Gettin' giga with it?

Against my better judgment, I decided to stay up late Saturday night and hit the 11:15 p.m. world premiere screening of the documentary "Nerdcore For Life" at the Bartell. Boy, was I glad I did. What a fun doc, and what a totally fun screening that was well worth the lack of sleep.

Dan Lamoureux's immensely entertaining film looks at the exploding subgenre of "nerdcore" rap -- basically, nerds putting together hip-hop songs about their favorite "Star Wars" characters, "World of Warcraft" exploits, computer programming slang, and the like. Rappers with names like MC Hawking, The Sucklord (who dresses like a Sith Lord and wears bling that looks like Boba Fett's spaceship) and Optimus Rhyme (my favorite name, hands down) discovered that they could use sound editing software on their computers to make decent-sounding hip-hop and then upload it onto their MySpace pages. Suddenly, we've got ourselves a phenomenon!

I loved how the nerdcore (or "geeksta rap") world is a little microcosm of the mainstream rap world -- there's rappers who are better than lyrics and others who are better at flow, there's one rapper (MC Chris) that has reportedly gotten so big he won't associate with the others, and there's a nerdcore rap impresario who some rappers hate for supposedly diluting the product by roping in inferior rappers. There are even feuds, such as the ongoing beef between MC Router and NurseHella, two female nerdcore rappers. Actually, they're the only two female nerdcore rappers.

And the film makes the point that these nerds really are hip-hop artists, "keeping it real" in the most literal sense of the phrase, rapping about what they know and the lives they live. Not many mainstream rappers these days can say the same thing.

The screening was a riot, in part because several well-known nerdcore rappers (The Former Fat Boys, Monzy and MC Router) were in attendance. MC Router (pictured), who admitted getting hammered before the screening (she explained they don't carry Pabst Blue Ribbon in 40 oz. containers in her native Fort Worth) sat front-row center, hollering and throwing signs at every artist on screen that she liked, booing and flipping off all those she didn't.

NurseHella's ears must have been burning under that Pikachu cap she was wearing onscreen.

Monzy admitted that his rap career has had to take a temporary backseat to, you know, actually getting that computer science dissertation done that was the whole reason he went to Stanford in the first place. And the Former Fat Boys, whose remixes of songs by OneRepublic and Kelly Clarkson songs on YouTube have scored hundreds of thousands of views, say they plan to put out both a nerdcore and a "serious" album this year, which some hardcore nerdcore fans have bristled at.