The Graduate Review
Recently, I found a genre called nerdcore, which is basically nerds rapping about nerd stuff. It’s a pretty novelty and gimmick-adjacent genre for the most part, and you can tell that most of the genre came from an early age of internet music, where everything sounded cheesy, compressed and quite bland. One album that clearly represented this internet age of comedy and cheesiness is The Graduate by MC Lars, released in 2006.
At first, that cheesiness comes in the form of “Download This Song”, which clearly samples “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop. The sample is unchanged for the most part, but what really ages this song more so than the topic is the detailed drum beat that kicks in. However, as the album progresses, he gets better at sampling, like in “Ahab” with its Supergrass sample working pretty seamlessly(unless you were paying attention to the tonality of the percussion).
Throughout the album, Lars experiments with many different genres such as rap rock(Signing Emo), crunk(Generic Crunk Rap), chiptune(21 Concepts, Six Degrees of Kurt Cobain), acoustic(If I Had A Time Machine), and punk rock(Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock). This variety gives it a something-for-everybody quality which fits in quite well with the strangely charming lyrics and wordplay.
However, despite the clever writing, Lars’ rapping is quite stale compared to other rappers you may be thinking of. However, I find its simplicity to have a charm, and it probably inspired a lot of other people to rap. It also helps that the themes of the songs are varied, timely, and executed pretty well so that the rapping doesn’t end up derailing the entire project.
A lot of tracks will contain topics that are quite dated, such as “Download This Song” with it’s lyrics on file transfers, “The Roommate from Hell” with its references to post-grunge bands and morbid albeit humorous lyrics, and “Signing Emo” with it’s lyrics about how emo became corporatised. This album is clearly made for millennials and other people who remember and lived through the mid-2000s, and the song “iGeneration” makes that theme come full circle.
Despite the amount of novelty songs, there are some songs on here that do have some merit to them. “Rapgirl”, a track about a girl who wants to rap, might inspire some girls to rap. “Internet Relationships Are Not Real” should have been popular long ago and would have prevented so many catfishes from happening. “Generic Crunk Rap”, despite parodying the genre, may get some people bumpin’. But for the most part, a lot of the songs can be simply enjoyed for their production alone, which does the job well and can be pretty good listens for people who want to get into hip-hop production.
A lot of early internet songs sound pretty darn bad compared to how they have evolved nowadays, where they sound like they were done in an actual studio. Sometimes, it won’t even matter if the songs are low fidelity if the lyrics are intriguing. MC Lars feels like the middle ground where some songs still feel relevant and sound pretty good, but others will sound pretty dated and the lyrics will still smell like 2006.
I’d recommend this album to millennials who are interested in mid-2000s alternative music or early internet music. Everyone else will either think this is outdated or might as well enjoy the instrumentals. Younger generations may be alienated by The Graduate, but for anyone older, it serves as a reminder to people of what the mid-2000s felt like.
