Due to a lazy holiday season and a slow month for releases in January, Nerdcore North skipped a month, so for this fourth installment I look at the nerdy hip hop audio and video released in the months of December of last year and January of this one. Plus, I get way more than I bargained for from Nursehella, who came close to matching the marathon Q&A sessions I’ve had with (separately, of course) Kool Keith and The Extremities. My apologies in advance to Nursehella for any cuts that were made during editing that might have been a significant part of the story, but there was just sooooooo much. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked so many questions…

Artist Spotlight: Nursehella

Thanks to her appearances in the nerdcore documentaries Nerdcore Rising and Nerdcore For Life, both released in 2008, Nursehella has guaranteed herself a position in the nerdcore scene, but as a simple civilian Danielle Prokop was a late bloomer to hip hop. She grew up in a small Canadian town with an ex-punk rock mom and two uncles that were drummers, so she naturally gravitated towards rock music. She even learned to play guitar and aspired to join a band. In fact, in high school, Danielle thought of hiphop as “misogynist, it’s discriminatory against women” without having heard it, which was ignorant and narrow-minded, she admits, adding “but if you can’t be ignorant and narrow-minded in high school, when can you be?”

However, her opinion changed dramatically in the liberal, experimental environment of the University of Victoria, where she started an electro-clash band with plans to use her nickname Nursehella – earned by her frequent time spent in hospitals as a sick and accident prone youth. Danielle also worked at the university radio station along with a good friend with whom she would trade themed tapes on a regular basis. And in 2001 or ’02, during a period of disillusionment with rock music and the pretension that surround it, Danielle asked her friend, who happened to have a really good hip hop collection, to make her an educational hip hop tape, and on that tape was the life-changing track “Keep It Real…Represent” by Kool Keith. “It was just incredibly raw,” she says of the song, “filthy.” She would go on to later cover the song as Nursehella.

It was also through the U Vic radio station that Nursehella was first exposed to nerdcore when she heard an MC Paul Barman promo sent to the station from Matador Records. It wasn’t labeled as nerdcore, and Hella had no idea it could be labeled as such at the time, but she thought the music was “radical and smarmy.” She also caught on during the third season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force that mc chris, who played a recurring character on the show, was also a rapper who rapped about nerdy things and then she heard “Fett’s Vette,” based on her favourite Star Wars character, Boba Fett. But it was Owen, a good friend she met after dropping out of university, who would take her basic education and further it by introducing her to comic books and rugged rap like Wu-Tang Clan.

A self-professed “wordophile” that fell in love with the lyrical element of hip hop, Hella turned her musical aspirations to hip hop in 2005, appearing in two documentaries on nerdcore and releasing her Nursehellamentary EP with Vancouver producer Baddd Spellah before taking a couple years off to return to school in 2009 to finish her Bachelor of Fine Arts, with a major in Visual Arts and a minor in Japanese Cultural Studies, a field well-suited to her interest in anime, manga and Japanese movies. But now she’s graduated and has made her return to rap with a brand new release, her debut album Second Coming, produced by close collaborator Karl Olson aka Ultraklystron, who she first met while innocently standing in line to see MC Frontalot and mc chris at PAX in Bellevue, Washington in 2005. So now is the perfect time to catch up on Canada’s First Lady of Nerdcore, Nursehella, who it turns out is long-winded, willing to share her opinion, and loves the f-bomb. Proceed at your own risk…

Do you consider yourself nerdcore?
I understand myself, as a musician, my roots in rap were firmly laid down as a nerdcore artist because my EP had very nerdy anthems on it: “LV 99” about roleplaying games and the track I did with Karl Olson about anime, you know “Shoujo ‘n Shonen,” [about] having crushes on anime characters. So, yes, I specifically tailored some of the songs after “Nursehellamentary” dropped to be part of the nerdcore genre but I realized very quickly that, as an artist, to limit yourself and to limit the scope of your writing or the scope of your artwork is only going to hurt you in the long run. And also, I can’t do shit like that. I fucking can’t limit myself to anything. I have no self-control over stuff like that, I’m so ADHD. I’m always going to get bored really quickly. And I’ll come back to something too. I’ll come full circle to it but I’m going to go all over the place as it suits me to do so and whatever feels right at the moment. There will be nerdy fucking references in my raps from here to Kingdom Come, but it’s part of a grand scheme of things. I really like making multiple references to everything that flow into one another. They might be obscure or whatever, but it’s not because I want people to figure it out and get back to me but because I’m really happy I could work out these amazing fucking couplets that have such inter-connection to me. My life is one big in-joke; I’m very happy to have it that way. I have quite a few fans, some of them are fans that are from the nerdcore families and many of them are not. I consider myself an independent rapper who happens to be female and Canadian. But I will continue to apply the term as much as it needs to suit me. … In fact, nerdy references are a huge part of rap culture. You’ll hear any number of them in any number of songs, but I think to be considered a nerdcore act you are specifically taking the time to write quote-unquote anthem songs that deal with one subject and are tailored to that one facet of life.

