Q&A with Damian Hess aka MC Frontalot

Damian Hess’ qualifications in nerdom make him the stuff of Internet legends: He designed gorey.ttf, a typeface based on the handwriting of artist and writer Edward Gorey. He has asthma and was a web designer before he launched his full-time music career. But his crowning achievement comes as the pioneer of nerdcore, a slightly less serious subgenre of hip-hop that is perhaps the antithesis to big personas and overproduced egos.

This week, Diversions editor Joseph Chapman talked to Hess about internet memes, Reddit vs. MetaFilter and growing up nerd.

DIVERSIONS: Could you quantify your emcee alias — exactly how much is ‘a lot?’

DAMIAN HESS: Well, you know, ‘a lot’ is one of those vague quantities. One generally knows it when one sees it. You say, “Oh, that person there is fronting only a little bit. But here we have MC Frontalot. That amount has drastically increased.”

DIVE: How’d you get started in nerdcore?

DH: I was making raps by myself in front of the computer, and I called it ‘nerdcore’ and the name caught on. So I guess I didn’t get started in nerdcore — nerdcore got started in me.

I’ve been making raps since I was in high school. In high school and college, I would make them with a 4-track tape. I came back to it a few years after college, like late 1999, because my desktop software had gotten so fancy that I was suddenly able to do multitrack recording and mixing.

I had been using electronic music tools and desktop recording tools in production class in college, but it was for treating regular, 2-track audio.

So, suddenly, I had this amazing, ultra-cheap, hi-fi studio environment that was contained to my desk. And that inspired me to start making raps again, although it didn’t inspire me to show them to anybody.

I did start putting them on the Internet, but anonymously. It wasn’t until the fanbase had built up quite a bit that I had pictures of myself on the Internet — it took a long time for me to tell the press what my real name was.

DIVE: How nerdy was your upbringing?

DH: I was in a big high school. I certainly had a lot of nerd friends there, but we were definitely all nerds. We weren’t allowed to sit where the cool kids sat at lunchtime. All the totally cliche highschool movie nerd bulls—-, all that stuff was weirdly true.

It wasn’t like I was alone — my buddy Jack and I started a Monty Python fan club at Berkley High School and we had like 100 people in the club. We would just sit around and watch Monty Python movies in the dark in one of the science rooms at lunch. It wasn’t a particularly social group.

DIVE: You’ve describe nerdcore as a ‘salient meme.’ What’s a meme, and how do you think the genre fits that definition?

DH: A meme is a unit of knowledge that is communicable. It’s something that can have its own weight and motion within the mental landscape of the human race. It’s similar to a trope — it’s something that repeats and reoccurs, but instead of reoccurring necessarily inside of literature, it could just be something that pops up in people’s heads. That’s my understanding of a meme.

But, all kinds of things — once everybody who was far away from each other started sharing information on the Internet all the time, you saw the term gain a lot of currency and a lot of people refer to things that ignite briefly and then disappear on the internet as a meme. Such as, “All your base are belong to us,” and what have you. I don’t know how old you are, but that’s some older Internet right there.

So yeah, after I came up with [nerdcore], I remember thinking, “why, that sounds like something that people could be fooled into thinking was an actual thing.” And lo and behold, that totally worked.

DIVE: What is the MC Frontalot gang sign?

DH: It’s not a gang sign of course, it’s just sort of a hand jive. I made it because people seem to love to make hand jives in photographs, and all of them are so dumb. It’s just American Sign Language for ‘n’, ‘n’ as in ‘nerd.’

DIVE: What’s the typical audience for an MC Frontalot show?

DH: Medieval architecture students, archaeologists. People who work with lasers. People who work for NASA. People who work in the intelligence community doing data analysis and code breaking, those kinds of folks.

DIVE: What are some of your most-visited websites?

DH: I spend a lot of time on MetaFilter. I like Gawker, I like Wonkette. I like I09, Boing Boing. Sometimes I look at Fark. I don’t look at reddit.

DIVE: What? No reddit? That must be your MetaFilter bias.

DH: I hear that when you dig down a bit into the subreddits, there’s some intelligent discourse, but anything you see if you try to approach the site from the top, it’s like YouTube comments.
It’s your standard-issue bunch of hollering, borderline illiterate angry children. A really unpleasant experience.