MC Hawking

Biography

MC Hawking is a fictional nerdcore artist who gained some popularity in the early 2000s, largely due to the availability of his music on the Internet. It may actually be a stretch to consider the music rap, as the lyrics are not spoken, but rather synthesized by a commercial text-to-speech program. Although MC Hawking's entire body of work and his imaginary rapper personality were created almost entirely by American web developer Ken Leavitt-Lawrence, MC Hawking is purported to be an alter-ego...

MC Hawking is a fictional nerdcore artist who gained some popularity in the early 2000s, largely due to the availability of his music on the Internet. It may actually be a stretch to consider the music rap, as the lyrics are not spoken, but rather synthesized by a commercial text-to-speech program.

Although MC Hawking's entire body of work and his imaginary rapper personality were created almost entirely by American web developer Ken Leavitt-Lawrence, MC Hawking is purported to be an alter-ego for theoretical physicist Stephen W. Hawking and is thus a parody of the physicist. Keeping with this joke, the official MC Hawking website (singlehandedly created and maintained by Leavitt-Lawrence) is set to look like a personal fan site for the MC. From the www.mchawking.com home page: "While there are dozens of other sites on the web devoted to Stephen Hawking's scientific achievements, I am unaware of a single site (aside from this one) devoted to his career as a lyrical terrorist."

The use of Stephen Hawking's name and reputation could be considered extremely off-colour, as Hawking's reliance on a speech synthesizer is a result of his debilitating motor neuron disease. However, it appears that no offense is intended, as the lyrics are largely references to and parodies of actual Stephen Hawking quotes (such as the famous "When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun."), and the original Hawking has said that he is "flattered, as it's a modern day equivalent to Spitting Image". Among subjects of MC Hawking songs are various scientific topics, Hawking's professional relationships with MIT rivals, as well as the standard fare of gangsta rap, including street violence and racism.

The beats for MC Hawking are provided by DJ Doomsday. Most of the beats are samples of classic hip hop tracks.

His greatest hits album is called A Brief History of Rhyme: MC Hawking's Greatest Hits, a parody of Hawking's book A Brief History of Time. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.