Disparate Elements: On Fronting

Last week I bore witness to yet another amazing spectacle of Nerdcore Hip-Hop as I attended a show with not one, not two, but three stellar MC's, including the godfather of Nerdcore himself, MC Frontalot. Along for the ride was MC Lars and YT Cracker.

If raw, house bringing down rap power was the fuel that could run our lives, let's just say that after this show, the world would never need for energy again. It was an amazing powerhouse of raw MC skills and mad nerdcore flow.

I was somewhat familar with MC Lars, and not at all familar with YT Cracker, and man, can these guys lay it down. YT Cracker, along with being an accomplished rapper, is also a l33t hacker, having hacked the NASA front page years ago to bring attention to glaring security holes in various federal web sites. He also may or may not have been a spammer, as indicated in his many songs with his first nerdcore rap group, spamtec. Spamtec is, indeed, the greatest.

MC Lars and YT Cracker recently collaborated on the Original Digital Gangster lp so they did the majority of their sets together. They both have a tremendous amount of energy and really get the crowd into things, lowering the microphones so that everyone can rap along with the choruses. Lars likes to rock the dual projectors for his songs to bring the multimedia aspect to the show which makes for some hilarious visuals to go along with the songs. Both MC's brought their A game and the crowd was eating it up.

Once Lars and YT Cracker were done and various sound issues were worked out, Front took the stage and rocked it as well as he always does. Front's latest album "Final Boss" is a real aural extravaganza, and I was disappointed that he didn't perform more off of it, but while Lars and YT Cracker rap to a mish-mash of a live band and a backing track via iPod, Front rocks only with the live band, making some of his newer stuff harder to do. He still represented nerdcore to the fullest and did many of my favorite tracks from "Secrets From the Future", his last joint. Unfortunately, the sound issues persisted during his set and his microphone was often drowned out by the keyboards, but luckily the guy behind me knew all of the songs, and rapped them all right in my ear. Oh yes, luck was certainly with me.

As great as it was to hear the MC's bring it with full force, the best part of the show, as with previous nerdcore shows, was being able to chat with the rappers beforehand, buy some gear and generally thank them for dropping inconceivably thick rhymes. All three guys were super nice and very cool to hang out with. If I hadn't been there for five hours already, I would have stuck around longer and shot the shit some more, but as it was, it was late, and I was exhausted as well as partially deaf. Between spending time with these guys at this show, spending time with Front at his last show and being able to chat a bit with Jonathan Coulton at his show, I can tell you that these guys are just super great to their fans. I hope that one day their fame matches their levels of fan awesomeness as right now, they are all super, mega, rope-a-dope awesome to their fans.

And now, crappy cell phone pictures!