Star Search: Mc Lars

Dork Rap
Words: Olivia Allen
Photo: Beatrice Neuman

Hollywood-based boy genius MC Lars gets to be the new spokesman for nerd core rap music. This is because he is intelligent, talented, and attractive—the three traits by which all hip-hop is judged in the whole wide world. Nerd core is a subgenre of rap distinguished by its’ geek-centric subject matter and heavy hitters that include MC Frontalot, Optimus Rhyme, and MC Chris.

Oakland-raised Andrew Nielsen chose his alias, Lars Horace, “Lars” from the foreign camp counselor in the Ben Stiller opus Heavyweights (Lars) and from the lovable yet hapless telegrapher in “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” (Horace). “I said to my friends, ‘call me Lars’. It stuck, and now I’m 25 and that’s how most people know me.” MC Lars became his moniker and Horace became his record label, which he started in 2006. With an English degree from Stanford and plans to matriculate at Oxford for graduate school, there is an obvious literary influence on his music, and not just in the lyrics but in the structure: “I approach it like each verse is like a paragraph or a section of an essay and the thesis is the chorus.”

This smarty with a knack for party and “post-punk laptop rap”, also has some subversive ideas of how the music industry should function. His hit, “Download This Song” illustrates his frustration that, “record companies took forever to accept the Internet was going to change everything. Labels need to be creative with distribution and see music as a service, while the product is the brand of the artist and merchandise.” As such, MC Lars’ singles are available for free on his MySpace page and he releases his own records to avoid the major label trap. Lars is working furiously on his sixth record This Gigantic Robot Kills, due to drop this October and featuring collaborations with Weird Al (!) and his buddy Brenden Brown from Long Island band Wheatus (hello “Teenage Dirtbag”!). Plans include a ska song, amd subject matter from Hipster Girls to of course Hamlet. This pretty much guarantees that some of us bookish cat lovers may pine to be ahem… Lars’ real girl. Mclars.com