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LISTEN UP: Nielsen's lyrics
are a kick.
Pam Piffard |
with his cheerful, unassuming
demeanor and tufts of blond hair peeking from beneath
his trademark Oakland A’s hat, Andrew Nielsen
seems an unlikely candidate for hip-hop innovator. Yet,
as his growing following can attest, the senior English
major has helped introduce a fresh genre to the music
mix: post-punk laptop rap.
Nielsen, whose stage name is MC Lars, creates songs
entirely on his laptop computer, fusing a punk beat
with a literate, almost nerdy sensibility. Subjects
range from Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe to SAT scores,
aliens and performing at the Coffee House. Consider
these lyrics from his tune “UK Vice Versa.”
“The Florida incident? Democracy at work/But we’ve
still got love for your boy Edmund Burke/ If it weren’t
for us, you’d be speaking German/But then we gave
you Hanson and Pee Wee Herman.”
“It started out just as fun,” Nielsen says
of his first attempts to write and produce songs. Then
he began performing on KZSU and at the CoHo, and a campus
following ensued. While studying at Oxford last year,
he attracted the attention of Truck Records, a local
label that distributed his first album, “Radio
Pet Fencing.” His stateside debut, “The
Laptop EP,” was released in January 2004 and spawned
a music video for the song “iGeneration”—a
riff on The Who’s “My Generation.”
Last summer, Nielsen snagged a mention in Rolling
Stone, and major labels have come sniffing around.
He is working on a third album.
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“The plan is to pursue this as long as I can,”
Nielsen says. “I expect to attend graduate school
and get a PhD in English literature. I could do some
cool stuff teaching—the meter of hip-hop in conjunction
with poetry.” |