As one of a very small number of females working within nerdcore, has your gender had any affect on your reception by the nerdcore community?
Well, that’s a tricky little pickle, isn’t it? Your gender, I think, has an affect, sadly, on your reception in any community, and hip hop more so than a lot. … My gender, as a female, affects me in the nerdcore genre because people inevitably go, “Oh, she’s nerdcore, hunh? No, she’s too pretty to be a nerd, that can’t be true.” This is no joke. I was the 250 lb girl with the glasses and crooked teeth and only dressed in army clothes in high school, and I had a mohawk. I only embraced my femininity in my young adulthood. Being pretty has no relevance to what I’m good at or what I’m interested in, nor did being a fat girl with braces and glasses. I’m still the same fucking person, it’s people’s outward perception of you.

Did the nerdcore documentaries have any impact on your music career?
Yes, of course they did. The documentaries actually both did very well for themselves. And they were actually really excellently put together. I was quite pleased with the overall results. They were fun films to watch. And the thing is, I was kind of sleeping a little bit on my game, and that happened to be at the time when they were doing their tour of the festival circuit, so … that press that was reflected from the film festival reviews, etc, if I was mentioned that got back around to me. That got me hits on my pages, new fans from it. So yeah, the documentaries had a great impact on my music career, and will continue to as a person watches it on Hula or something like that and decides to check me out. I’m very fortunate to have been part of those.

Did you find it difficult to put hip hop on hold to return to school?
No, I needed to finish school. I needed to do it wholeheartedly, too. I had to get a student loan, and the last year of school I couldn’t get a student loan anymore. So I had to go home to my mom’s to work for six months to save up a bit. And three days a week I worked in the afternoons after my classes – I was a student with full time classes – and I worked on the weekends. I had a $9 an hour job. There were no weekends [off]. I didn’t leave the city. I fucking woke up, ate, slept, studied and worked my fucking ass off and got straight motherfuckin’ A’s. So no, it wasn’t difficult to put hip hop on hold. I had a goal in mind and it was to finish school.

How about any difficulty getting back into music when school ended?
No, not really. The thing is, being an interdisciplinary artist by nature, I just felt like instead of music for 2009, 2010, which is when I was in university, I just was doing another form of art. I have very, very severe ADHD so I have a difficult time only holding down one art form. So, for me I was like, great, I’m super tired of doing these – I was doing these animations or whatever – I’m so tired of doing this, now I can focus my creative juices to make music again. So, it wasn’t difficult at all. It was actually right when I was due for a change. It was difficult, maybe, to get back into getting on my grind about it in the same way I was with my artwork in school because I’m a lazy fucker that loves to play video games. Towards the end it was a bit easier.

How was your experience working with Karl Olson aka Ultraklystron on Second Coming?
When Karl would first try to produce tracks for me, he hadn’t quite grown into his own yet as a producer for other people. Karl’s an amazing producer, and has been for a long time, and not just hip hop – he does amazing drum n’ bass. He’s prolific enough in his music to make me exceptionally envious of his fuckin’ grind and his fuckin’ ability to just get shit done, and to pull it out of nowhere. He’s quite a genius, actually. The thing was, [he'd always ask] “What do you think of this beat?” And I’m like, “It sounds like some stupid weboo fuckin’ anime winka-dicka-dink beat, can’t you make me… I want bass, I want dirty, I want deliciously fuckin’, like, rarrrr, evil.” Up until about the last year of working on the album, it was a bit touch and go, and then all of a sudden he started cranking out shit for me that I only had to listen to the first two bars [and] I’m like, “perfect, perfect, need it, yes, want it.” I rejected almost half the beats he ever gave me beforehand. I didn’t want to work with him at first. I was committed to only working with Baddd Spellah, but Baddd Spellah became a father over the last couple of years, and you know, [that's] a busy time in your life. So yes, I’m very glad to have kept with it and stuck with it with him because the result is something I have no qualms about anything in it. I love it. It’s perfect for me, and that’s a huge thing for me because I’m a crazy perfectionist. It’s really amazing for myself to have made a work that I can look upon [like] that because that’s what mattered to me. And I think for him it was a really important work too, because to produce like that, to almost get inside someone else’s head, was a huge step for him, too. So, I think he’s really proud of it, too; it’s a little bit of his baby as well.

