MC Frontalot, Nerdcore Rapper

Ok, so not to take away from your claim to fame or anything, because we're big fans, but there's a lot of information out there claiming that you are the inventor of "nerdcore." We remember bands like Nerf Herder and Treephort calling themselves that back in the day at their shows (the day being about 2000? 1999?), so we'd like to get a date on this if possible. It does seem like you guys all kicked off around the same time, though. Why do you think culture cried out for nerdcore at the time? It is funny that nerdcore has become a word that anyone's keen to pin down the origin of. I am not sure Nerf Herder and Treephort were calling themselves nerdcore in 2000. At least there was no sign of it online early that year. When the term occurred to me, I dug through the search engines for it, and I found someone's personal blog titled Nerdcore and one other page that had a guy talking about a leisure activity he'd invented called "nerdcore hedgediving," which meant jumping into bushes when you walked down the street. So I think the first place there's any evidence of the term associated with music is my song "Nerdcore Hip-hop" which I recorded in April of 2000 and put online.

By then there were already plenty of acts (and probably there have always been plenty) that a term like nerdcore would readily describe. My favorites are They Might Be Giants, Ween, Del & Dan the Automator doing Deltron. Weezer and Nerf Herder are in the same mode. Devo even has that kind of thing, where they are goofy and too smart and anti-fashion, and are ridiculous but not making novelty music.

So I don't know that the culture eleven years ago was crying out for nerds to do more rapping, but music was definitely shifting from something that listeners found through push technologies like TV and radio into something disseminated through reliable networks (friends sharing secrets with you in your inbox, early sites that used smart agenting to guess your taste). iTunes, WinAmp, and Napster were just about to poison the album as a sales unit. Suddenly the prized object was a pop single in MP3 format, and the price point was zero if you knew where to go for your data. Hardly anything was even available legitimately. So there was a moment that was both cultural and technological, when the nerd folk were seeding an explosion of newly accessible songs, and sending them to each other, and writing about them on LiveJournal or wherever. It was a little renaissance for audio recordings. And I was lucky enough to be making material that appealed to exactly the type of person who actively participated in all that. I didn't have to craft what I was doing to fit that audience at all. They had the means to hear it, and they latched on.

You say downloading music for free is a big part of what helped nerdcore grow. How do you reconcile that culture with relying on people buying your music for a living, which you address in your song "Charity Case"? Do you still feel like downloading music for free should be part of the culture? That's what "Charity Case" is about: the fact that anyone trying to make a living off recordings these days basically has his hand out, begging for spare change. Most people can and do listen to music for free. I certainly do. If I'm excited about a band, I chip in. That's not a model that will keep an operation the size of Taylor Swift's afloat. But the generosity of my listeners has kept me in rent and groceries going on six years.

What made you want to express your musical opinions through hip hop over any other genre? Because let's face it, you don't look like your average rap star. I think a lot of other professional rappers are able to answer that question with "I didn't have to choose hip-hop -- hip-hop has always been a massive part of my life." Of course, those rappers probably don't get asked why they chose their genre. But people take one look at me and want to know if I lost a bet where the punishment was I had to try to have a rap career.

I became aware of hip-hop in the early eighties. I heard it in places where groups of Berkeley kids had control of record players. And eventually Run DMC was on Friday Night Videos, and then a bunch of rappers were on MTV. MTV was probably where I saw "Parents Just Don't Understand" fifty times, and then I went out and spent three weeks' worth of my 8th-grade allowance on He's The DJ, I'm The Rapper. There were millions of other American white kids who had that exact experience. Once I had full-time access to a rap CD, I got deeply fascinated. In high school I had nine or ten rap albums that I listened to over and over and over: the first three PE albums, Straight Outta Compton, Three Feet High and Rising, People's Instinctual Travels, I Wish My Brother George Was Here, Sex Packets, Seminar.

I edited the literary magazine at Berkeley High and wished I could eventually be a novelist. But also I wrote short stories and plays and shitloads of lousy poetry. The emergence of hip-hop was exciting for all kinds of reasons -- some of it had radical politics, some of it had so much cussing and misanthropy that it made punk rock appear timid, some of it was hilarious, some of it was intellectual. But what really hooked me was the wordplay and the constant barrage of what seemed like innovations in rhyme scheme. Verse was getting reinvented right in front of our eyes.

So I was really deeply attached to the pleasure I took in trying to write raps. I wrote them, and said them out loud, though shamefully and in private. Besides writing, I loved audio production, particularly hacking other pieces of music into collage. So I came at it from wanting to compose rhymes and from wanting to make beats. I did not come at it from thinking that I sounded any good on the mic. I've spent a bunch of years trying to get comfortable with that part of the endeavor.

Your songs tend to appeal specifically to nerds (duh), especially because you make references to nerd culture points that a lot of more "mainstream" people wouldn't get. However, that sounds like a tough balance. How do you know which references are too obscure even for the nerds, and which are too obvious and could possibly turn away your core fanship? Or do you even care? Knowing that there are plenty of people out there who can follow an entire song about data encryption definitely frees me up to write a song about data encryption without having to worry that I'm wasting my time, but once I start, I'm not writing with their parsing of it in mind. I mean, I try to rhyme in complete sentences and create a coherent idea that gets expressed completely in each song. But I never worry that some folks will miss a piece of jargon or a reference. If I know what something is or means, other people do too. Or they can look it up. My audience likes looking things up. I worry more that I'll accidentally use some kind of rhetorical flourish that nobody could ever make sense of.

What's the rap writing process like? Do you write your lyrics out beforehand, or do you and the band just improvise together until you find something that works? Baddd Spellah and I go back and forth to develop percussion sections, then we bring in Gm7 to develop keyboard parts, then we three work together to tweak that stuff into the shape of songs. I add lyrics as we go, so a lot of the words are written over one bare drum or drum machine loop or a basic groove, and some are written against song-length nearly-complete arrangements. Various real instruments and other vocalists get added in there. Maybe half the time I've got a chorus in mind before I start on verses. In every case I've got a rough idea of how the song is going to cover the subject, and I match that with a drum. The live band comes into the picture when we are picking through the finished recordings and deciding which ones will get three-piece arrangements for the live show.

After growing up on the West Coast, what made you want to move to New York? I had always wondered whether living here would be as exciting as visiting. Gm7 had already moved out here, and he and I wrote a pop/rock musical called Young Zombies In Love that got into the NY Fringe Festival in 2004. So I thought I'd come out for a little while to help produce that, and see whether it was easier outside of San Francisco to get off my ass and make a full album of non-sample-reliant stuff to actually sell. Bl4k Lotus and The Categorical Imperative had also moved here from the Bay Area, so we started to take the idea of doing Frontalot material onstage more seriously and did some gigs on the LES. Now I'm doing about 80 shows a year, with only a few of them around town. I like coming home to Brooklyn, though. I guess New York wears some people down eventually, but I continue to find it invigorating just to wake up here.

Where are your favorite places to hang out in the city? I like my neighborhood (Prospect Lefferts Gardens) and I spend a lot of time in the park with my little dog. I wind up in Prospect Heights pretty often to eat and drink, and the East Village and LES to see shows. I like Hell's Kitchen and Astoria. But I'm kind of a homebody.

What's your best "only in New York" moment? Getting into a street- corner cipher with a bunch of crack and heroin addicts in Alphabet City at four thirty in the morning. Such ciphers must occur in every major city, but I wonder if New York is the only place I could get randomly invited to participate in one.