JedFonner.com

My friend Ben of the bentropy blog sent me a link to “post-punk laptop rap artist MC Lars’ page on purevolume.com (of course MC Lars is also on MySpace, YouTube, etc etc). After listening for a day, I’ve got to say I’m hooked.

“MC Lars is a member of what he dubs the iGeneration, a group born and raised in the time of the Ninja Turtles, cassette tapes and new wave music, who now live in the age of Desperate Housewives, Sidekicks and screamo bands. These are the kids who have grown up using the Internet as a part of their every day life. They can conveniently carry 5,000 songs in their pocket, but are faced with the glooming fact that the worlds oil supply and Social Security will both run out in their lifetime. MC Lars is the hero of this new generation, addressing their thoughts and every day struggles in his music.” (from his Purevolume page).

One of his tracks, “Download This Song”, is freely available to download (as the name implies). It’s a pretty catchy tune and speaks to the an issue that lots of us feel strongly about, namely that there’s a growing dissatisfaction with the current music distribution method. MC Lars isn’t just complaining about the issue - he’s making a successful career out of producing and distributing his own music. Checkout this analysis on copyright.corante.com and this one on the Future of Music blog.

Watch “Download This Song” below:

You can find a free download of this song on his Purevolume page, where you can also stream many of his other songs. Pretty quickly you’ll be a fan too. Strangely, on his MySpace page, this track runs $0.99. So start with the purevolume page.

His myspace page also has a bunch of videos and other crap (as most myspace pages do) which I haven’t had time to watch, but if you have more free time, go for it.

By the way, I think “screamo bands” is a hilarious phrase. Can’t wait to slip that into a work email somehow.

Some are calling this nerdcore, which I think is incorrect. Now this is real nerdcore.