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 “Geekâ€? 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.â€?

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.

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