He Grainy Video on Youtube Shows a Rapper with Wild Hair, Goth-Like

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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 beatmaker 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 computers. “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 technology, 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. So we started collaborating a little.” In much the same way that Ritchie had pulled Brown into the Fort Worth live music scene, he ensnared her in the world of online nerdcore hip-hop. At the time, she professed to hate most rap, although she later developed a fiery appreciation for mainstream artists such as Missy Elliott, as well as nerdcore line- droppers like ytcracker, Beefy, and mc chris. She decided to give rap a whirl.

In person, Router is only slightly toned down from her onstage persona, gesturing extravagantly to emphasize what she’s saying, the tattoos and punk clothes adding more drama. She laughs a lot, although an undercurrent of fragility runs through her words. Above all, she obviously yearns to make you understand what she’s saying — and obviously thinks that most people don’t. She detests women who use sex to sell their music, in any genre. In her male- dominated musical world, her aversion to doing that costs her points from some

“It was like opening a treasure chest and all the dust flies off.”

would-be fans. And it was her anger over sexist comments — though she probably wouldn’t describe it that way — that helped get her started as a rapper. When someone posted a lascivious message on her MySpace page in 2002 that pissed her off, Ritchie recorded a reply to it. It was her first rap song. “I did it freestyle, and it went on for more than four minutes,” she said, sound- ing excited all over again at the memory. “I didn’t think I was going to stop. It was like opening a treasure chest and all the dust flies off.” From there, she wrote raps about Pogs — the game played with bottle cap-like discs that reached a zenith of popularity in the mid-90s — as well as the TV game show The Price is Right, with Brown pro- viding digital rhythms. She posted the raps online. Like almost every other rapper in the genre, Ritchie/Router discov- ered she was nerdcore before she was 100 percent sure what nerdcore was. “I had heard Tanner talk about it, but I wasn’t really listening to it at the time,” she said. “But ytcracker heard [the early tunes] and told me, ‘You’re nerdcore.’ ” Bryce Case, a.k.a. ytcracker, lives in Colorado Springs. An erstwhile spammer

fwweekly.com AUGUST 15-21, 2007 FORT WORTH WEEKLY 15 for the porn industry, the 24-year-old has “They told me that I couldn’t tell the dif- been rapping since 1998 about “my love- ference between video games and reality,” hate relationship with computers. she said. “During boot camp, we’d do con- They’re wonderful inventions, but it’s voy ops and have to kick in doors. The scary how dependent we are on them.” As whole time in my head, it was like playing ytcracker, he tours clubs, comic conven- video games.” tions, and computer shows nationally. The last straw might have come dur- He and Router have recorded two ing grenade training, when she asked if songs together, including a rap duet she would get to handle plasma grenades. called “Nerd Love,” which turns digital What the hell, her trainers wanted to slang into sexual double entendres and know, were plasma grenades? The discusses romance from the geek-male weapons from the video game Halo II, and geek-female points of view. she replied. “She’s authentic and original even for She wasn’t delusional, she insisted. “I a nerdcore artist,” he said of Router. “A just really thought that plasma grenades lot of people identify with her. Her songs were based on a real kind of grenade.” aren’t gimmicks. She raps about the real Router was issued an ELS (entry-level things that geeks think and talk about.” separation), or “uncharacterized dis- Over the next couple of years, Router’s charge,” the kind granted to individuals personal life took a series of turns as she who’re deemed unfit before they finish honed her hip-hop skills. She dropped their first six months of enlistment. Talk- out of high school, which she said she ing about what happened, she sounds always hated, earned a GED, took a few matter-of-fact. She was actually relieved courses at Tarrant County College, and about her early dismissal, though disap- finally made her most dramatic decision: pointed in herself for not making it to Iraq. In 2005, she enlisted in the U.S. Army. So she was shipped back to Fort She felt like her life was aimless and Worth and never got to see action in the unfocused, and she was full of unused sandbox. But she’d begun her elaborate energy. She turned to an old geek obses- collection of body tattoos while in the sion to justify her decision. service — always a plus for an edgy musi- “I wanted to see what the sandbox was cian. And Brown and ytcracker were like,” she said, using military slang for the waiting to help her assume the tiara as current Iraq War. “I wanted to be a First Lady of Nerdcore. sniper. I think it was the video games — I’d been playing since I was eight.” Somehow, computer-game skills didn’t Chicago filmmaker Dan Lamoureux has translate all that well to real soldiering. just wrapped his first feature-length doc- Her military career was short-lived. Sent umentary, Nerdcore 4 Life, a comprehen- to boot camp in Fort Jackson, S.C., she sive North American survey of the nerd- continued to write raps, but her behavior core scenes of San Francisco, Las Vegas, Naomi Vaughan Naomi increasingly unnerved her superiors. Tanner “T-Byte” Brown is Router’s producer, beatmaker, and pal from high school days. Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Vancouver,

fwweekly.com AUGUST 15–21, 2007 FORT WORTH WEEKLY 17 and Toronto, as well as cities in Louisiana, Florida, and Texas. His crew visited Fort Worth to film interviews and concert footage with Router, one of the movie’s key nerdcore players. He’s hop- ing to submit it for next year’s Sundance Film Festival. “She brings a gravitas to the whole genre,” he said of Router. “Besides being the first female artist, she’s completely committed to it, very businesslike about what she does. And she knows what she’s talking about — she’s very bright, very tech-savvy. But a lot of computer guys want to cry foul. She takes some heat because she’s a woman.” Lamoureux confirmed what Router and Brown also know: There are a lot of haters on the internet, eager to dismantle Router’s hard-drinking, tough-bitch pub- lic persona because, well, girls aren’t sup- posed to be able to build computers and Ryan Tidrick - rayntidrick.com - Tidrick Ryan Seattle-based rapper Beefy accompanied Router on her first national tour.

