I’ve been putting off doing a nerdcore post just because I’ve been heavily into nerdcore hip-hop for a couple of years now, and I kind of don’t know where to start. But now there’s a nerdcore documentary. So my hand is forced.
For those who don’t know, nerdcore is hip-hop by nerds about nerdy subjects: video games, star wars, conventions, programming, “whatevs.” My first contact with the genre was The Lords of the Rhymes, which is obviously pretty Tolkien-heavy stuff. It took me a while to convince myself I wasn’t being made fun of by some novelty act — any beat-boxing Gollum must be scrutinized pretty closely before consumption — but they actually seemed to have a pretty cool attitude about it, and their first single ended up in heavy rotation on the iPod.
Unfortunately the Lords only have a couple-three songs, so it wasn’t until Penny Arcade linked to the Penny Arcade Theme Song by MC Frontalot that I started to realize this was actually a vital and viable subgenre. Then I ran across Baddd Spellah’s remix of mc chris’s Fette’s Vette at which point the nerdcore metastasized over large portions of my listening routine. Just to hear stuff that you never thought anybody would ever rap about, rapped about, is incredibly liberating — like your whole life up to that point, everything else you’ve ever listened to has been just slightly beside the point. I have no idea how many people actually listen to nerdcore, or whether it’ll ever become a commercially viable genre, and I don’t really care. It’s just dope.
Epilogue: Frontalot did an Achewood-themed song on Songfight a couple of months ago. Thus the circle is complete. (Though why, given all the characters in the Achewoodverse, would you choose to rap about Todd?)
