.

If computers and computer games evolve, nerds will perhaps evolve into higher beings along with the things that helped them become nerds in the first place. Geeks on the other hand or more dependent on science and scientific things in their culture, and science will be with us forever. There is no doubt that the nerd and geek culture has been growing exponentially over time, so it will probably be around for awhile. But, one must consdier that the most populous bird that ever inhabited the Earth, the Passenger Pigeon, was considered a pest and slaughtered and poisoned into extinction. The last surviving Passenger Pigeon died in the Cincinattie Zoo in the early 1900s. Hopefully, society will not ever take such radical steps to eliminate geeks and nerds, but odds are nerds will evolve, and geeks will still be around.

If that heppens, will nerdcore rap still survivie? I would think probably so and I predict that nerdcore rap will be with us for a very long, long time. I think it will be quite a long time until computers and computer games evolve to the point that nerds evolve into higher beings, and since science is here forever, I think geeks must be here forever too. Long live nerdcore!!!!