I hate nerdcore.

Now, I'm going to be honest upfront before I go into what may become a diatribe--I haven't heard that much nerdcore. I've checked out a few of the major player's tracks, I've watched the trailer for that documentary, I've read the articles, and I've observed the culture (via blog posts and the like). I'm not an expert, so understand that what follows is not an attack on one person or a set of people or whatever. It's an attack on over-arcing themes.

Let me start by getting my biggest pet peeve out in the open: I hate that nerdcore is even considered a sub-genre of rap. The people who decided rap wasn't nerdy clearly hadn't listened to much rap. Besides the U-N-I track with a chorus about Nintendo controllers, the rap I listen to involves people who rhyme about their shoe obsessions, a group that names themselves after kung-fu B-movies, a guy who has multiple personalities based off comic book characters, Kool Keith, and, hell, even Lil' Wayne referencing The Gremlins. Sure, they may be gangster overall, but since when is that incompatible with a little geekery?

That pet peeve opens up perhaps my biggest disagreement with the nerdcore movement, which is that it's exclusive as hell. I know that a lot of things are, and a lot of things I am involved in are, but the revelry that nerdcore fans take in being fans of an exclusive moment is legendary. I know nerds get off on being better than everyone, and that shit pisses me off generally, but never more so than when it turns what I feel is an inclusive genre into something about making privileged people feel better about themselves.

I know people may not agree that rap is inclusive as, in particular, so-called mainstream rap tends to talk about the very specific experiences of people engaging in criminal behavior from very specific types of neighborhoods. I'm aware. But the difference lies entirely in the ways in which these situations are presented, the ways in which language is used.

Nerdcore songs, as far as I can tell, go like this: "Reference, reference, reference, reference/reference, reference." It's the musical equivalent of Meet the Spartans. Now, rap references a lot of shit too, and tends to get meta at times, but it doesn't referencethings so that you feel good about understanding said reference ("Holy shit, I program with ruby too! I AM amazing!" versus "Oh cool, I know who the ice creamers are"), it does so because it makes sense at the time. Additionally, as I have argued before, rap teaches you and draws you into its world. The first time you hear something about birds you may be totally confused, but after a track or two (or another listen) you'll have figured that shit out, no problem.

No one exemplifies this better than Disszee Rascal. Most rappers use regional slang, but Dizzee comes from the region of London's East End, making his slang have a whole mess of back-story most U.S. listeners know little about. Yet, look at his track "Jezebel":

"Constant boasting bragging to her friends/Juiced every boy in the ends"

It doesn't matter if you've never heard the word juiced used in that way before--if you don't figure out it's meaning the first time around, you'll have gotten it by the second. It invites you in, as opposed to songs about Star Wars, which invite you in...if you happen to already have a fair bit of knowledge about Star Wars.

The exclusion of nerdcore largely gets my goat because it's just so damn white. Now, I'm white. I come from a white state. I live in a white place. But, despite it's diversity, I'd be a fool not to recognize rap's black roots. And while I know that not every black person is from the hood, nor is hip-hop entirely made by people from the hood, the fact of the matter is that some rappers are and, being from that situation, they hardly had time to sit around and play lots of D&D and use IRC. And to call your genre of music after that specific type of rap (geeksta, anyone?) smacks of an inability to get just what white privilege is and why it's a bad thing. It's basically: "Sorry about all that, poor people of color, but is it cool if we semi-mock music you use to express yourself in order to talk about things that we exclude you from? Also, we will use this music to talk about how we are oppressed. Because, dude, we sooo are."

I don't want to end there, on a note that makes me sound like the white guiltiest Liberal Arts student ever, so have this less intelligent thought--I also hate nerdocre because a lot of it seems to be in the rap-paraody arena, wherein rhyming words=rap! It's like, have you bitches ever heard of flow!?