MC Lars
Photo: Andrzej Liguz

MC Lars is making enemies faster than 50 Cent.

On his new album, The Graduate, the Stanford- and Oxford-educated laptop hip-hop star (see "Former 'Weird Al' Fan MC Lars Pens Brainy Anthems For The Laptop Generation") not only goes after crunk rappers, but the music industry in general, Hot Topic stores and even Ace of Base.

"I think with any artistic endeavor, your chief goal has to be honesty," Lars explained. "Even if it's gonna ruffle some feathers, it's probably good, because so much music is so safe. There are issues of personal safety, which is why I have the disclaimer on the crunk song at the end."

The crunk song, "Generic Crunk Rap," ends with the line "I'm just playing, Lil Jon, you know I love you," but not before ripping the genre to shreds for "not having anything to say."

"Not just with crunk, but with a lot of mainstream hip-hop, it's the lowest common denominator and just mindless," Lars explained. "The crunk beats just fit well with the generic flow and phrases I could think of."

Lars hopes to release "Generic Crunk Rap" as The Graduate's second single, with an accompanying video parodying hip-hop clips. "But to do that, I'd have to make the video awesome, and I'm trying to figure out if I have the budget," he said.

In the meantime, Lars is causing enough of a stir with "Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock," which he never intended to be a single until influential radio stations like KROQ-FM in Los Angeles began spinning it. Since then, he's been flooded with angry e-mails.

"They're kids who think they're punk and they're like, 'Lars, you wouldn't know what punk was if it hit you in the face,' " he said. "After a while, you realize you can't please everyone. What's funny is, I'm making fun of Hot Topic, and now they're selling my stuff. They're so dumb they don't realize I'm making fun of them and they suck and they have to pretend that they like someone who makes fun of them. They're definitely not punk rock at all."

Cindy Levitt, vice president of music and marketing at Hot Topic, confirmed the chain has in fact been carrying more Lars merchandise since the song surfaced.

"We don't ever want to censor an artist in any way," Levitt said. "Just because they poke fun at us doesn't mean we're going to ban their music or merchandise. In fact, we embraced it. We think it's funny."

And that's exactly how MC Lars pulls off his bitter diatribes, which mostly center on the music industry: They're funny. While downloading has become a mundane topic, it's ear-catching when it's Lars rapping, "It's all about marketing/ Clive Davis see/ If fans buy the shirt/ They get the MP3 for free" on "Download This Song," which features Jaret Reddick from Bowling for Soup.

"I read this book called 'The Future of Music' by this professor, Dave Kusek, and it was interesting to me how there's this giant paradigm shift in the music industry, and the labels aren't willing to accept it," Lars said. "I just wanted to make a song that summed up what the book was about, and it's sort of a letter to labels who aren't getting it."

Lars also goes after the industry on "Signing Emo" and "iGeneration," both of which were first released on 2004's The Laptop EP (see "MC Lars Sends Up Emo On New Single, Which Stars Fake Band Hearts That Hate").

"The two things I mix are satire and pop-culture references," Lars said. "And I love music so much that I am frustrated with all the problems with it. It's legitimate anger, but I find people react better [to humor], and it's hard to ignore that you're writing for an audience. You don't want to tailor your songs to an audience, but if you keep that in mind, it informs your writing. And I think people know me as the guy who makes fun of the music industry."

That's not his only ammo, though. Lars also raps about everything from American history ("If I Had a Time Machine, The World Would Be Fresh") to relationships ("Rapgirl" and "The Roommate From Hell").

"I had a difficult roommate my last semester, but he was not eating dead babies," Lars said, referring to a lyric in the latter. "I'd written a song about this guy, but it was too personal, so I thought it would be funny to write something with Satan as the actual roommate."

Lars even wrote a song about his own songwriting, a tribute to "99 Problems" called "21 Concepts." It's home to the line "I wrote a song about the '90s that sampled Ace of Base/ But I kept it off the album in the interest of taste."

"I like Jay-Z, and I thought it would be a funny way to reference him," Lars said of the track. "And it was a cool way to sum up all the songs that didn't make the album. You can see some are better than others."

