I know quite a few of you have been enjoying the Tim Blais "Acapella Science" videos, and I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge Tim's predecessors.
At the turn of the century, Nerdcore was invented practically simultaneously by two different people (shades of Newton and Leibniz!) At almost the same time MC Frontalot (real name Damien Hess) and MC Hawking (real name Ken Lawrence) gained enormous popularity in certain corners of the internet (Usenet!) releasing rap songs that were, if not exactly "cool", a great deal of fun and enormously clever in their lyrics.
MC Hawking used a WillowTalk speech synthesizer to style himself as an alternate persona of famed physicist Stephen Hawking. My very first introduction to nerdcore was MC Hawking's song "Entropy".
Tim Blais is an extraordinarily talented musician, lyricist, and communicator, upholding the grandest (and funnest) traditions of nerdcore.
Here's where it all began: