I got stabbed with the poison sword/ Then I stabbed my girlfriend’s brother/ And then I stabbed my uncle and we’ve all killed each other/ To be or not to be? Well I guess that solves that one/ And I would have stayed in Wittenberg if I’d known that this would happen”
—MC Lars, “Hey There Ophelia”
WHO says an English degree is worthless in the real world? MC Lars has taken his straight to the streets.
The 27-year-old Lars, born Andrew Robert Nielsen, often pokes fun at his own white-bread upbringing in the Bay Area, on songs like “White Kids Aren’t Hyphy.” That 2007 single, also included on his newest album This Gigantic Robot Kills, got play on Live 105 for its send-up of the Yay Area’s hip-hop scene, in which he laments his own inability to keep it real, get it twisted and ghost-ride his Volvo.
But when it comes to his liberal-arts education, the self-proclaimed “post-postmodern” laptop rapper is hella proud. He flaunted his newly minted Stanford degree in 2006 by naming his album that year The Graduate. And though he did come into his own playing campus parties and freestyling in the Stanford Coffee House, he was mixing classic lit content and hip-hop form long before that, while growing up in Carmel Valley and attending Robert Louis Stevenson High in Pebble Beach.
“My first rap song that I recorded, I was 16, I took Macbeth, and made a song called ‘Rapbeth.’ The assignment was to make fun of Macbeth for class. So I did that song and recorded it, and I got an A on it,” says Lars. “I realized that hip-hop and literature are the same thing, quite literally. Hip-hop is literature. Hip-hop is poetry. That’s something that was harder to convince my teachers, but once I could prove it, it was this amazing thing.”
Since then, he’s only done a handful of those songs, generally one per record, tops. Certainly other songs he’s done are better-known around the world—”Download This Song,” his Iggy-Pop-sampling ode to MP3s, charted outside the U.S., and his song “iGeneration” led to Lars being credited for popularizing (or, according to John Mayer, coining) the term describing post–Cold War kids.
But songs like “Ahab,” his rap retelling of Moby Dick, and the new album’s Hamlet rocker “Hey There Ophelia” demonstrate why he’s the premier practitioner of lit rap. It’s not easy to condense a Shakespeare classic into 50 or so lines of rhyme; make it funny, cool and fittingly tragic; work in references to Amy Winehouse, R. Kelly and O.J.; and throw in an interpolation of Therapy’s song “Screamager,” so that Ophelia’s refrain is “Screw that, forget about that/ I don’t want to know about anything like that/ I’ve got nothing to do/ But hang around and get screwed up on you.” And Lars knows it.
“Those are always my favorite songs. Like, ‘Hey There Ophelia’ is probably my favorite song on This Gigantic Robot Kills,” he says. “I’m eventually going to do an album that’s all literature songs. I want to do The Metamorphosis, and Catcher in the Rye. Mark Twain. Make it an amazing record like that.”
It used to be punk rock for about four years/ I played lead guitar, we dissed Britney Spears/ Amphoteric the name, Central Cali band/ Local shows, t-shirts, EP’s, no plan/ Just chilling with the crew slamming power chords/ They wanted more guitars but I got bored/ I was born to rock heads and fill them too/ But did the world really need another Blink 182?
—MC Lars, “Straight Outta Stockholm”
WHEN he was 11, Lars heard Chuck D for the first time on the Anthrax CD, Attack of the Killer B’s.
It’s mystifying why Anthrax’s collaboration with Public Enemy on that version of “Bring the Noise” hasn’t gotten its proper due for turning thousands of metalhead kids on to hip-hop in 1991. It’s a great story: Chuck D heard about Anthrax’s Scott Ian wearing Public Enemy shirts at the band’s gigs, which led to a shoutout to Anthrax on the original P.E. version of “Bring the Noise.” Anthrax then rang him up about redoing the song together, and after a few awkward moments in which Chuck D wondered if they were really serious, the first thrash-rap hybrid was born.
Obviously, Carmel Valley didn’t have much of a music scene, but Lars carved out a regular place to gig performing among the girls with a guitar and old guys with a harmonica at the Friday night open-mic at a Pacific Grove spot called Juice N Java. He figures his MC Lars career was really born when he was 17, which is why he’ll be celebrating his 10th anniversary Feb. 21 with a show at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco.
“It was hard, ’cause I had to put on my own shows. I really got my start at Stanford, playing shows at the Stanford CoHo, and playing parties. Eventually I started playing gigs in the city.”
Not every NorCal locale proved to be ideal for his brand of hip-hop.
“I played this place called Jim Dandy’s in Castroville, this bar. I have this song about John Brown, the revolutionary, and how white racism is white people’s problem and black people’s burden—really heavy stuff,” he says. “I was like, ‘We need to learn not to be racist,’ and hicks were yelling ‘Why?'”
Still, he found his way. Even while he was doing his punk shows with his band Amphoteric, he was cross-promoting his hip-hop stuff, sometimes opening his own band’s shows. As for his breakthrough in 2003, once again, against all conventional wisdom, he has his English major to thank.
“I went to Oxford to study, for my Shakespeare requirement. That was where everything changed, ’cause I got signed. Nettwerk Management had Avril Lavigne, and Sarah MacLachlan, and Brand New was blowing up. Dido, Barenaked Ladies. Anything Canadian that was big in the early part of the last decade, they were doing that. They got behind me, and I got a publishing deal and distribution. For four or five years, they really had my back. That’s how I made The Graduate, because they helped me clear all the samples. That was kind of the shift, and then I met Bowling for Soup and everything else just happened from there.”
Bowling for Soup, the Texas pop-punk band best known for the hits “1985” and “Almost,” became big Lars fans and supporters. Through them, he met Brendan Brown, of the band Wheatus (of “Teenage Dirtbag” fame), a collaborator whose friendship led to several of the songs on the new record.
