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[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I'm a little surprised that Flower hasn't been posting more about "nerdcore:"

• 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 found this touching:

• From its early days, hip-hop has been an art form born from oppression and marginalization, where performers sought to turn limitations into strengths, and the harshest circumstances yielded the best material. While no one is going to compare life in the high-school computer lab to the streets of the South Bronx — or certainly, wedgies to racism — suburban dweebs have their beefs with society, too.

South Bronx, Bronx H.S. of Science -- aren't these just different kinds of oppression?

Oddly enough, there's not a lot of black nerdcore:

• Which is not to say that nerdcore has crossed over to hip-hop’s core black audience. Mr. Hess said he knew of only one African-American nerdcore artist, a self-described “half-black” Web designer named Ken Leavitt-Lawrence, who performs satirical gangsta rap in the voice of the physicist Stephen Hawking, under the name MC Hawking. (In “All My Shootin’s Be Drive-Bys,” he directs a bullet at a foe with the rap, “Time to give a Newtonian demonstration/of a bullet, its mass/and its acceleration.”)

MC Chris is pretty funny. Didn't you watch Sealab 2021? He was Hesh.