Nerdcore Revolution: Nerds Rapping About Video Games and Computer Programming

Whatever is great is stolen. Rap music is great. It has been stolen. Young men in thick rimmed glasses with skin as white as the paper I write on are rapping about themseleves. They're higly educated. They are not talking about gangs or being black. They rap about video games and computer programming. Don't they have any shame, any sense of embarassment? What draws them to this form of expression?

The nerdcore crew is best represtented by its most prominent representative. The charming and bespectacled MC Frontalot. MC Frontalot emerged as the founding father of nerdcore rap in 2001 with his song, "Nerdcore Rising", where he invented the word "nerdcore" and set a whole community in motion to represent it's identity through song. Nerds have a had a long relationship with rap music. The classic example is the guy from office space.

But unlike the guy from office space who cowers down when a real black person might see him, the nerdcore crew stands tall to represent themselves with pride and quirk. They steal funk rhythms and blatently bite the rhymes of established balck rappers. But they make it their own, coming as whack as they like, they pander to no one. They know that they are not black, but they have embraced their pasty skin and their inability to get laid and turned it into their most valuable asset.
This is their identity.

With Eminem gone from the rap scene, presumably in hiatus, who can fill the lyrical void that streches across suburbs and cities? Will they turn to Philip Roth to sooth their souls with honeyed words? No, because their own culture refuses to take their interests seriously. They may be small in number now, but there are millions of white kids out there, black kids, mexican kids, who care and think and want to hear theri thoughts mirrored in the hearts and on the lips of others. The gut wrenching pain of every Final Fantasy game haunts them. The black hours of the night are filled with code and no one promises them meaning. No one except the nerdcore crew. Those dreamers of dreams.