“I stayed with him for a month in 2007, and just wrote. Some of the best songs from that record came from his support of me. We became good friends. I’ve got a lot of love and respect for those guys, they’re like our big brothers.”
Once upon a time Grandmaster Flash/ Inspired these nerds with a culture clash/ Once Run-DMC mixed rock guitars/ With the kick, snare, kick, kick, snare/ Public Enemy took a political stand/ Now we pirate these records like damn the man/ NWA got attacked by the media/Now we check the facts up on Wikipedia/ Can’t get on the stage at the Jay-Z show/ So we boot up ProTools and bust a funky flow
—MC Lars, “True Player for Real”
LARS has been closely associated with the “nerdcore” movement, a sort of gimmicky concept of which I’ve never been a fan. I’ve got some personal nerdcore favorites, like Optimus Rhyme’s “Sick Day” and mc chris’ genius work on The Brak Show—really, is there anything better in all of Swimdom than the mostly rapped “Brak Street” episode? (“Dad, you don’t know about my rapping ability!” “What you got is futility! Futility!” “C’mon, dad, that’s a mean thing to say!” “Hey, you wanna be a rapper gotta play that way!”)
But generally, nerdcore rappers just seem to take themselves too damn seriously. Lars, on the other hand, never seemed to fit into that. Though he counts many nerdcore artists among his friends and collaborators, and gives the genre its props in his songs, he acknowledges his problems with it.
“Nerdcore shouldn’t be kids’ understanding of hip-hop. It’s cool as an anthropological extension of how hip-hop has evolved,” says Lars. “The whole political component of the African American experience in the Bronx in the ’70s, and the financial disparity under Reagan in the ’80s, is kind of what hip-hop trades on as its old-school genesis. I think nerdcore’s really racist, because it takes that underdog thing of an underclass judged by their race, and uses it as this big, ridiculous metaphor to be like ‘the nerds are being persecuted.’ That turns hip-hop into this weird minstrel show to me.”
“Hey Mr. Record Man, the joke’s on you/Running your label like it was 1992/ Hey Mr. Record Man, your system can’t compete/ It’s the new artist model, file transfer complete
—MC Lars, “Download This Song”
BY contrast, Lars’ rapper persona trades on a respect for the origins of the genre, and a certain wide-eyed innocence. Even at his most sarcastic—mocking record industry stupidity in “Download This Song” and “Signing Emo”; railing against Misfits candle tins, AC/DC hair clips and Sex Pistols boxer shorts in “Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock”; or giving Lil’ John an Eminem-style kiss-off in “Generic Crunk Rap”—his music is firmly in the spirit of getting everyone on the same page.
For instance, while the Who’s “My Generation” (and Patti Smith’s superior cover of the song) was meant as a defense, Lars’ “iGeneration” is a call to arms. “Want to be more than info super highway traffic/ Want to be more than a walking demographic,” he raps, and the subsequent, original-referencing line “Hope I die before I get sold” is essential to understanding Lars’ music. Instead of the typical hip-hop (and nerdcore) assertion that “I’m the best,” Lars’ attitude is “we could all be better,” and he is constantly pushing his listeners, his generation, to embrace that possibility for evolution.
He also has the ability to laugh at himself, much like Adam Goren, who became one of his idols when he discovered Goren’s sequencer-driven solo project, Atom and His Package. Lars wrote the song “Adam You’re Awesome” for his first record, and covered the classic Atom and His Package salute to metrics, “(Lord It’s Hard to Be Happy When You’re Not) Using the Metric System” on This Gigantic Robot Kills. Atom, it should be noted, once did a hilarious cover of the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” in which he imagines going trick or treating with Willie D, Bushwick Bill and Scarface.
“He’s a real inspiration,” Lars says of Goren. “He’s totally amazing, just a nice, real guy. Punk rock. His attitude, I took that, and that’s what allowed me to sustain myself. The attitude that you just make music because you love it, not trying to be in a scene, being self-sustaining. And the joy that he found in writing songs about his friends and his personal life. That’s what I’ve kind of been taking recently.”
The latest album also features two of his other childhood heroes—the late, great rock outsider Wesley Willis (who came up with the title This Gigantic Robot Kills, as a sound clip on the album proves) and Weird Al Yankovic, who plays accordion on one track. On “True Player For Real,” Lars tells his friends that they know they’ve made it because they’re playing with Weird Al. This is a concept that probably only males of a certain age can understand, but understand it we do.
“The Weird Al thing was an amazing moment, when I realized I was on his radar and that he respected what I was doing. I was in Australia on tour, ’cause ‘Download This Song’ was a hit in Australia, so I was doing MTV and all this crazy press there,” says Lars. “He hit me up on Myspace, and at first I didn’t know if it was legit. He’d seen some news thing I did on mtv.com where they interviewed me and I talked about how much I loved him. He was like, ‘Thanks for the nice words about me, I think what you’re doing is cool.'”
He also credits his Christian faith with his positive attitude, an interesting revelation from the guy who chose to give one of his anti-Bush songs the Atom-esque title “I Can’t Speak That Well, And I Am a Christian Fundamentalist Prick.”
“I could never do something cynical or negative, because I know in my heart that things aren’t that bad. It’s because I have that inspiration,” he says. “That’s why I don’t curse extraneously. I know families come to my shows. I kind of have this mission to make the world better, and inspire people to be their best. And with musicians, to work with and help my friends who are doing great stuff and really care about what they’re doing. And then everything works out. At least for 10 years.”
MC Lars performs his 10th anniversary show Feb. 21 at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, 1233 17th St., at 7pm. Tickets are $10/$112, call 415.621.4455
