Photo courtesy of The Breakbeat Axiom

A wise man once said, “The geek shall inherit the Earth.” While the world isn’t yet his a la Tony Montana, MC Frontalot has made a sub-genre of rap, nerdcore, all his own. Frontalot has taken the world of hip-hop and made it friendly for World of Warcraft users. The result is a fascinating juxtaposition of rap and geekdom. Platinum grills aren’t necessary in nerdcore. Pentium processors and pocket protectors, however, are encouraged.

Frontalot will drop rhymes like Han Solo dropped Greedo with Austin’s own Terp 2 It at The Highball on April 17th, with Brandon Patton opening the show. A free screening of “Nerdcore Rising”, the documentary that brought nerdcore to the forefront, will play at the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse before the show to whet your appetite. (Get tickets for the show here)

Frontalot recently released Zero Day, his fourth album, to the world and recently appeared in The People vs. George Lucas, the Alexandre O. Philippe documentary that rocked the 2010 SXSW Film Festival.

“Like MC Chris, I have a song in my catalog that is heavily Star Wars focused,” said Frontalot. “When people are looking at Star Wars related things I often get a phone call. The crew of ‘The People vs. George Lucas’ were aware of ‘Yellow Lasers’, one of my songs. They called me and said they were in Brooklyn and wondered if they could stop by. That movie turned out great, by the way. I got to drink and do karaoke with one of their producers at The Highball, actually. That was a lot of fun.”

The central character of the ‘Nerdcore Rising’ explained that the documentary began, as many great ideas do, over drinks.

“I met Negin [Farsad] at a bar in Manhattan and she was already buddies with my keyboard player.,” said Frontalot.  “I think she might have been a bit drunk but she said, ‘What a great idea nerdcore is. I’m going to make a movie about you guys,’ and we were all like, ‘Yeah, I bet you are.’ Then on the first day of the tour she was there with a film crew that had their equipment. I was really surprised.”

The power of nerd culture and ability to have technology at our fingertips has brought fear with it, something that Frontalot wanted to explore on his latest album, which Frontalot said is, “about paranoia and people being terrified by secret fascinations of hackers and the people who really know how to use all the equipment we use to live and breathe.”

Even with a successful documentary about the sub-genre and a national tour, Frontalot is uncertain where the ceiling of nerdcore will reach.

“It’s really hard to tell. Every year I thought that nerdcore had peaked and that people would start to lose interest, but every year the interest continues to double up, getting bigger and deeper,” said Frontalot.  “I keep my fingers crossed that my luck will continue but it’s hard to imagine that it will go forever but I hope it does. I hope in a couple of generations that other nerdcore kids will come, make it their own and do fascinating things that I never thought of.”

While the future of nerdcore isn’t immediately clear to him, Frontalot already has future songs on his mind.

“I’ve got this one song I wanted to put on the last album but didn’t have time to put it together. It’s a song about a guy who wants to join a capella groups at his university but can’t get into them. It would be put together with a bunch of a capella samples.”

You also shouldn’t be surprised if you see him in a comic store next to Spider-Man, as he explained, “One of the things I’ve had on my list of important things to do for the last few years is an MC Frontalot comic book, for which I would solicit pages or half-pages from all of my talented comic book friends. It would be shaped like a normal comic book with gloss and color. It would be a compilation of all sorts of stuff that would be related to me and my songs. I think it would be a fun thing for people at shows.”

The Highball offers a unique venue for Frontalot, which he said was “beautiful and one he can’t wait to play at.” A classy establishment is going to be a great fit for the nerd-linguist, who promises a show full of style and razor sharp flows.

“They can expect us to dress sharp onstage. We don’t do any of that slacker t-shirt wearing. We wear slacks, dress shoes and we wear ties. They can expect the music to be tight and funky, and the rhymes will come with extremely high voltage. I’d suggest that they bring a pocket dictionary or a dictionary application on their mobile devices in case the words we use are outside of their vocabularies.”

-Adam Sweeney-

Tags: Alamo Drafthouse, MC Chris, MC Frontalot, Nerdcore Rising, The Highball, Tim League