What’s with all of the sexual content on Second Coming? Nerds aren’t supposed to be sexual.
I like sex, like many girls do, I think, and many boys do, regardless of whether you’re nerd, jock, banker, lawyer, drug dealer, whatever you are, usually you like sex. And f you don’t, that’s also cool. You can rap about being non-sexual. But, sex is really fun to rap about. I have a really puerile sense of humour. I have the sense of humour of a 15 year old boy. I have sever ADHD. I have a super fowl gutter mouth, I love being inappropriate. I derive excessive enjoyment out of making ridiculous double entendres, triple entendres. I love wordplay that is basically crazy inappropriate and sexual but you could also read it a different way as well. I think also being sexually empowered and being able to rap about, sing about, talk about sex in whichever way you choose to do so is part of being a woman in the modern day. It’s just about being comfortable with who you are. … And the nerd boyfriends that I’ve had – two, three, I guess – that were long term boyfriends were the best lays I’ve ever had, so I don’t know what the deal is. Nerds can fuck. There’s a lot of fuckin’ pent up tension there. It’s good times.

On Second Coming you have an interlude where you enthusiastically pitch nerdy ideas for porn movies. If you actually had the opportunity to produce a porno, what would you do?
It wouldn’t be a spoof because all that shit has been done, like Cherry Poppins, Butt Pirates of the Caribbean, whatever. If I could produce a porno, I would want to do something super random, non-sequitur, psychedelic kind of like Dali’s Un Chien Andalou mixed with Tim & Eric and a lot of bukkake and lots of real female orgasms. Just something that was a crazy mindfuck of sex non-sequiturs for no reason.

I hear you’re into cosplay. Do you have any advice on how to successfully cosplay for a newb?
Be accurate with your costumes. There’s nothing worse than when you go to a con and see, like, one fucking character, like Ivy from Soulcalibur and they’re next to another Ivy from Soulcalibur who’s in a half trash bag with a sword that’s made out of paper. Don’t bother doing it if you can’t do it right. There’s nothing I admire more than cosplay that shows time and love and just deep, crazy, nerdy effort into it. It’s a thing of beauty and I have high respect for it.

And tips I wish I had known when I first started out. Pick simple stuff. And you don’t necessarily have to pick characters that are from shows. One of the things I like cosplaying as a lot is a Yankii, which is from the song “Ride of the Yankiis” A Yankii is a sub-culture of Japan that are basically these motorbike-riding girls, they’re kind of like female yakuza in a way, but a little bit more light, usually typically with the long blue pleated skirts, and you usually have a sarashi or something under your pinafore and you’re wearing your cold mask or whatever. If you watch the movie Kamikaze Girls or Shimotsuma Monogatari you’ll see a really good example of that. You can just start with shit like that, if you want.

I think fetish stores are a great place to look for things, especially during Halloween. I’ll find a lot of vintage kimonos and things like that. I can’t sew, so if you can do so and you want to put time into cosplay as well like that. Just remember, people will always take requests for commissions, so when you start you should look for people to do commissions for the things you might not be able to do. You can look online, you can look on cosplay forums. You can look on cosplay forums also to see what you’re up against, what’s been cosplayed before you. Cosplay is amazing, and not just anime shit. When I was at Comic Con, there’s this Predator, it was insane. I mean, it was perfect. I was like, “Oh my god, dude, I love your Predator,” and he was like “Fank ew ferry much” because he couldn’t talk through his mask. That’s how into it he was. I feel stuff like that is the penultimate nerdiness. It’s just what geekiness and nerdiness is, a passion, and taking that passion to its utmost of whatever you love.

