MC Hawking
MC Hawking is a fictional nerdcore interpreter, the idea and implementation come from the American web developer Ken Leavitt-Lawrence .
Real biography
MC Hawking was created around July 2000 by Ken Leavitt-Lawrence. The 30-year-old rap fan got the idea when he was working on a Macintosh with speech output and the voice reminded him of Hawking's voice computer . He developed his first rhymes with the text-to-speech program Willow Talk , which the software developer then sent as a joke over the company network. On the advice of a colleague, he then added a beat to the rap and began to build up a fictional biography. The fictional rapper was then introduced to the public on a website. In addition to a fictional disco and biography, some MP3 songs were also released that parodies rappers like Run-DMC , Public Enemy , NWA and the Beastie Boys .
In 2004, the rapper's only real album was disguised as a greatest hits album under the title A Brief History of Rhyme: MC Hawking's Greatest Hits on the Brash Music label . A guest appearance has MC Hawking also on the album Nerdcore Rising by MC Frontalot .
Fictional biography
MC Hawking is a parody of the theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in which he leads a double life as a rapper . His biography, which is distributed via the website, is a mixture of real data from Hawking and fictional elements of the rapper; the texts are not spoken, but output by a commercial speech synthesis program and are very similar to Hawking's synthetic voice.
MC Hawking was born Stephen William Hawking on January 8, 1942 in Oxford . After graduating from University College Oxford, Lou Gehrig Syndrome was diagnosed in 1963 . Although the doctors only predicted a short life span for him, he did not allow himself to be dissuaded from his goals and received his doctorate in cosmology at Cambridge , where he has held the Lucasian chair for mathematics since 1979. After being dependent on a wheelchair for some time , the disease took a further toll in 1985. As a result of a tracheotomy , his vocal cords were damaged so much that he could only communicate using a computer with speech synthesis - since then he has only complained that he now sounds like an American . Up to this point, both résumés match.
However, when he heard the performance of the Beastie Boys in 1988 at the college's student center, this changed his life completely - in the following weeks he was completely immersed in the culture of the rap scene, with NWA particularly inspiring him. He was now part of gangsta rap and MC Hawking was born. He started writing his own lyrics and performing in local clubs. At first nobody knew what to think of it - neither in the music scene nor at university - but he managed to both make a name for himself in the hip-hop scene and increase his reputation as a theoretical astrophysicist.
He teamed up in 1990 with DJ Doomsday and Professor Puff 'n Stuff, who were at the university at the time and shared Hawking's enthusiasm for gangsta rap. The three rented a small recording studio and recorded their own record. However, since they could not find a record company, Hawking released The Hawkman Cometh in 1992 at their own expense - the EP sold more than 10,000 times within a year and in 1993 they signed a contract with GangstaBitch Records, a subsidiary of the Disney group. They released their first album Fear of a Black Hole in 1994 . In the following years MC Hawking teamed up with the hardcore hip-hop / metal band Dark Matter and released his second album E = mc hawking in 1997 .
motivation
The aim of this project is to better disseminate scientific topics to the public. For this purpose, the medium of music - and especially the hip-hop popular in the 1990s - is used to gain access to young people in a fun way. Studies by the US National Endowment for the Arts showed that in 2004 43% of the US population had not read a single book - in addition, the daily newspapers had to experience a sharp drop in sales, especially in America, due to the advent of the Internet.
Stephen Hawking himself says this about MC Hawking: ... flattered, as it's a modern day equivalent to Spitting Image ( ... I'm flattered, it's like a modern counterpart to Spitting Image ) Spitting Image is the British model for Hurray Germany .
Content
In many texts physical (e.g. I explode like a bomb. No one is spared. My power is my mass times the speed of light squared. - I explode like a bomb. Nobody is spared. My energy corresponds to my mass times the square of the speed of light .; from E = MC Hawking ), cosmological or social issues such as the creationism debate in America ( They (the creationists) want to have their bullshit taught in public classes. Stephen Jay Gould should put his foot right up their asses. - They (the creationists) want their shit taught in public classes. Stephen Jay Gould should kick them right in the buttocks .; from Fuck the Creationists ) picked up.
Discography
Real discography
- A Brief History of Rhyme: MC Hawking's Greatest Hits (2004)
Fictional discography
The legend of the fictional rapper also includes an invented discography that was developed on the website. Some of the fictional songs were also released in real life on the alleged greatest hits album .
- The Hawkman Cometh EP (1992)
- Fear of a Black Hole (1994)
- E = MC Hawking (1997)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Susan Carpenter: Check It! MC Hawking rapeseed. LA Times , November 1, 2000, accessed November 17, 2012 .
- ↑ MC Hawking at Discogs (English)
- ↑ Discography. MC Frontalot official website, accessed November 17, 2012 .
- ↑ a b c A Brief Biography of MC Hawking. Official website, archived from the original on November 2, 2005 ; Retrieved November 17, 2012 .