Either I’m getting old or the NYT is actually reporting on a trend BEFORE it’s over. Or both. Anyway, here’s a piece on an obscure but emerging (and perhaps slightly limiting) musical genre: NERDCORE.

A largely white subgenre of hip-hop that celebrates the solitary pleasures of science fiction, computers and bad teenage movies, nerdcore is emerging from the shadows of the Internet, where it spent the last half-decade as an in-joke. This do-it-yourself brand of rap, part self-expression and part self-satire, has inspired two documentary films, and its own festival, Nerdapalooza, in California. This month, MC Chris — otherwise known as Christopher Ward, 31, the son of a finance executive from the affluent Chicago suburb of Libertyville, Ill. — will attempt an unprecedented nerdcore crossover when he joins mosh-pit-friendly rock acts like New Found Glory and Sum 41 on the Warped Tour.

“I feel like the whole rap audience is me,” said Mr. Ward, perched on a tattered sofa in the greenroom at Emo’s before the show, wearing a Star Wars baseball cap. “White kids, playing video games, living in the suburbs. So what if one of them spoke their mind, what would happen then?”

WHEN he expresses himself on stage, in a breathy tenor that makes him sound like a 12-year-old waiting for his voice to change, Mr. Ward affects a tough-guy posture familiar to mainstream rap. As the lyrics to his song “Geek” go: “Stop pickin’ on me/Because I’m a geek/I’m strange to you/You’re strange to me/Well, one of these days/I’m gonna pack heat/Your brains on the wall/My face on TV.”

In conversation, Mr. Ward was quick to point out that the term “nerdcore” — coined by fellow rapper MC Frontalot in 2000 — may be too self-limiting, because “nerds” are hardly the only children of the ’80s who were raised on Transformers, Indiana Jones movies, and Public Enemy.

General, Music