MC Frontalot takes on the internet in Bend

Published 12:00 am Thursday, August 29, 2019

MC Frontalot describes his seventh studio album, “Net Split or, the Fathomless Heartbreak of Online Itself,” as a “breakup record about the internet being terrible now.”

But the rapper born Damian Hess, who rose to prominence in the mid-2000s as a pioneer of the nerdcore genre, hasn’t completely unplugged. In today’s world, that would be hard to do, especially as a musician and, of course, a self-proclaimed nerd who has made his career writing songs about video games, comics and “Dungeons & Dragons.”

“As I point out onstage, it’s not the kind of breakup where you never see the other person again,” Frontalot said recently from his mother’s house in Berkeley, California. He was waiting to meet up with his bandmates before the kickoff to his West Coast tour — including his first-ever stop in Bend, at Volcanic Theatre Pub on Wednesday.

“It’s the kind where you tell all your friends it’s completely over forever,” he continued, “but then you still make out behind the dumpster.”

“Internet Sucks,” the album’s first track and single, sets the tone, with Frontalot bemoaning the online world’s angriest denizens. Other songs address toxic comment sections on websites and articles (“Never Read the Comments”) and the trials of online dating (“Dating Profile”).

While timely, these topics have been on Frontalot’s mind at least since 2014, when he released previous album “Question Bedtime.”

“I thought I was gonna whip it right out, and then I got caught up in various other things,” he said. “And then I probably ran into some writers’ block at some point in there. It’s such a long span. I could probably compile a lot of excuses to cover each little time period in there, but yeah, it took me forever.

“… Luckily for the concept of the album, if not luckily for humanity, the internet has grown more and more horrifying each year that the record was delayed,” he added.

Frontalot also had some personal experience to draw from during the long layoff between albums. His website, frontalot.com, was hacked in 2016 and his user database was compromised (he said the only potentially sensitive information that could have been published was the email addresses people signed up for his message board with).

“There’s a type of hacker who we pejoratively term a ‘script kiddie,’ who uses well-known attacks and previously published tools to get into places without having invented any new breaches or discovered any new vulnerabilities themselves,” Frontalot said. “So I will — with spite in my voice — say that script kiddies took my website down, but I actually don’t know who it was. But my CMS — the whole system I used to post and organize all the pictures and news posts and music and all that stuff — had been written by fans. Most of them were computer science students who were all just volunteering on it around 2006.”

That was around the time Frontalot started touring in earnest, after moving from his native San Francisco to New York City. Before the mid-2000s, he self-recorded his songs as a hobby, eventually compiling his 2005 debut album, “Nerdcore Rising.”

“In San Francisco … sitting around having an idea for stuff is just as valid in everyone’s eyes as doing it,” he said. “‘Oh, I should put all this MC Frontalot material into a real album and sell it to people.’ And everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, great idea,’ and then take another huge bong rip. But in New York, if you’re not actively causing all of your dreams to come true, then you feel like a huge slacker. I found it very inspiring to move to New York.”

Before coining “nerdcore” as a phrase and paving the way for artists such as mc chris, MC Lars and Schäffer the Darklord (who will open for Frontalot on the current tour), Frontalot studied writing and graphic design. He’s obsessed with horror movies, video games (he’s currently playing “Satisfactory,” a resource extraction and building game on Early Access on Steam), “Dungeons & Dragons” and comic books — fitting given his many collaborations with popular webcomics such as “Penny Arcade,” “Octopus Pie” and others.

“I was one of the zombies in the second issue of ‘Walking Dead,’” Frontalot said. “One of my proud moments in nerd life. The original illustrator and co-creator of ‘Walking Dead,’ Tony Moore, was someone I knew from doing the music and just knew him over internet. And he had done the album cover for my first album. He just threw me in the zombie book.”

Hip-hop — especially mainstream hip-hop, as Frontalot readily admits — is still concerned primarily with “being cool,” and that juxtaposition with nerd culture led him to try his hand at combining the two. Still, the genre did have its nerdy points even before nerdcore was a thing, according to Frontalot.

“That first De La Soul record is very much about being the weird kid or the odd kid out whose interests are not aligning with all the cool kids surrounding them,” Frontalot said. “I always think of that Busta Rhymes line from ‘Scenario’ by A Tribe Called Quest: ‘Rar, rar, like a dungeon dragon.’ I remember hearing that when I was 17 or 18, whenever that record came out. I was like, wait a minute, what? Did they just mention ‘Dungeons & Dragons?’ I was clearly not listening closely enough.”