October 26, 2009
Nerdcore
Even typing “nerdcore hip hop” makes me feel like I'm violating an unspoken but serious rule. Saturday night I was at an awesome party the central event of which was a screening of Nerdcore Rising, a documentary about a rapper named “MC Frontalot.” In it you get a “band who starts out playing small venues and wonders if they could ever make of living out of it, but, lo and behold (!), now they can play in huge packed venues for lots of fans” story, and reflections on the significance of the genre.
Before I watched it, I didn't know that nerdy guys like and are like uncloseted gay guys because they feel insecure about not “living up to” traditional notions of masculinity, and that nerdcore artists might be true heirs of hip hop because it was never about being cool back in the good ol' days.
Stylistically it was unremarkable, but a noteworthy exception gave me an utterly unexpected flashback to a scene from a childhood movie I haven't been able to place yet. It was from something Winnie the Pooh, and involved trippy rumination about heffalumps and woozles. This isn't a quality I look for in documentaries.
The movie was also funny. A song about internet porn had me in tears by “on her knees and hands.” I link to an mp3 of the song for your pleasure. My only real complaints about the documentary were that it ends up feeling slightly like a recruitment video, and it features too much Jello Biafra, which as it turns out, happens when one asks him speak into a camera.
by goat at 2:29 PM |
6 Comments:
Stylistically it was unremarkable, but a noteworthy exception gave me an utterly unexpected flashback to a scene from a childhood movie I haven't been able to place yet. It was from something Winnie the Pooh, and involved trippy rumination about heffalumps and woozles. This isn't a quality I look for in documentaries.
What an incredible detail to this post.
I'll keep an eye out for this film...and I'll hold off listening to that mp3 'til I'm away from the office. Might be NSFW I imagine.
Yes. I probably should have noted that. It's NSFW.
I remember the heffalumps and woozles and being scared by them as a kid.
This morning I listened to five minutes of Jello Biafra ridiculing Moral Majority-type organizations on an MP3 track I downloaded in high school.
What's wrong Jello Biafra (that is, aside from the fact that his speaking voice sounds way too much like his singing voice)?
Biafra seems like a bad mixture of a musical Nick Zedd and a potentially helpful political figure. Nothing against his aesthetic goals, even if his stuff isn't my favorite, and of course I easily prefer the cultural far left to the cultural far right.
Then again maybe I should think of him as a kind of a public show with a much longer run-time than any of Zedd and company's work. Hadn't thought about that before. Maybe he's not so bad after all, just kind of annoying.
I didn't even know who Nick Zedd was until just now but Jello Biafra is annoying if not entertaining at times.
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