AUSTIN, Tex.
Multimedia
SHAKE YOUR CALCULATOR Terp 2 It (Chris Trew), right, and Boss Coyote (Tamy Nelson) at a show at Emo’s.
AS the break-beats ricocheted off the corrugated steel walls of Emo’s, an outdoor rock club, a bantamweight rapper named MC Chris strutted on stage in supersize black work shorts, spraying the crowd with volleys of rat-a-tat rhymes. With each burst, the audience of more than 400 bobbed in unison. Their T-shirts soggy on a sweltering night, some fans thrust fists in the air and hooted approvingly. Others reverently mouthed the rhymes under their breath, as if reciting a novena.
It could have been any other hip-hop show, but little details seemed off, like the songs that sampled the epically cheesy rock band REO Speedwagon, or that name-checked detritus from 1980s-era pop culture, like Boba Fett, “The Goonies” and Dungeons & Dragons. Or the fan in the back wearing a full-body foam armor suit modeled after the cybernetic commando from the video game Halo.
And when MC Chris invited the audience to join him in a campy singalong of the saccharine Sean Kingston hit “Beautiful Girls,” the boisterous crowd suddenly grew uncertain, devolving into an awkward mumble that sounded like a few hundred high school wallflowers simultaneously being turned down for a slow dance.
“We nerds,” MC Chris clucked in mock-disapproval. “We got no rhythm. We can’t do nothing right.” But maybe they can. There was a time that brainy, pimple-cheeked misfits could only work out their frustrations alone, in action-figure-filled bedrooms, blasting through level after level in “shooter” video games likes Wolfenstein 3D.
Then nerdcore came along.
A largely white subgenre of hip-hop that celebrates the solitary pleasures of science fiction, computers and bad teenage movies, nerdcore is emerging from the shadows of the Internet, where it spent the last half-decade as an in-joke. This do-it-yourself brand of rap, part self-expression and part self-satire, has inspired two documentary films, and its own festival, Nerdapalooza, in California. This month, MC Chris — otherwise known as Christopher Ward, 31, the son of a finance executive from the affluent Chicago suburb of Libertyville, Ill. — will attempt an unprecedented nerdcore crossover when he joins mosh-pit-friendly rock acts like New Found Glory and Sum 41 on the Warped Tour.
“I feel like the whole rap audience is me,” said Mr. Ward, perched on a tattered sofa in the greenroom at Emo’s before the show, wearing a Star Wars baseball cap. “White kids, playing video games, living in the suburbs. So what if one of them spoke their mind, what would happen then?”
WHEN he expresses himself on stage, in a breathy tenor that makes him sound like a 12-year-old waiting for his voice to change, Mr. Ward affects a tough-guy posture familiar to mainstream rap. As the lyrics to his song "Geek” go: “Stop pickin’ on me/Because I’m a geek/I’m strange to you/You’re strange to me/Well, one of these days/I’m gonna pack heat/Your brains on the wall/My face on TV.”
In conversation, Mr. Ward was quick to point out that the term “nerdcore” — coined by fellow rapper MC Frontalot in 2000 — may be too self-limiting, because “nerds” are hardly the only children of the ’80s who were raised on Transformers, Indiana Jones movies, and Public Enemy.
“It’s so weird to talk about these as my specific influences, because they’re not,” said Mr. Ward, who earned an undergraduate degree in screenwriting at New York University and worked as a producer, animator and voice actor for late-night Adult Swim cartoons like “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” before turning to music full time in 2005. “This is everyone’s story.”
The growing number of nerdcore (or nerd rap, or geek rap) artists and fans seems to bear that out, said Dan Lamoureux, 30, a filmmaker in Chicago whose documentary “Nerdcore for Life!” is in postproduction. When he started the project in 2005, he could find only a couple of dozen rappers who seemed to fit the criteria of nerdcore. Now, he said, there are hundreds, if not thousands.
“I probably hear from a new rapper every day on my MySpace page,” Mr. Lamoureux said. He added: “People had been making geeky rap all along. They just didn’t realize anyone had put a name on it.”
Many nerdcore anthems — “You Got Asperger’s” by MC Frontalot, “Fett’s Vette” by MC Chris, “View Source,” by Ytcracker (“Eagerly awaiting my macro advances/running with my beta cuz I’m taking chances”) — are as much efforts at comedy as they are attempts at sincere hip-hop.
- 1
- 2
