RE: Nerdcore
This post has been a long time coming, something that’s been kicking around in my head for months now, but I never really knew when or how to start it. I guess I still don’t, but with the various dramatic uproar amongst the nerdcore community it feels like maybe it’s time to finally try and contextualize the feelings that I’ve been holding onto for the latter half of 2016.
This is gonna be tough.
I’ve been listening to nerdcore hip hop for a decade now. I fondly remember discovering the first nerdcore song I’d ever heard via the NewGrounds BBS. I don’t remember the context of the thread, I just remember someone posting a link to a song which I clicked (Because why wouldn’t I? What else was I doing at the age of 15?). It was I Heart Fags by MC Frontalot. I was immediately intrigued by what I was hearing and fell into a rabbit hole of other various Frontalot songs. I downloaded whatever I could grab off of Limewire and burnt a CD that consisted of half nerdcore (MC Frontalot & MC Lars) and half Bomb The Music Industry! (The album “Goodbye Cool World”). I remember listening to it at school a lot, trying to talk to people about it and realizing my taste in music may not have been, well, “normal.”
I don’t remember much of my descent into the genre after that point, it must have just been finding tangentially related artists via illegal downloads until I had built up a small collection. I assume in 2007 it was probably something like Frontalot, Lars, Chris, YTCracker, STD, and Beefy. I know for a fact that Beefy was part of it. I remember listening to Tube Technology in high school and thinking it was the coolest fucking thing ever. I have no concept of how I found out Beefy was releasing a new album (I probably found out through MySpace), but I knew that I wanted Rolling Doubles and that I also had no money. At this point I had just gotten into torrenting so I attempted to Google me up some magic, and in 2008 while searching for “beefy rolling doubles torrent” I landed on a forum called RhymeTorrents. The first hit that came up was a thread by MC_Loki reviewing the new Beefy album. I was intrigued.
I had been a forum kid for years at that point. As I mentioned the only reason I even know about nerdcore was through my excessive time on the NewGrounds BBS, so I was no stranger to the forum format. I started to peruse RhymeTorrents. And slowly it clicked. This wasn’t just a couple artists putting out this music, there was an entire community behind it. And I could be a part of it if I just signed up on this forum.
All right, fuck it, I’m in.
In the fall of 2008 I spent a month in New York with one of my best friends who had moved away. One day I was bored in his apartment while he was at work, derping around on the internet, and decided I wanted to try my hand at making a nerdcore song. At this point I had already been rapping for a couple years (though I was still fucking terrible, because I wasn’t really “rapping” or trying too hard, but that’s another story), so I thought why can’t I do what these guys are doing? I can be a nerdcore artist too! I quickly cranked out a really shitty song that I titled “I Wish I Was A Nerdcore Rapper,” and posted it to RhymeTorrents. The rush was amazing as I waited for replies to come in. Oh boy, they came in. My song wasn’t the sensational break into the scene that I had hoped it might be, and everyone was going to let me know. The consensus was that the “song” sucked, but many people offered constructive criticism on how I could improve. Questions were asked as to how I had recorded it and why I had made certain choices, a conversation developed. I learned a few new things.
StarF, circa 2008
The nerdcore community welcomed me into it (I think? Maybe I was just too delusional at that age to take a hint and fuck off. It’s entirely possible) and I was glad to be there. Beyond starting to really take making music seriously, it gave me exposure to tons of new music that I came to adore. I have always loved nerdcore as a genre, and while a lot of people for some reason even in the community seem to be “too cool” for it, I’ve always been a huge fan of the music that comes out of this scene.
In late 2008 I was aware of something taking place called Nerdapalooza. It was an interesting event, but I shrugged it off and figured there was no way I could go. I had just gotten home to Minnesota after a month in New York. I was still incredibly new to the community and figured “oh well, it’s just some show I guess.” I remember being so young and naive about the scope of the music world and how things worked. I mean to be fair I also hadn’t done much research and I was new to the scene. So when I saw advertisements for the event I imagined it as some huge thing that had been running for years. I didn’t know anything about anything at that point in my life. I was fresh out of high school and didn’t have any plans for life besides “Eh, I guess I’ll figure it out as I go along.”
2009 was a weird year.
