MC LARS

So, I heard you just finished Stanford.
Yeah, I just graduated in August. I was an English Literature major. Eventually I want to get a PhD and fuse hip-hop with academics at a college level as a professor. So I thought (laughs) getting my degree was an important step.

On your new album you have a line in your Jay-Z parody ད Concepts' that complains about college girls.
Yeah, it's 'College is where girls go to get fat.' The thing is, at Stanford, the girls aren't so attractive. I think they were the types in high school who spent a lot of time in their rooms doing homework. I don't mean to be mean, but at Stanford I found if you want to hang out with girls you ' go to other schools. And don't you find honesty is the best answer in this situation?

Um, sure. Good luck playing Stanford. Do you usually play for college kids?
I've done a lot of colleges, get flown out for one show, that and the punk audience are the strongest for me. College kids get the jokes, though; they'll understand the existentialism references, while a random kid from Nebraska will get the 50 Cent reference.

You do a lot of music based around classic literature. 'Rapbeth' is a tribute to Edgar Allen Poe, while 'Ahab' retells the story of Moby Dick.

Yeah, that was from my school days. I took a whole class on Herman Melville. I really got into it, it's a great story.

How'd you get into hip-hop?
I was more of a punk guy in high school, but I realized hip-hop was a really minimalist artform ' it can just be me and my computer on stage, and it's just as entertaining.

You knock 'crunk' on your new CD and your other hip-hop musical references are pretty old-school. This is a pretty standard response by white rappers to modern hip-hop.
I think what happened is that after ྚ, the public decided that the degrading image of African-American people being gangster rappers was more appealing and marketable than the KRS-One, Public Enemy consciousness stuff. Hip-hop reinforced itself as an insipid genre, instead of something challenging and exciting. I think when rock guys and nerdy white guys try to appropriate hip-hop, we go back to that, it seems more like when hip-hop had vitality and potential. But I do like some new underground stuff, like Ras Kass and Canibus.

Do you freestyle?
I'm working on it more and more, I try to incorporate it into my set, but the thing is, if you can't do it well, you shouldn't (laughs).

Where did you get such a huge English fanbase?
Ironically, my home base, my 'scene' is Oxford, England. Sophomore year I went abroad, that's when I started stepping up and performing for people who weren't just my friends. It kinda just snowballed there. I think British people have a quirkier take on hip-hop, their sense of humor is more dry, and that helped me. It's funny, Stanford is very academic, you hang out, do homework and go to the football games, and then in Oxford, there's a wonderful music scene and cool people' it was the perfect time to be there.

Rap doesn't age well. Where do you see yourself in ten years?
I want to get more political. My whole thing is to have a family-friendly edge, that gets people into it, but then when they look at the lyrics, they see that there's a whole subversive philosophy and makes people question things' the best way to do that is come off as child-friendly and silly, but if you have an edge to it, that adds a lot.

As the song says, did you have a 'Roommate from Hell?'
Yeah, senior year. His name was Chris, just like the song. He was nice, but we had different personalities. But no, unlike the song, he wasn't literally Satan, and he didn't have an actual pitchfork or sacrifice babies.

Your first single, 'Download This Song,' pretty much encourages your fans to get your music for free. How you gonna make a living doing that?
I'm for downloading, but ideally ' there's this whole technological shift to having music as a physical product to it being a service. Now I think my fans can compensate me in other ways, like buying a T-shirt. Well, in a morally perfect world, that's how'd it work.