By snoadmin
Amalgam. Inane. Manifestation. These aren’t words that I normally come across when interviewing the average band member or entertainer on today’s entertainment scene, but Andrew Nielsen is not average.
This 24-year-old Bay Area native studied 19th century American literature at Stanford and then studied Shakespeare at Corpus Christi College at Oxford University in England.
Now he tours the United States and England under the moniker MC Lars and brings his “post-punk laptop rap” show to packed clubs coast to coast.
With his 2006 release “The Graduate,” the MC takes on some touchy subjects like Hot Topic, the RIAA and the punk/emo scene, all while either using carefully chosen samples by artists like Iggy Pop and Piebald or collaborating with pop-punk bands like Bowling For Soup and The Matches.
And with songs inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” Lars is redefining the “nerdcore” rap genre.
Q: So you’re the self-proclaimed innovator of “post-punk laptop rap.” How did that start?
A: I was in punk bands in middle school and high school playing guitar. That was a lot of fun, but I was always doing solo music on the side. I went to college, and I started doing a hip-hop radio show because I found that you could say more in less time with hip-hop, and you don’t really have to be able to sing. You just have to have a sense of rhythm. So I took my punk background and just started making more independent music on my computer. It became more hip-hop, and now I tour and do it full time.
Q: You’re a pretty smart guy. You studied at Stanford, then at Oxford. How important is education to being a musician?
A: I think if you’re writing lyrics, then you need to be educated. I see songwriting as writing an essay. Your thesis is the chorus and each verse is a defending paragraph. And so, if you want to be persuasive, you have to learn how to write and persuade people to express either your emotional perspective or your intellectual perspective on something. It’s different if you’re doing beats, though. The beat part of it is more about the feel, and for me the lyrics are more about the mind.
Q: A lot of your songs are really funny and satirical. How do you differentiate between what’s fun and what’s making a statement?
A: That’s a good question, and I always wrestle with that. For me, creatively, I use comedy as a way to grab people’s attention. And then I think that if you use comedy as a hook, and you can have a real message underneath, like a message about individualism or thinking for yourself or questioning things, I think that humor is a great way to bring up those questions. And I think a good song does both. A good song is funny, but has something to say.
Q: You talk about a lot of random stuff on “The Graduate.” We’ve got literature, the punk/emo scene, crunk rap. What are the muses of MC Lars? Just whatever comes to your mind?
A: I think so. I think you can’t limit yourself. The goal for me is to take something specific and make it universal, like the literature songs are taking something like “Moby Dick” or “The Raven” or my old “Macbeth” song and making something like that cool again. Making it so like kids are like “Wow, this is a really cool, dark, weird story and it applies today.” Anything that excites me intellectually, I am all about turning into a song. Because I think if I can get excited about it, I can make somebody else excited about it.
Q: Does putting out your music on your own label allow you to get away with more?
A: Yes, I think that major labels are about bottom line, marketing and demographics. And they’re like, “Is this going to appeal to these people and why? Or why not?” And me, doing my own A&R and feeling it out, and release the songs that I want to release. I can finish a song one day, and it can be on iTunes the next. It’s awesome. Artists have this freedom that didn’t exist 10 years ago.
Q: So when you’re on tour with Bowling For Soup or The Matches or at The Bamboozle where there are all sorts of scene kids and emo bands and you start playing “Signing Emo,” how do you deal with haters?”
A: I think it’s good to wake people up to the trends they’re involved in. I really don’t care if people are offended by me telling the truth. That’s good. It’s so ridiculous. People are so into following trends and finding their identity in something that is big and safe. I’ve always been against that. That’s always been a core message of what I do.
Q: You have a song called ‘Hot Topic is not Punk Rock’ where you list a bunch of random crap that Hot Topic sells and make fun of the store. But doesn’t Hot Topic sell your T-shirts?
A: It’s controversial. The song is kind of a joke. You’re not supposed to find your identity in the mall. But at the same time, if Hot Topic is going to give me six grand to license a thousand of my shirts and that’s going to let me go on tour to England for two weeks, that’s in a way DIY. If you can use corporations to your advantage creatively and don’t have to compromise, then why not? If you’re a professional artist, you always have to balance business and art, and that was a decision that I made and that I got a lot of shit for, but I’m not ashamed of that decision.
“The Graduate” is available at most record stores, and Hot Topics, nationwide.
