What is Nerdcore?

Nerdcore is a new genre of music created by nerds for nerds. Feel that music underrepresents your strong feelings about your +2 Chain Mail...well now you have no need to fret. Nerdcore is what happened when people who know what a Hidden Markov Model is started rapping about it. I hadn't heard about this until today but I have been perusing about and some of this stuff is just fantastic.

Here is a description from Wired Magazine:

Tupac and Biggie, move over. A new hip-hop feud is brewing that glamorizes not guns and 'hos but Java and secure encryption algorithms.

While gangsta rap is seen as celebrating the violence and aggression that claimed two of its brightest stars, "geeksta" rap is a hip-hop genre celebrating coding skills and school grades.

Also dubbed "nerdcore," this branch of hip-hop is for geeks, by geeks. Geeksta rappers adopt the same combative verbal-assault stylings of their forerunners, but bust rhymes about elite script compiling and dope machine code.

The term was first coined in 2000 by nerdy New York rapper MC Frontalot in a track of the same name. Nerdcore now refers to artists waxing lyrical about topics as disparate as engineering and Lord of the Rings.

In recent months, the field has seen a growing number of releases from computer science labs, where egocentric grad students show off their Ph.D. credentials in tracks like "Have to Code" and "End of File."

"The stigma that was once attached to computer geeks and role-playing nerds is diminishing incredibly fast," said "digital gangster" Bryce Case Jr., aka ytcracker. "It has almost become trendy to have skills on a computer. Rather than guns and 'hos, I speak about DDOS attacks and camgirls."

Here is a site called Rhyme Torrents that has taken it upon itself to make a compilation CD out of these songs. Perusing the merchandise, my favorites are Off the Markov by Lil' Nix, Rock Out with Your Hawk Out by MC Hawking, and I'm A Gangsta by Rappy McRapperson. (WARNING: Some of these songs have explicit lyrics.) MC Hawking also has this great music video called What We Need More Of Is Science (click on Watch This Movie) where in a cartoon world he battles the evil Fundamentalist.

Here is another site keeping up on Nerdcore news -- nerdcorehiphop.org.

You see...Science is KEWL!

Hat-tip: Slashdot.