MC Lars tour dates, according to his publicist:

• 5/4 - Boston, MA @ Axis
• 5/5 - Hackensack, NJ @ School of Rock
• 5/7 - Centreville, VA @ Bull Run Regional Park
• 5/8 - Wilkes-Barre, PA @ Cafe Metropolis
• 5/9 - Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar
• 5/10 - Charlotte, NC @ Tremont Music Hall
• 5/11 - Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade
• 5/12 - St. Petersburg, FL @ State Theatre
• 5/13 - Jacksonville, FL @ Jack Rabbits
• 5/14 - West Palm Beach, FL @ Rays Downtown Blues Bar
• 5/16 - Orlando, FL @ Will's Pub South
• 5/17 - Tallahassee, FL @ Beta Bar
• 5/20 - Houston, TX @ Walter's on Washington
• 5/21 - Dallas, TX @ The Door
• 5/23 - Tempe, AZ @ The Clubhouse
• 5/24 - Anaheim, CA @ Chain Reaction
• 5/25 - San Diego, CA @ Soma
• 5/26 - Las Vegas, NV @ Jillian's
• 5/27 - West Hollywood, CA @ Key Club
• 5/28 - San Francisco, CA @ Slim's

• MC Lars

MC Lars (file)
Photo: Pam Pifford

Anyone who visited their Web site and thought that Hearts That Hate were the next big thing out of the emo scene is about to get a reality check from MC Lars.

The fictitious band has a starring role in "Signing Emo," the second single off Lars' Laptop EP. The song, a send-up of the bandwagon-jumping that goes on in the music industry, finds a 40-year-old, overweight and out-of-touch A&R exec named Marty feeling pressure from his boss to ink an emo band — any emo band — to the label because the boss' daughter likes Dashboard Confessional. Just before exhausting his last resource, Marty comes across Hearts That Hate's demo and sees dollar signs in his future.

At that point in the song, Lars' bouncy, straightforward rap yields to an explosive snippet of Hearts That Hate's aptly titled "Cry Tonight." The song's chorus, complete with raging guitars and strained vocals, is virtually indistinguishable from the music made by the many groups that unabashedly wear their emotions on their lapels like so many coin-sized buttons. If you didn't know otherwise, or if you'd checked out www.heartsthathate.com, you might be duped.

"The scene's not unique anymore," said Lars, who professes equal love for Jay-Z and Taking Back Sunday. "It's kind of like what happened after Nirvana: People are trying to match that sound. That's what I'm addressing, not the original groups like Dashboard Confessional and other bands that blazed the trail."

A video for "Signing Emo" will be shot December 17-19 by director Kurt St. Thomas. The tune, which follows Lars' first single, "iGeneration" (see "Former 'Weird Al' Fan MC Lars Pens Brainy Anthems For The Laptop Generation"), doesn't sound like anything else on the Stanford-University-student-turned-rapper's EP. Rather than simply employing the overused term "eclectic," Lars came up with his own label for his blend of hip-hop, rock, synth-pop and comedy.

"The term I've come up with is post-punk laptop rap," he explained. "It's like post-punk, in terms of not necessarily [being] punk. The laptop is the computer element. And the rap — that's the real explanation, but when people ask what it sounds like, I usually just say, 'It's like the Bloodhound Gang with emo influences.' "

MC Lars, who's still one semester shy of graduation, plans to take the spring term off to work on his full-length debut. In January, he'll head out on tour with Bowling for Soup, American Hi-Fi and the Riddlin' Kids.

MC Lars' tour dates, according to his publicist:

• 1/4 - Amarillo, TX @ Midnight Rodeo  
• 1/5 - Odessa, TX @ Dos Amigos  
• 1/6 - Albuquerque, NM @ Sunshine Theatre  
• 1/7 - Tempe, AZ @ Marquee Theatre  
• 1/8 - Tucson, AZ @ City Limits  
• 1/9 - San Diego, CA @ SOMA  
• 1/11 - San Luis Obispo, CA @ SLO Brewing Company  
• 1/13 - West Hollywood, CA @ House of Blues  
• 1/14 - Anaheim, CA @ House of Blues  
• 1/15 - Las Vegas, NV @ Jillian's  
• 1/16 - Sparks, NV @ New Oasis  
• 1/17 - Sacramento, CA @ Empire  
• 1/18 - Santa Cruz, CA @ The Catalyst  
• 1/19 - San Francisco, CA @ Slim's  
• 1/20 - Eugene, OR @ WOW Hall  
• 1/21 - Seattle, WA @ Graceland  
• 1/22 - Portland, OR @ Bossanova  
• 1/25 - Boise, ID @ Big Easy  
• 1/26 - Salt Lake City, UT @ In the Venue  
• 1/27 - Denver, CO @ Ogden Theatre  
• 1/28 - Kansas City, MO @ Beaumont Club  
• 1/29 - Sauget, IL @ Pop's  
• 1/30 - Milwaukee, WI @ The Rave/Eagles Club  
• 2/1 - Minneapolis, MN @ Quest Club  
• 2/2 - Chicago, IL @ House of Blues  
• 2/3 - Detroit, MI @ St. Andrews Hall  
• 2/4 - Columbus, OH @ Newport Music Hall  
• 2/5 - Cleveland, OH @ Odeon Concert Club  
• 2/9 - South Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground  
• 2/10 - Orono, ME @ Maine Center for the Arts 
• 2/16 - Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club

