He Grainy Video on Youtube Shows a Rapper with Wild Hair, Goth-Like
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n h a u g a v i m o a N he grainy video on YouTube shows a rapper with wild grenades in real life and to kill a thousand enemy soldiers in a hair, goth-like mascara, and vintage clothes, marching Nintendo game, as well as hold a mic and sip from a Pabst from one end of the stage to the other. Colorfully tat- Blue Ribbon beer can at the same time. Ttooed arms sweep from side to side, and the rapper’s But on a typical Fort Worth afternoon, those hands are voice is that of a grade-school thug — high and scratchy but helping deliver yet another soy-milk vente latte to a Star- with a swagger more friendly than your average bully. bucks customer at a Westside coffeeshop. They belong to MC The tattooed arms and nimble hands are good at physical Router, the internationally recognized pioneer of a burgeon- things — stripping down a computer and rebuilding it, say. Or ing hip-hop sub-genre called “nerdcore.” aiming the rifles that Army snipers use. Or playing instru- The fact that she’s a white female rapper and a self-taught ments like the bass and cello. They’ve been trained to lob musician on several instruments would make Router a rare fwweekly.com AUGUST 15–21, 2007 FORT WORTH WEEKLY 11 Linda Forbes Linda MC Router has been called “the Janis Joplin of nerdcore” on the internet. She eschews sexually provocative clothes onstage, preferring comfort in nerdiness. bird under any circumstances. And also, how many other rappers have joined the Army with the dream of becoming a sniper? But to understand just how much Router stands out from most other recent Arlington Heights grads, download any of her numerous song files that are careening around the web, and listen carefully to the words. Her favorite subjects include computers, robots, sci-fi flicks, wi-fi technology, and “message-board ass- holes.” Within the rarefied but increasingly recognized musical style called nerdcore, Router, her fel- low rappers, and fans worldwide have built a genre in which hyper- smart, socially downtrodden, mostly Anglo, self-made musicians spin rhymes about their fave “geek” obsessions. The former Kristin Ritchie is known to her fans as the First Lady of Nerdcore. Malhotra Vishal Her raspy, witty lines have attracted attention from VH-1 and interna- Computer-savvy geeks have been rapping tional software companies She’s an angry, online about their preoccupations since at restless, potty-mouth artist who loves least the late ’90s, but this particular sub- Pabst Blue Ribbon so much that her other genre wasn’t christened until 2000, when nickname is “the Janis Joplin of nerdcore.” Brooklyn-based artist MC Frontalot And at 21, she’s still directing a lot of that coined the term in his song “Nerdcore anger at the straight-arrow, popular kids Hip-hop.” Last year, his first national tour who used to make her life hell. As she said, was captured in a soon-to-be-released unofficially speaking for the whole nerd- indie documentary called Nerdcore Rising. core movement: “We had to listen to you in There are other signs that nerdcore is high school and take your bullshit. Now moving a few rivulets closer to the main- stand there and listen to us.” stream. The helium-voiced nerdcore artist mc chris, recently profiled in The New York Times, worships the Star Wars No “star wars” kids allowed in my sector movies and rages against frat boys and I’ll light you up down to the last vector popular kids. He went to the top of the Makin’ you dig for dilithium crystals iTunes hip-hop charts earlier this year. He Space pistols, silent missiles ... — Router, also voices several characters on the Car- from her song “captain’s log 3.1337,” rap- toon Network’s late-night Adult Swim ani- ping on behalf of Star Trek fans and against mated serials, including Aqua Teen the dastardly Star Wars devotees. Hunger Force (he’s MC Pee-Pants) and Sealab 2021. fwweekly.com AUGUST 15-21, 2007 FORT WORTH WEEKLY 13 Those are modest inroads, granted, but crowd to share the mic with fans who know Sure, she owned MC Hammer and was, even if they didn’t know my name.” the youth culture of 2007 is already so her raps from MP3 downloads. She shuns Vanilla Ice t-shirts, but that was about as Her nickname was “Bob,” and her punk- thoroughly geek-ified — with gamers, the tight, booty- and boob-baring outfits of gangsta as little Kristin got. Growing up ish look set her apart: spiky hair, pierced instant messagers, MySpace surfers, and