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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 Giant 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 treal, 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. Since then, he’s only done a handful of those songs, generally one per record, tops. Certainly other songs he’s done are more 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 re-telling of Moby Dick, and the new album’s Hamlet rocker “Hey There Ophelia,” demonstrate why he’s the premier practitioner of lit rap. Lars celebrates his 10th anniversary with a show at Bottom of the Hill.—Steve Palopoli, sanjose.com
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