• MC Lars

MC Lars (file)
Photo: SideCho Records

A decade after Beck penned "Loser" as the anthem for Generation X, 21-year-old MC Lars thought an update was in order.

He didn't think the self-deprecating tag suited his generation. As students at Stanford University, he and his friends were hardly the shiftless slacker types that marked the early '90s and inspired such films as "Reality Bites" and "Singles." Instead, the thread of commonality involved something a lot more fast-paced.

"Our generation is criticized in a lot of ways for being so reliant on the Internet," said MC Lars. "What people don't realize is that our generation uses technology not necessarily as a distraction from real life, but as a way to augment their friendships or interactions with the world. And I think that they need an anthem because it kind of justifies what they do and what they are."

The result of Lars' observations is "iGeneration," a hip-hop ditty that drops references to everything from iTunes to abbreviations like LOL and BRB and what it means to enter a space, colon, dash and closed parenthesis consecutively on your keyboard. The song — which samples "American Hearts" by Massachusetts indie rockers Piebald — was created entirely in Lars' dorm room, as was the rest of The Laptop EP. The self-proclaimed Laptop MC was born.

Lars (né Andrew Nielsen) got his first record deal with U.K. indie label Truck Records while attending Oxford and gigging around at coffeehouses and open-mic nights. The 12-track Radio Pet Fencing was released in January under the name MC Lars Horris. He's since dropped the "Horris" because people mistook his name for "Lars Whores."

"I made up the name when I was about 13," Lars explained. "I just thought it was really funny, and when I was in seventh grade it stuck. It's probably the world's dorkiest name for a rap person, so I thought it would be a funny name to take."

In the past, Lars has been a shameless fan of "Weird Al" Yankovic and the Insane Clown Posse, and he doesn't attempt to hide his dorky side. Instead he tempers it with cleverness, coming off as the nerdy guy who knows better but has more important things to do than care too much about it.

"Signing Emo," a song about how major labels scurry to sign the "next big thing" without fully understanding what that is, is the perfect vehicle for his acerbic wit. Within a squeaky hip-hop backbeat, Lars raps about out-of-touch A&R scout Marty, who eventually hits pay dirt with the fictitious Hearts That Hate and their hit "Cry Tonight," a prime piece of formulaic emo shtick that wouldn't be dreadfully out of place on next year's Warped Tour. To add credence to his ploy, Lars credited the band in the EP's liner notes for using their sample.

"A lot of people think the band's real," Lars said. "Well, it didn't really help that we set up a fake Web page to make people think they were real. Some people got really upset about it. They think we're disrespecting the genre, but I'm really just addressing the fact that it's become so derivative."

Another track on the EP, "Mr. Raven," transcends clever for downright brainy. Inspiration for Lars' rapped version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" came to him one night while he was studying the classic poem and listening to Brand New's "Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't."

"I realized the song had that same bouncy iambic pentameter," Lars explained. "It was kind of a stretch of an idea to see if I could put [the poem] and the song together. I had to clear the sample with the band, so they thought it was cool. And I played it for my American literature professor, and she thought it was good, too."

MC Lars has taken the fall semester off to promote The Laptop EP on the road and work on his next full-length album, which promises to be just as ambitious as any of his undertakings.

"I'm doing a song about 'Moby Dick' and one about the '90s," he said. "I'm trying to combine all the different genres of the '90s in one song. It'll be retro, but not too super-retro. Each chorus will be a different genre, like the first is pop-rock and the second is grunge. The challenge is making it original but familiar enough so people can recognize it."

• MC Lars