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MC Frontalot
 It seems that throughout the latter 20th century all disenfranchised youth have fought the power with music. They changed not only the musical landscape but the social and cultural ones too. In the '30s we had the Afro-Americans with jazz and the blues, in the '50s it was time for the white kids and their rock and roll. In the '60s it was the protest music of the hippies, whilst the '70s had hip-hop for the Afro-Americans and heavy metal for the English. On the other hand, the '80s punk and '90s grunge and dance seems to have included everyone.
But there's a group missing from this cacophony of social rebels. There's one group that has been excluded, although they've had the greatest impact on music - particularly modern music - that the world has ever seen. They are, of course, the nerds!
You may dismiss my claim, but without nerds there would be no amplifiers. There would be no samplers or computers. There would be no Internet. These tools are essential to making modern music and it's all because of geeky kids with glasses, pocket protectors and slide rules. These days the nerds too have a form of expression and it's only on the rise - it's called 'nerdcore' and one of its principle players is Damian Hess, a.k.a. MC Frontalot.
Hess claims he coined the term at the turn of the 21st century, "At first it felt silly," he says of the term, "and now I feel lucky to have coined it. It turned out to be the type of phrase that a group of people could latch onto and take part in, somehow."
Its popularity can be seen through the simultaneous growth of the Internet. By participating in Song Fight! (a website that posts a random title then allows artists to compete for fame through their use of the given title), Hess quickly gained fame despite the fact he only posted seven songs. His popularity blitzed all other contenders and his song, Yellow Lasers, garnered him more notoriety than he could have imagined. "The first night I heard about Song Fight! was the night Yellow Lasers was due the next morning, so I stayed up late and I made that song. Somebody emailed it to Penny Arcade [one of the webs' most popular webcomics with over a million hits per day] and they started talking about it in their news post, then they decided I was their official rapper. I emailed them and said I'd write their theme song for them."
Not only did MC Frontalot write the Penny Arcade theme song, he was invited to play at the Penny Arcade Expo - a massive gathering of nerds now attracting over 70,000 people per year. That's as big as our Big Day Out! He's toured the USA and has now had a film made about the experience called 'Nerdcore Rising'.
"The film makers [Negin Farsad and Kimmy Gatewood] are these two lovely women from New York. They're both stand-up comedians and they heard about nerdcore hip-hop and thought that it would make a good topic. To me it sounded very silly, but they were very serious about it and have been getting a lot of attention." The film features the likes of Weird Al Yankovic, MC Lars, Jello Biafra and 'The Daily Show' crew and will be released later in the year.
As to the longevity of nerdcore, Hess believes "The logical thing for nerdcore would be for it to peak and suddenly disappear and just be a cute little fad that had a couple of articles written about it, but who knows? I keep thinking that every year and keep getting surprised by it continuing to have legs. Certainly, there's endless staying power for being a nerd; it is part of the human condition," he laughs, "but in terms of prominence and being on view in public, it doesn't seem logical. People would certainly think it was funny to make nerds cool for a little while and then go back shunning us as they have always done.
"Maybe the world did change a tiny little bit after the dotcom boom and maybe now technology doesn't seem quite as that thing for kids with glasses," he continues. "But if I have to put bets on it I have to keep betting that it's all going to crash down around us - it's the only logical conclusion," Hess chuckles again.
'Secrets From The Future' is out on Fri 6 April independently
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