You’re also into comic books. Any current recommendations?
I’m not sure if you know, but Owen, the guy who was basically my hero, a huge inspiration on me and best friend, and current love of my life, he died by suicide in 2010. And a huge part of mine and Owen’s relationship was, Owen was my Marvel Comics dictionary. Twice a week I set aside time, I [would] go over and he’d have the new comics finished that he’d be reading, I’d come over and read them. So it’s been really difficult for me to get back into some of those things, not because I don’t want to but because I’ve got to take it sloooow. So, my recommendations aren’t gonna be that current except for some Otaku shit because he wasn’t that into manga.

I can recommend what’s currently coming out is a comic called Nana to Koru or Nana to Kaoru Arashi, which is a really good, super-edgy comic about a BDSM relationship, very much almost Secretary – if you’ve ever seen the movie Secretary with James Spader and Meg Gyllenhal – in its exploring of the fucking kinkiest ride. It’s like the most boobular tied up things, but also the emotions and depths of the relationships of the characters and what BDSM truly extends into. So, something sexy there as well. But for other comic books, if I can recommend some stuff that stuck with me that I just left off reading. I’ll recommend to anyone that hasn’t read it, Runaways is fucking amazing. The Daredevil, but volume 2 shit where it was the other Matt Murdoch papers and then “The Devil in Cell Block D”, the shit where you think Foggy Nelson has died, that shit blew my mind. I had a spazz when that happened: “Foggy can’t be dead!” One of my favourite comic books of all time is Promethea. It’s Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray. Yeah, Promethea is fucking mindblowing, life-changing. And other than that, of course, I also recommend Eightball to anybody who hasn’t read it. It’s Daniel Clowes.

For someone not familiar with your catalog, what would you recommend they play?
Well, you can got to nursehella.bandcamp.com and pick up my full length release that I just dropped, Second Coming. But out of my catalogue … of course you’re gonna wanna hear “Nursehellamentary”. You can check out the one on Second Coming [or] you can check out the first one, whatever you want. That was my debut song and it was just meant to introduce myself. Out of the new album, I would say please check out “Drop It Once More”, which is the first track on the album. That was a track for me that just came so quick, which none of my raps ever do; came so quick and the beat just came perfect. I’m really happy about that one. I would also check out “Bitches” if you want to hear me rap really insanely fast on purpose, like, insanely fast. Other than that, I would check out my track with Jesse Dangerously and Nolely Nole, which is called “Oulala” and that can be found on either Nolely Nole’s album Pretty Young Thing or it can be found on my Soundcloud for free. And also on my Soundcloud for free you could check out my cover of Kool Keith’s “Keep It Real (Represent My Nuts)” which was on Nerdcore Underground, put out by the blogger Z. And it was amazing for me to be able to cover that song and have it be part of a compilation, even an internet release because that song is basically the representation of everything that got me into rap. And I think it shows I can rap differently as well.

If someone wanted to delve deeper into Canada’s glorious nerdcore scene, who else would you recommend they check?
Who I know in Canada who would be considered neredcore, there’s Jesse Dangerously. He could be consider nerdcore or not, I just think he’s a great rapper – I don’t give a fuck what he’s rapping about, he raps really good. I would recommend my little brother Nolely Nole, who worked with me and Jesse on a track and who just put out an album, but he’s like “I’m not nerdcore.” And he’s not. He’s white and nerdy, but he’s not going to put himself in any genre and have expectations made of him. The whole Backburner crew is kinda considered nerdcore in some way, like Ghettosokcs, Wordburglar and all them, so I would recommend checking out the Backburner crew.

Finally, what’s up next for Nursehella?
I’m just currently finishing the cover art for the hard copy release [of Second Coming] which is on pre-order, and I know it’s taking a long time and that’s because I’m doing it for myself and I started an elaborate, detailed process, which I now resent doing. But when it comes to doing something, I’ll fucking do it right or not at all. So, hard copy releasing [and] I’m going to do some promotion after that. But, I really actually next, after rapping and concentrating on rap for so long, I’m dying to fucking get behind my guitar again with a band. I just want to have something really fun and free for release, and something completely different because my ADHD brain dictates that it’s time for a change. So, I want to do a four-song grunge rock EP under the name HERMIONE GRUNGER and I wanna do a couple of covers of tracks that I really love because it’s fun to do cover tracks, it’s always so free, and then I wanna do two grunge rock tracks about fucking nothing, I don’t really care, I just wanna play my guitar and sing. That will be sort of a one-off of nothingness. And then, after that, I’d really like to do some free EP releases or mixtape releases as it suits me because the next thing on my bucket list, for myself, things to do before I die, I really want to work on a cartoon or a project with people that mean a lot to me. So I’m really hoping to be able to use my visual arts training in the animation industry, I hope. It would be really cool if I could do something like that. And I’d still rap or whatever.