so many female performers. The elaborate in a west Fort Worth apartment with her lip, garish plaid pants, t-shirt emblazoned kids who can multi-task in sophisticated tattoos on her arms and upper chest make single mother, her early musical favorites with an obscure band name. School digital media — that nerdcore is just wait- her look more like an old-school punk were The Cure, INXS, and The B-52s. But peers, she said, would call her names in ing around the next bend for people to rocker than a rapper, and her vocal rhythms she was also an avid console gamer and the hall and laugh at her; once they even realize how mainstream it is. are slightly less staccato, a little more musi- took an early interest in the science of threw rocks at her. MC Router may be little known in Fort cal, than others. The DJ who works with robotics. She spent most of her adolescence in Worth, but in cities like Seattle and Port- her doesn’t scratch a turntable; instead, he “I was the kind of kid, my mother her bedroom, reading science textbooks land, she draws crowds of a couple of presses “enter” on his PC keyboard to acti- would have to tell me ‘Go outside, get and staring at TV and computer screens. hundred to the clubs. She finished her vate various beats and sounds and tries to some sunshine, you’re getting jittery,’” Her first musical foray was learning the first national tour this year and has just look busy while she performs. from playing hours of Super Nintendo cello at age 14 from a Korean girl in her completed her first full-length album. The differences between her shows and Commodore 64 games, she said. “I apartment complex who exchanged les- And she’s the subject of endless discus- and those of many other rappers are not was like, ‘Just let me beat this level and I sons for tutoring. Ritchie then taught sion on the nerdcore web forums. so surprising. Unlike many of her com- promise I’ll go.’ herself bass, guitar, and accordion. She At the clubs, Router’s onstage persona is padres, her childhood was much more “I didn’t have many friends in high has played in at least 15 different short- set for “stun.” She makes direct eye contact influenced by Euro-pop computer bleeps school,” she continued. But, “I was one of lived bands, ranging in style from punk to with the audience, even striding into the than hip-hop gangsta rhythms. those kids where everybody knew who I ska to swing jazz. Still, she wasn’t the only budding nerdcore artist in the school. She met her future producer and occasional beat- maker Tanner “T-Byte” Brown in a gym class. They made an immediate geek connection. They were both “the kids who got asked to fix other people’s computers,” Brown, now 20, remembered. “That’s how I stayed out of fights. I’m not very strong.” Ritchie’s interests were far from those of a stereotypical teenage girl — she loved console games, web chat forums, reggae- “We had to listen to you in high school and take your bullshit. Now stand there and listen to us.” influenced riffs and beats — and comput- ers. “I was into hardware,” she said. “I like to use my hands. I can take apart and reassemble a PC from scratch, but as far as programming, I have no clue.” She also worked weekends for a few years at the Christian-influenced youth club The Door, first as an in-house assistant to vis- iting bands and, later, helping to book touring bands for the club. Meanwhile, Brown taught himself to play the drums so that he and Ritchie could form a band, called cowspunge, with two other teens. “It was sort of a cross between They Might Be Giants and Ween, though not quite as vulgar as Ween,” Brown said. In this incarnation of her musical self, Ritchie was a singer. Her vocal style was scratchy, squeaky, very Peppermint Patty-ish, but quite charming and even melodic. Meanwhile, Brown’s musical interests were ranging farther afield — he became interested in home-studio digital tech- nology, including programs that allowed him to remix tracks and generate synthe- sized beats. He became enmeshed in the online culture of MP3 file-sharing and stumbled upon his first nerdcore rap artist, Colorado’s ytcracker, who’d uploaded a whole album’s worth of songs onto the internet. As per the nerdcore 14 FORT WORTH WEEKLY AUGUST 15-21, 2007 fwweekly.com ethos, the music was free for listeners to download. “Ytcracker is considered one of the pioneers of nerdcore,” Brown said. “I downloaded the songs, remixed them, added a few beats, and then sent them to him. He contacted me back and said he really liked the new mixes.