I tried attending a community college because through a very strange set of circumstances I was able to go for free. That in itself is an incredibly complicated and long story, so we’ll skip to the end where I stopped attending the free college because it ultimately wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t the college experience I wanted for a myriad of reasons. It’s funny now because in 2016 I’m finally attending college for something I know I want to study, and it absolutely is the environment I want to be in. The school I’m attending now is fantastic! I’m sure it would have absolutely put stars in my eyes had I attended fresh out of high school (Of course back then it would have been a total waste of money because I hadn’t yet learned how to be a real person). Right now I’m attending college because I want to learn a skill. Most people look fondly back on their college days as a time where they really branched out and honed their social skills. Luckily I still got to have that experience, even if I didn’t realize that nerdcore was going to provide it to me at the time.
In late 2009 I attended my first Nerdapalooza. This wouldn’t be my first exposure to live nerdcore music, I believe it was earlier in 2009 that my mom drove me to Iowa so we could see Schaffer The Darklord, Coolzey, Casethejoint, and Imperfekt. Oh yeah, I had also gotten my mom into nerdcore at this point in time. The show took place at Gabe’s and was incredible. I’ll never forget specifically Coolzey performing the song Artworld and literally screaming the lines directly into audience members faces. The intimate crowd and the intense performance made me think “Wow, shows can be like this?!” But Nerdapalooza was my first real exposure to the community. By this point a year had passed since I joined up on RhymeTorrents and I had become an avid member of the board. Meeting up with everyone for the first time in ‘09 was electric and terrifying. I was painfully awkward but relentlessly enthusiastic and happy to be there. Even though every following nerd event would be special in its own way there’s no comparing the magic that was ‘09 for me, and that first face-to-face experience with a community I had grown to know over the past year. I loved every moment of that weekend.
I also at that time in my life had a shitty digital camera and took pictures like a madman.
And I seriously have hundreds more photos from Nerdapalooza 2009. I think I have a selfie with every single person I met that year, and a shitload of performance pictures.
I could go on and tell stories all throughout the various Nerdapaloozas, and include a whole bunch of pictures from subsequent years, but I’ll spare you at this point and just go on with this: This was an incredibly special event to a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons. There was a lot of amazing things that came out of these events. There was a lot of unfortunate and less cool things that happened along the way.
Lately there’s been a lot of drama surrounding Nerdapalooza, and quite frankly I’m not going to get into that here. I don’t really have any business having an opinion about the inner workings of the event. I have only been privy to the fringes of what’s happened. Mistakes were made, and unfortunately it continues to be a huge mess to this day it would seem, with a lot of turmoil that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.
But like I said, I’ve wanted to make a post about this for quite some time now, because what I want to say has nothing to do with any of the recent drama.
Looking back on my years getting into the community and attending various events (From my first Nerdapalooza to last year’s Orlando Nerd Fest, and every small convention I’ve played in between), on the time I invested into talking to people and forging relationships on the internet, on all the nonsense drama that we struggled through that was always created and propagated within our own bubble... I miss what the scene used to be. And I keep wondering if the scene is dying, or if it’s just changing form and I’m leaving it behind?
2016 is the first year since 2008 that I haven’t made my way down to Florida for the annual gathering of the nerdcore community. In all honesty it was a relief on my wallet, and while I thought it would simply pass by, the fall season weighed heavy on my mind and heart. Not getting to see everyone this year was the ultimate bummer.
But what’s worse is that it feels like the online community has been slowly eroding into itself as well. After RhymeTorrents went away NerdcoreNow took its place, and then that eventually shut down as well. Now the nerdcore community lives on Facebook and while it makes sense in some form... I feel like Facebook is not the avenue for new people to be introduced into the scene.
It just feels like everything is shrinking. Beyond the fact that everything has been reduced to a Facebook group (or ten), it seems like what’s left is long-time members of the community and trolls (and some people who are both!).
The scene and the forums have always had its share of stupid inside jokes, lulzy trolling, and stupid drama. This I know. But when it’s concentrated into a Facebook group it seems to make it impenetrable for newcomers. It feels like a lot of the time we don’t want newcomers. I’m not entirely sure what’s happened.
I don’t know what the solution might be, I’m only offering observations at this point. All I know is that I miss the community I remember. The one that often gave constructive criticism of tracks. The one that posted track-by-track album reviews. The one that didn’t seem ashamed to be a part of itself, like its whole identity was some sort of joke.
I have so much to say on the subject but at this point my mind is kinda unraveling and I’ve been typing for about an hour. So I think I’m going to call it a night here. It’s important to note that I don’t see the good in the community still. There are still people trying, there are still valuable things going on. From what I’ve kept my eye on the VPC seems to be a really cool thing that still happens in the group.
I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t want this to go away. Nerdcore has somehow managed to have given me the most wonderful decade of my life, and I love all of you. Please keep the dream alive. <3
