PRINTNegin Rising
July 24, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Negin Farsad was more exasperated than excited when her cohort Gaby Alter temporarily interrupted work on The Israeli-Palestinean Conflict: A Romantic Comedy to hear a friend’s interview on the radio. Of course, that was before she heard who the subject was: Damian Hess, aka MC Frontalot, progenitor of nerdcore hip-hop. That interview spawned in Farsad the idea for a new project.
Despite having “never picked up a camera,” Farsad found Frontalot, his band (which includes Alter), his rapper compatriots and his followers a compelling enough group to film as the rapper embarked on his premiere cross-country tour. The result was Nerdcore Rising, titled after Frontalot’s first album. Reviews of Farsad’s film, though rare, have been rave. After attending the South by Southwest Film Festival, Salon film critic Andrew O’Hehir described the film as “funny, inspiring, authentic, sympathetic and never, ever mean. (Or at least not in a bad way.)” Based upon the short interview I had, it doesn’t seem an entirely inappropriate way to describe the director herself.
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Vox: When did you decide to make a film about nerdcore hip-hop?
Negin Farsad: I took a camera with me to a couple of shows. At the time, (Frontalot) wasn’t performing very much. The very few options people had to see him, they got super excited. The real clincher for me was talking to a couple of fans who had traveled from Buffalo to Manhattan to see the show, and they were arguing about some particular Magic: The Gathering cards. I was like, “Wow! This has got to be the only hip-hop show in the entire country where there’s a legitimate conversation about Magic: The Gathering.” Those two guys made it clear to me that there was a movement. The music is great, it’s fun, it’s compelling — but that fits the description for a lot of different kinds of music. What really sets this particularly apart is the fans that it attracts.
Vox: In the trailer, it really struck me when MC Frontalot said, “I can do this at the cost of everything.” I liked the romantic aspect of it. Is that the narrative focus?
NF: The stakes of the film are largely centered around that notion. He quit his day job, and if this tour doesn’t work out for him, it’s a big indicator that nerdcore hip-hop is not going to work out for him as a career. When I decided to make the film, he hadn’t decided to tour. I was like, “I wanna make a film. I just don’t know what the film is yet.” When he announced the tour, that’s when I was like, “Oh, there it is.” It is, in many ways, the classic making-it story.
Vox: Were there any difficulties during filming?
NF: Difficulty is a kind word. One miserable tragedy after the next miserable tragedy is probably more accurate. I think that’s the experience for any first-time filmmaker who is — and this probably fits the bill for most of them — making a movie on a shoestring budget. Everything was great in terms that I had a hunch that there was a story in there — 350 hours later, it turns out my hunch was correct. I did some things right, I did some things wrong, and it was all really difficult, because it’s so expensive, and it requires so many man-hours — a documentary especially.
You have a narrative film … You’ve got a script, you can control your shooting location, you can control how many actors you have. There are a lot of things you can control to mitigate the costs, to mitigate the time you spend. When you’re dealing with a documentary, you control nothing. You just follow what’s happening, and you never know how expensive that’s going to end up being.
Vox: How difficult was editing 350 hours into less than two?
NF: That is where they separate the men from the boys, because I’ve never had to be chargé d’affaires of a more ridiculously intense management and organizational process. The war in Iraq has fewer managerial difficulties than 350 hours of footage, which is obviously a complete and total hyperbole of the most offensive variety. I had each of those hours transcribed painstakingly by an understaffed, underpaid crew of homies. Then I went through thousands of pages of transcript and read stuff like, “Frontalot says, ‘I really feel like eating a hamburger today,’ and then the bassist says, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s go to McDonald’s.’” As interesting as human beings are, they’re not that interesting. I’d piece together scenes based upon the transcript, and in the end, I had this document that would resemble a script. A team of associate editors pooled that stuff, threw it on a timeline, and we would look at that and go, “Yes, no, crap, boring, lame, awesome, funny, whatever.” It’s a whittling-down process: You go from 350 hours to 10 hours to seven hours, and eventually we had 80 minutes.
Vox: Did your background in comedy help the process at all?
NF: Having gone on the documentary circuit, I’ve noticed that documentaries tend not to be funny. Part of the time it’s because they’re on the tragedies of Darfur, and part of the time, it’s just because there’s not necessarily a comedian at the edit bay. Having had so much experience both as a stand-up comedian who does a storytelling style of stand-up — although I’d never been classically trained in film and never picked up a camera before — I still knew the fundamentals of being able to tell a story. The tools are different here technically, but the fundamentals are consistent across formats.
Vox: A few places in your doc allude to the appropriation of a traditionally black genre by the dominant culture. How did you approach that sensitive subject?
NF: What was really interesting to me about nerdcore hip-hop is there’s this group of white dudes that are taking what is considered generally a black musical genre and making it their own. Where does that leave them in the history of hip-hop and the future trajectory of hip-hop? We’ve seen a lot, in the history of black music, that it gets kind of re-appropriated and used by multiple races and cultures. Rock ‘n’ roll in an outgrowth of soul and blues. What’s more specifically interesting in this case is that it can be viewed as a misappropriation of black culture, because nerdcore tends to be funny. It tends to be an ironic look at nerd culture. They tend to use references that sometimes can be seen as parodying black culture.
I don’t think MC Frontalot falls into that category. He honestly uses hip-hop. The fact that it has driving beats, the fact that the lyricism is so intense… he really uses those aspects of hip-hop to create something that is wholly his own. And a lot of nerdcore artists do that with great respect for the hip-hop masters that came before them. But there is a bit of parody of gangster rap, for example, using CS terminology as an analogy for gunning someone down. That stuff begins to feel a little more dangerous. I would never want to be judgmental of someone’s rough upbringing, nor would I want to parody it.
Vox: In the trailer, I saw a few subjects who say things that could be interpreted as compromising, such as admitting to an Internet porn addiction. How did you work with material that potentially painted your subjects in an unfavorable light?
NF: I didn’t come on with a résumé of 15 films. (Frontalot) was worried, especially because I’m a comedian, that I was going to come at the film as making fun of the genre, making fun of the subjects and making fun of the fans. Once he got to know me and got to see where my sensibilities were, he saw I wasn’t actually making fun of anyone. You have to realize is that the guy that says the line about Internet porn addiction… he’s very self-aware. He does like the fact that MC Frontalot raps about Internet porn addiction, but he realizes in the world at large, that’s kind of hilarious and ridiculous. The movie never casts judgment on nerd culture and never casts judgment on MC Frontalot or the band. It’s one of the things I put my foot down about very early on, partly because I am really uncomfortable with movies that do that. I’ve seen documentaries where the idea is you’re supposed to laugh at the subject. The subject is so crazy, or the subject is so flighty, or the subject is so awkward or such a loser. Those movies make me feel really bad; I can’t handle watching them.
Vox: Do you have a distributor for your film yet?
NF: If nerdcore hip-hop has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t have to necessarily disseminate your media through traditional modes. There are other ways of doing it. That’s definitely something to think about before making any big leaps. And at the end of the day, it’s still on the festival circuit.
Find out more about Nerdcore Rising or request a local screening at www.nerdcorerisingthemovie.com.
