Rap Marketing Comes to Nerdcore
`While gangsta rap is seen as celebrating the violence and aggression that claimed two of its brightest stars, “geeksta” rap is a hip-hop genre celebrating coding skills and school grades.
Also dubbed “nerdcore,” this branch of hip-hop is for geeks, by geeks. Geeksta rappers adopt the same combative verbal-assault stylings of their forerunners, but bust rhymes about elite script compiling and dope machine code. [..]
Henry Lin, a geeksta fan and graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, said: “The lyrics are full of inside jokes that only those knowledgeable in computer science would understand. Besides, some songs do a good job of capturing the everyday struggles of computer science majors.”
Frontalot, a New York designer who declined to give his real name, conceded he has “mediocre” mic skills, but said nerds can out-hip hip-hop’s true superstars.
“I think CS graduates have a better chance than most rappers at calculating and devising hitherto unheard rhyme pairings,” he said. “50 Cent has dance clubs and oral sex, we have awesome video cards.”‘
