Kill Dash Nine

December 14, 2006 3:52 PM

Kill Dash Nineby Monzy, the next big thing in Nerdcore. Wired interviews some of the figures, including the better known MC Plus+ (previously). Monzy's latest clever, well-informed lyrics stand in stark contrast to Weird Al's latest proof that he wouldn't know a geek if he bit one's head off.^[1]
posted by dmd (30 comments total)

Wtf? How can anyone doing array bounds checking consider themselves hardcore?
posted by delmoi at 4:04 PM on December 14, 2006

Thank you, dmd. Those lyrics were great.
posted by psmith at 4:14 PM on December 14, 2006

man dog why you even gotta do a thing delmoi
posted by boo_radley at 4:22 PM on December 14, 2006

Once the terms became associated with obscene amounts of money, 'geek' and 'nerd' were effectively stolen from those of us to whom they apply. Now it's "cool" to be a "geek", where that basically means you spend a lot of time blogging about what actual technical people are doing as though you yourself were involved. Yes Boing Boing I'm looking at you.
Good to see there are people trying to represent properly.
posted by nightchrome at 4:30 PM on December 14, 2006

s/dash/minus/
posted by dorian at 4:32 PM on December 14, 2006

Scent of a Robot
posted by 31d1 at 4:46 PM on December 14, 2006

I'm not really feeling it. This is fun for CS majors, but I prefer a more inclusive vision of geekdom, and hence much prefer Jonathan Coulton, who focuses more on the emotional side of nerdiness.
posted by StrikeTheViol at 5:02 PM on December 14, 2006

You thought the 7-layer model referred to a burrito.

Nothing goes better on the Application layer than guacamole.
posted by euphorb at 5:07 PM on December 14, 2006

I have always wondered where MC Paul Barman fits in the world of semi-novelty hip hop like nerdcore, with lyrics like:

Had I made a mockery of a culture, like the Choco Taco? Was I to rap as France was to Morocco? Was I colon rap colon colon France colon Morocco?"

he seems like the humanities version of nerdcore. Of course, he is also capable of some of the most filthy lyrics around.
posted by blahblahblah at 5:08 PM on December 14, 2006

> s/dash/minus/

s/dash/minus/g

Xenix, Minix, SysV, SunOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, six flavors of Linux, I have never said "dash", never known anyone who said "dash."

Guy's lyrics are clever (and they scan well, many bonus points for that) but I still like Weird Al's too.

:wq
posted by jfuller at 5:15 PM on December 14, 2006

One can be a nerd or involved in the technical side of things without being a programmer or work in IT, nightchrome.

Don't dis Boing Boing, part of their genius is taking the technical and making it make sense for a more mass audience.
posted by MythMaker at 5:20 PM on December 14, 2006

Brilliant. Especially the last verse.
posted by damnthesehumanhands at 5:20 PM on December 14, 2006

pine >> thunderbird
posted by b1tr0t at 5:21 PM on December 14, 2006

pine >> thunderbird

Ohh, snap.
posted by damnthesehumanhands at 5:27 PM on December 14, 2006

Lazy coder poseur, I got maximum infamy
Coz you're still compiling while I'm coding in assembly
(Z80 y'all)
posted by Jimbob at 5:36 PM on December 14, 2006

oh, burn!

and, pine is just nasty. if you aren't going to enter the mutt era, at least use elm jeez.

all I can say in my defense is that I blame perl...
posted by dorian at 5:50 PM on December 14, 2006

pine is great, so long as you remember to replace the built-in editor with vi.
posted by b1tr0t at 6:10 PM on December 14, 2006

export PS1="\[\033[11m\[\033[0;34m\[\332\304\[\033[1;34m\[\304\[\033[0;34m\[(\[
\033[0;36m\[\u@\h\[\033[0;34 m\[)-(\[\033[1;34m\[\`date +\"%a %B %-d %l:%M%P\"`\[\033[0;34m\[)\[\033[1;34m\[\304\[\033 [0;34m\[\304\n\300[\[\033[0;36m\[\w\[033[0;34m\[]:\[\033[0;0m\[ \[\033[10m"

posted by betaray at 6:41 PM on December 14, 2006

I promise that looked better in preview
posted by betaray at 6:41 PM on December 14, 2006

never known anyone who said "dash."

