The lines between Hip Hop and nerd culture are being blurred more and more these days. The Hip Hop nerd, coming out of the proverbial closet filled with dusty records, sneakers, and comics. What? Comics? Yes!
If you look back you can see nerd culture entrenched in hip hop. From Ghostface’s alias of Tony Stark, Meth as Johnny Blaze, to the acclaimed producer MF Doom. Maybe the supernatural abilities of these characters match the larger than life personas of these rappers.
Since Hip Hop is such a competitive and seemingly hardened culture, being a comic book and video game freak was kept a secret. The genre has gone through a bit of a shift through the social media generation.
Producers Just Blaze, 9th Wonder, and Pete Rock come to mind. Blaze would make beats with sound effects from the transformers movie and even has a flux capacitor in his studio. I first found out about his nerdem, when I saw a picture of him wearing a Darth Vader pendant.
9th has recorded videos of himself playing with light sabers, and can even be seen wearing a Black Jedi tee with the Star Wars font.
Pete Rock is another comic book lover. On his Twitter and Instagram profiles you can see his love for comics. I have conversed with him from time to time on Twitter about it.
Why now? With big budget movies and nostalgia, being a nerd isn’t a bad thing anymore. The comics and cartoons we grew up with are now live action dreams come true.
We are hip hop heads that also love to play with light sabers, retro games, and watch Marvel/DC movies.