talk like that. The nerdcore chat forum Rhyme Torrents regularly posts angry challenges to her credibility. YouTube offered one homemade video in which a stranger viciously insults her weight and questions her computer knowledge. The film clip includes a picture altered to transform Router’s mike into a dildo, and Brown’s onstage PC has gay porn playing on its screen. Ah, the creative skills of America’s next generation ... “I don’t want to sound like a fucking feminist,” Router said, “but it’s hard enough being a girl and white and a nerdcore artist. Some people think nerdcore is a gimmick anyway. And some guys get mad at you if you’re not out there shaking your ass, trying to be sexy.” She pretty much sees herself as just one of the nerdcore guys (though she admits she “got to make out with the sound guy” at one club on her last tour). “It’s so easy to be obnoxious on the internet,” Lamoureux said. “You can call

18 FORT WORTH WEEKLY AUGUST 15–21, 2007 fwweekly.com somebody gross and fat and stupid and send it out to the universe without any consequences. But [within nerdcore] there’s a paranoia about who’s legitimate and who’s not, because so many people record and upload one or two novelty raps and call themselves nerdcore artists.” He cited a recent calendar called The Girls of Nerdcore that had absolutely noth- ing to do with the music, but featured naked women curled around computers. Somebody just wanted to cash in on the phrase “nerdcore.” And, he said, there are occasional female nerdcore artists whose photos are so glossy, their appearances so mainstream glamorous, and who are so often followed by rumors that they don’t actually perform their own raps, that people have become wary of so-called band- wagoners. He declines to name names. But nobody in the nerdcore scene could point to any other female rapper as prolific as Router, and certainly none so good at dropping lines about robots, Nin- tendo games, computers, and Bill Gates. Lamoureux was so impressed with Router that he did a second collaboration with her early this year. The software company Axo Soft conducted something called the “Geek-to-Geek Marketing Challenge,” an ad contest aimed at web- literate folks that called for the best ama- ytcracker of Courtesy teur video singing the praises of Axo Soft Colorado-based nerdcore pioneer ytcracker has signed Router to his Nerdy South label. products. Lamoureux and Router made a video called “Bugging Out” (whose rap their front page. We won the $5,000 prize. a Seattle-area nerdcore performer. They Show at a punk club, where they rapped was written by Router), that featured the I’m not sure a lot of people even realized started in Portland and went through about message boards and Dungeons and artist being rescued from computer bugs it was a commercial.” Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles (per- Dragons (one of Beefy’s fave subjects) (in the form of a tall man in a fly costume) forming at the famed Whisky a Go Go), while naked people had elaborate designs by an Axo Soft specialist. Boise, and San Antonio. They played ven- painted onto their bodies. “It was a slam dunk,” he said. Router finished her first national tour ear- ues ranging from comic book and gaming More recently, the music video chan- “YouTube made it a featured video on lier this year along with her friend Beefy, conventions to a so-called Graffiti Flesh nel VH-1 requested that she send a video

20 FORT WORTH WEEKLY AUGUST 15–21, 2007 fwweekly.com audition for their upcoming Female Rap- makes major labels nervous. They don’t pers competition, based on the recom- trust the audience because they think, mendation of ytcracker. And she just ‘They’re getting it for free, anyway.’ ” completed her first full-length album, Router hopes Lamoureux’s documen- produced by her high school pal Brown tary will get major exposure and that she’ll and released on cracker’s Colorado-based be taken along for the ride. She plans on label Nerdy South. An official CD release putting together another small national show is scheduled in Seattle in late tour soon. But for now, she’s mostly just August. The album will be available waiting. “I live with my mother, I work, I online for free but will also be sold in disc make music, and at night I hang out in bars form. Why, you’re probably wondering, and drink,” she said. “I’m kind of a drunk.” would people pay for something they can She’s been taking yodeling lessons, of download in seconds at no cost? all things, to smooth out the breaks in her Naomi Vaughan Naomi Places like the Gaming Center are hotbeds of MC Router fandom.

“A lot of nerdcore fans download our voice. Her bosses at Starbucks have been music and buy the discs,” said ytcracker. very understanding about her periodic “They want to support us.” In any case, forays to other cities for shows. But, as is he believes, the U.S. corporate model of typical for the prophet in her own village, distributing and promoting recorded what she really craves is a fan base in Fort music will eventually be forced to move Worth, which she admits doesn’t have a in the direction that nerdcore already solid nerdcore scene. has. CD sales, he pointed out, have plum- “I fucking love Fort Worth, I fucking meted in recent years because people are love Texas,” she exulted in her raspy burning and downloading so much for voice. “I want people to know me here. free. He thinks the future of music profit- I’m gonna burn a whole tray of CDs and making lies in concert ticket and mer- start going to where my target audience is chandise sales. — game shops, comic book stores, com- “You can’t download a cap, a t-shirt, or puter stores. I’m gonna draw signs and a live-show experience,” he said. He stick them at random places all over town points to Prince, a decidedly non-nerd- — on telephone poles, at intersections — core superstar, who recently stunned cor- that say ‘Nerd? Geek? Video Gamer? porate music suits by handing out his Interested? Here’s my web site.’ ” new album for free — at a show where She paused. “Is that illegal?” fans had purchased tickets. “He sold out every show in the U.K.,” ytcracker said. MC Router performs Tuesday, Aug. 21, at Still, no nerdcore artist has yet been Club Dada in Dallas. The show starts at 9pm. signed to a major label. Lamoureux said he believes it could eventually happen — he thinks Router is one of several worthy You can reach Jimmy Fowler at candidates — but right now, “Nerdcore [email protected].

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