The NPR series All Songs Considered certainly lives up to its name. From folk to country to rock to rap, no music is excluded from its repertoire. Not even a new genre called nerdcore hip-hop.

This interesting style of music fuses hip-hop music with lyrics that sound like they are from a rhyming science-fiction novel or computer manual. "I'm a geek, spelled G-double E-K / I meet my boys in the basement about every day / Card table, comic books, and cans of coke / Then we blow out our nose after a Star Wars joke / We got style," raps mc chris (always without punctuation or capital letters) in his song "Geek Lyrics." It's not exactly Shakespeare, but it's certainly funny.

Many nerdcore rappers don't intend to be funny, but mc chris pokes fun at himself, playing characters on various Cartoon Network television programs. His most notable television work has been in the popular series Aqua Teen Hunger Force as the character MC Pee Pants. He has also appeared on Sealab 2021 and The Brak Show.

Television appearances have made mc chris one of the most popular nerdcore rappers. But don't think the rest of the crowd has missed out on marketing opportunities.  MC Frontalot, who coined the term nerdcore hip-hop, has given his songs to online comic strips, and others have given songs to online video games. I guess they know their target audience.

Appealing to a select group of people is really what nerd rap is about. One rapper, MC Hawking, is just a computerized voice made to simulate physicist Stephen Hawking's voice simulator. "I explode like a bomb. No one is spared. / My power is my mass times the speed of light squared," spouts the digitized voice in the song "E = MC Hawking."

But despite all their efforts, nerdcore rappers aren't very popular in the mainstream. There are a few good reasons for this. Their rapping alone isn't that good. But often the geeks know that. MC Frontalot proclaims himself to be the "world's 579th greatest rapper." And he's one of the better nerds.

Their popularity is also hurt by the fact that no one really wants to admit he is a nerd. So even if a Star Wars-loving, computer-hacking geek does like rap, he would probably rather listen to something about bling, grills, lollipops, laffy-taffy or whatever other candy euphemism will be used next. I'm not sure if that's for better or for worse.

But while the general nerd population denies its true identity, these rappers have embraced it. And that is at least a little admirable.