<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, nerdcore]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, nerdcore]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/nerdcore http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/nerdcore <![CDATA[Facebook Friends? 'Are You F—king Kidding Me?']]> Hey look, it's a song about Facebook, that is somehow pretty great. Geeks have been uploading songs about their culture for a while now, but it took an Aussie alt-pop singer's "Are You Fucking Kidding Me" to legitimize the genre.

We've written about nerdcore anthems before, including this rap about the SXSW internet conference, the one about the Hadron Collider and the one from the O(nline)G threatening to shank a Wired writer. With few exceptions, the genre has been dominated by geeks, which is why it's nice to see Kate Miller-Heidke get righteous on a creepy, Facebooking ex.

The Twitterati are, naturally, eating this up (though it dates to May).

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<![CDATA[Web Developer Fantasizes About SXSW's 'South By Girls']]> Every year, instead of heading to the beaches, geeks flock to Austin, Texas, to engage in a rite of spring called "South By Southwest." There's a conference, but who goes to that?

I mean, yes, okay, technically there are thousands of people employed in the Internet industry whose employers, despite the recession, have paid for plane tickets and hotel rooms and passes to a conference called "South By Southwest Interactive," or "SXSWi," or "South By," if you're painfully hip, which starts this Friday.

And technically all these PHP coders and social media marketers and wantrepreneurs and pretty girls with webcams and Hollywood interactive business-development types will be physically present at the site of said conference. But no one actually goes to the conference.

They do go to the convention center where the conference is held, only because there are so many tweets on Twitter during SXSW that it is impossible to make plans electronically, so they are forced to meet up in person to discuss which parties they plan to attend. Plus, they talk about Twitter. And then they go to the parties and drink and talk about Twitter.

Then they wake up the next day still drunk and go to whichever 10 a.m. panel offers free breakfast tacos, which are exceptionally tasty in Austin and good for curing hangovers and make excellent subject matter for Twitter.

Also, Wired editor Chris Anderson will give a keynote, presumably about his book, Free, which lays out an already outdated theory about how everything will be free, except that it won't because everyone is broke, even Google.

This is why I'm not going this year.

But we have found one redeeming thing about South By Southwest. One!

It is a rap song, "South By Girls," by former Facebook interaction designer Eston Bond, who is something of a perfect parody of a South By Southwest attendee. (Under 25? Check. Web designer? Check. Lives in Palo Alto but kind of wishes he lived in San Francisco? Check. Disturbing love of guns? Check.) There are lyrics — with footnotes, because this is a nerdcore rap.

If you use his rap song to create an especially amusing video, you might win a gift card for an iPhone, a prize we only mention for its pointlessness. Anyone who would listen to this song and be inspired to create a video already owns three iPhones. But Bond managed to rhyme "Zivity" and "productivity," so we forgive him.

Here's the song, with Bond's gold-Treo-bedecked visage and some photos from last year's SXSW as visual backup:

(Video by Ryan Tate)

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<![CDATA[CERN's Large Hadron Collider explained in rhythm and rhyme]]> Do you lay awake at night worried that physicists tinkering in Geneva at the new Large Hadron Collider might destroy reality as we know it, or are you hoping they open a portal to a parallel dimension that just happens to have really hawt aliens? I do. Both. If you don't, let Will Barras and friends take you on a ride in their ode to the search for the Higgs boson. Mad props for the Stephen Hawking shoutout on the hype track.

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<![CDATA[Hold a rap-off before someone ends this with a switchblade]]>

"Wired is just Cosmo now," a friend told me last night. "Nothing of substance." Nerdcore rapper MC Router agrees. When Wired published a story by Roger Thomasson on a new Nerdcore compilation, it used outdated slang and misrepresented her, says MC Router. So she wrote a song, UnWired, with lyrics like:

Nerdcore article got published in Wired.
That asshole Roger Thomasson should get fucking fired.
What the hell's going on with this shitty magazine?
You want this motherfucking knife in your fucking spleen?

Well I'm glad no one's overreacting.

UnWired by 1337 Geek Beat [MySpace, autoplay]
Photo of MC Router [MySpace]

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