http://www.nursehella.com

http://www.facebook.com/nursehellamusic

https://twitter.com/nursehella

What to Hear:

Peter Chapman – Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack!!! OST [album]

Peter Chapman is perhaps better known to the hip hop and nerdcore communities as Peter Project, a producer and DJ who has backed members of the Backburner crew while maintaining his own solo career in multiple genres. His latest release comes courtesy of his day job as a producer of music for tv shows and video games. Released in February of last year, Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack is a critically-acclaimed side-scrolling platform game for the PS Vista and sequel to Tales From Space: About A Blob. The soundtrack is a simple, fun mash-up of garage rock and surf rock with a bit of a circus vibe, which Peter has just recently made available for free download on his soundcloud page.

Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/peepyopee-chapman/sets/tales-from-space-mutant-blobs

Little Eskimo Jesus – Could You Please Be Quiet, Please? [album]

Ira Lee is an artist not afraid of emotional honesty or controversial subject matter, and he’s been getting progressively more experimental since the release of his solo debut, Cafeteria Food, produced by Factor. Little Eskimo Jesus is his collaboration with Swiss producer Mattr, and Could You Please Be Quiet, Please? is their collection of unreleased songs not included on their debut album Never Trust the People and also recorded since then. He sums up his style perfectly on “How to Hip Hop Dance” with the words “I love to tell stories, pretend to be someone else,” and here he touches on topics such as extreme sexual gratification, erectile dysfunction, and another touching song about the love he has for his grandmother over Mattr’s electronic-inflected hip hop beats infused with a little bit of folk. Oh, just one more quote from another of his songs about dancing: “Move, like you grew up in Guelph.” Ha ha, awesome!

Listen here: http://littleeskimojesus.bandcamp.com/album/could-you-please-be-quiet-please

Noah 23 – Wingfoot [album]

And speaking of that small, Southern Ontario town, the godfather of Guelph’s hip hop scene ends his self-imposed one year retirement with Wingfoot, although I like to think he was just taking 2012 off to wait out the Mayan Apocalypse. If you’re familiar with Noah’s output, don’t expect much deviation. He flips back and forth between fast, tongue twisting raps and a slower, more traditional flow, sometimes even showing his witch house influences with vocals that are pitch-shifted down quite a bit. His subject matter mostly tends toward the esoteric and mystical, mind-expanding drug use, and the occasional reference to rap. While Wingfoot is light on guest appearances with the only feature being Susan Gray singing the hook on “Rain,” the production credits are a more diverse selection that includes K-the-I?, Motem, Sir Pressure, Kydd, Fr<>ze, B.illing and more.

Listen here: http://noah23.bandcamp.com/album/wingfoot

Nursehella – Second Coming [album]

After taking time off to finish school, Canada’s First Lady of Nerdcore finally follows up her debut Nursehellamentary EP (2007) with her first full length. On Second Coming, her “Nurse versus the universe” shtick involves plenty of braggadocio battle raps and a second half that is almost predominantly unapologetic sex raps. While the nerdy references are few and far between, nerdcore fans will likely appreciate the mid-album interlude on which Nursehella pitches some of your favourite franchises as porno. It’s here (and on “Violent Me” and “Geekend Freakout”) that she flexes most of her nerd knowledge. Ultraklystron produces all but three songs on Second Coming, his hip hop beats influenced by electronic dance music and therefore often border on dance music themselves. The exceptions are remixed and remastered re-releases of Baddd Spellah productions, her first song ever, “Nursehellamentary”; previously unmixed “Geekend Freakout”; and “GROGB (Get Rich Or Get Bent)”.

Listen here: http://nursehella.bandcamp.com/

What to Watch:

The Extremities featuring Ambition & Relic – Around the Corner (Muneshine Remix)

Mongoika featuring Sibitt Masa, Jesse Dangerously, Thesis Sahib & Bleubird – Moksa Only

More Or Les – Big Sugar

Noah 23 – Tropical Fruit

Wolves featuring Maestro & Adam Bomb – Kings