Huh. I've never known anyone to say minus, myself. dash makes much more sense to me. It's shorter, and, well, minus implies some sort of mathematical meaning, which is not what's meant at all. It's an option, not a number.
posted by dmd at 6:42 PM on December 14, 2006

I'll last a mythical man month and you're a one minute man.
posted by octothorpe at 6:55 PM on December 14, 2006

For pleonasm's sake, and because I love saying "kill," I always use:

kill -kill 1337

Where 1337 is my shell, because 1: yes, I am that awesome and 2: why type

exit

when you could do something unnecessary and cool-looking when recalling a command.
posted by synaesthetichaze at 6:59 PM on December 14, 2006

"I'll drop punk-ass bitches like a modem drops packets"

Nice, nice
posted by Spacelegoman at 7:03 PM on December 14, 2006

Huh. I've never known anyone to say minus, myself.

Ditto. Always heard "dash", always said "dash".

Back on topic... Why the dig at Weird Al? He never claimed to be "nerdcore"... he does parody, and does it very well. Whereas MC Plus+, Frontalot, and others in the "nerdcore" movement are legitimately hip-hop - in form, if not in culture.

Monzy (at least on this track) seems unsure which he is. The lyrics are great, but the presentation definitely comes off as parody. He even talks about this issue on his blog: "There’s also the larger question of whether nerdcore is a parody of hip-hop or an homage... the type of nerdcore that I admire the most has lyrics that are funny in their own right, and not because they mock mainstream rap music." Which seems to me is exactly what "Kill Dash Nine" is doing.
posted by Roommate at 7:08 PM on December 14, 2006

Ahh, nerdcore. The alleged funny is based on an understanding of hip hop as a neolithic landscape hewed out of machismo and sheer anti-intellectualism. And so the incongruence of lily-white keyboard-thumping is supposed to be good for a foil and a laugh.

Except it's the same joke, every song. And there's plenty of smart rap out there.
posted by kid ichorous at 7:13 PM on December 14, 2006

kid ichorous, I'm sorry you don't understand the lyrics, and I'm sorry you seem to feel threatened, but that doesn't give you license to spread your bullshit theories on the style. You're the only one here constructing these dichotomies. Some of us just find it amusing and interesting. If you don't find it interesting, just move on.
posted by psmith at 7:39 PM on December 14, 2006

I don't need to hear the tunes. I've lived it.
posted by Samizdata at 1:47 AM on December 15, 2006

kid ichorous, I'm sorry you don't understand the lyrics, and I'm sorry you seem to feel threatened, but that doesn't give you license to spread your bullshit theories on the style.

Gah. I'm sorry you feel threatened by one lone voice saying that they don't like this. Admittedly, I know shit-ass about computers, so I'll just have to take it at face value that these lyrics are funny. But that doesn't mean that the music is very good, or that the guy can actually rap.

In a much smaller sense, the same thing is happening to the word "nerdcore" as is happening to the word "emo". Nerdcore used to be a name attached to good rappers who decided to rap about geeky stuff. Now anyone who knows about geekdom and can rhyme is called nerdcore.
posted by 23skidoo at 3:32 AM on December 15, 2006

Comin' straight outta Stanford, ain't nobody tougher,
Control-X, Control-C, I'll discard your fuckin' buffer.

Dude's using emacs?? Yo, he's frontin'. Monzy's out, now I'm down with MC++. Any real geeksta is on vim, yo.

I been carryin a nerdcore handle for years, yo. M.C. Stay in Skool, kickin out the positive raps to all the middle skool peeps.

(of course, most on metafilter would probably read it as McStayinskool, which reads like some kind of bizarre homage to a McDonald's PR campaign, but if I would have used spaces or punctuation in my handle I would have lost all of my geek cred. And that simply would not do.)
posted by mcstayinskool at 7:11 AM on December 15, 2006

reads like some kind of bizarre homage to a McDonald's PR campaign

Better than what I heard in my head when I read it - "McStainySkool"
posted by mmrtnt at 7:49 AM on December 15, 2006