MC Hawking

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MC Hawking
Birth name Ken Leavitt-Lawrence
Also known as MC Hawking, The Hawkman
Genre(s) Nerdcore hip hop
Occupation(s) rapper, songwriter, producer
Instrument(s) Text-to-speech program
Label(s) Brash Music
Associated acts Dark Matter
DJ Doomsday
Website www.mchawking.com

Ken Leavitt-Lawrence, known as MC Hawking, is a nerdcore hip hop artist who parodies gangster rap and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. MC Hawking gained some popularity in the early 2000s, largely due to the availability of his music on the Internet. Each of his raps are synthesized by the now defunct commercial text-to-speech program WillowTalk. The songs were originally released in MP3 format, but due to the popularity of the website, MC Hawking got a record deal with Brash Music to release a "greatest hits" album sometime in 2004.

Contents

[edit] Background

MC Hawking's entire body of work and his rapper persona were created by American web developer Ken Leavitt-Lawrence. The official MC Hawking website (created and maintained by Leavitt-Lawrence) is set to look like a personal fan site for the MC. From the 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 lyrics are a mixture of gangsta rap topics, science topics and Stephen Hawking quotes (such as the famous "When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun."). Stephen Hawking has said that he is "flattered, as it's a modern day equivalent to Spitting Image". [1] On the inside cover of A Brief History of Rhyme, Leavitt-Lawrence thanks Stephen Hawking "for taking this joke in the spirit that it was intended." 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 drug use.

The beats for MC Hawking are provided by DJ Doomsday. Most of the beats are samples of classic hip hop tracks, or taken from commercial royalty-free loop libraries.

He is also involved with a heavy metal group called Dark Matter — a parody of Ice T's "Body Count" — with whom he has performed such songs as "Why Won't Jesse Helms Just Hurry Up and Die", "UFT for the MC" (a parody of the Sex Pistols song "Anarchy in the UK"), and "The Big Bizang" (a parody of Kid Rock's "Bawitdaba"). He is also an occasional Song Fight! participant.

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. It included many songs that were available on the official website, plus new material (four songs and three interludes from a fictional radio interview).

The lyrics display insight into many aspects of current scientific thought:

  • "Time to give a Newtonian demonstration, of a bullet, its mass, and its acceleration." — from "All My Shootings Be Drivebys"
  • "I explode like a bomb. No one is spared. / My power is my mass times the speed of light squared." — from "E=MC Hawking"
  • "They want to have their bullshit taught in public class. / Stephen Jay Gould should put his foot right up their ass." — from "Fuck the Creationists"
  • "Noah and his ark, Adam and his Eve / Straight-up fairy stories even children don't believe / I'm not saying there's no God, that's not for me to say / All I'm saying is the Earth was not made in a day." — from "Fuck the Creationists"
  • "Look I ain't Thomas Dolby, science doesn't blind me. / Think you're smart? Form a line behind me." — from "What We Need More of is Science"
  • "In the beginning there was nothing, not even time / No planets, no stars, no hip-hop, no rhyme. / But then there was a bang like the sound of my gat; / The universe began and the shit was phat." — from "The Big Bizang"
  • "You ever drop an egg, and on the floor you see it break? / You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake. / But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true? / If you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new?" — from "Entropy"
  • "Creationists always try to use the second law / to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw: / the second law is quite precise about where it applies, / only in a closed system must the entropy count rise. / The Earth's not a closed system, it's powered by the sun. / So fuck the damn creationists! Doomsday, get my gun." — from "Entropy"
  • "I got a Ph.D in pain and a master's in disaster, / the mighty Stephen Hawking is a fucking Quake master." — from "QuakeMaster"
  • "I'll stuff you in the box like Schrödinger's cat / You'll be dead and alive until such a time as that / I check and make the wave function collapse /And if you ain't dead I'll cap your ass..." - from "Rock Out With Your Hawk Out"

[edit] Discography

  • A Brief History of Rhyme: MC Hawking's Greatest Hits (2004)
    1. "The Hawkman Cometh"
    2. "The Dozens"
    3. "Big Bizang"
    4. "Excerpt from a Radio Interview (Pt. 1)"
    5. "Entropy"
    6. "The Mighty Stephen Hawking"
    7. "Crazy as Fuck"
    8. "Bitchslap (With MC Frontalot)"
    9. "Excerpt from a Radio Interview (Pt. 2)"
    10. "Fuck the Creationists"
    11. "E=MC Hawking"
    12. "All My Shootings Be Drivebys"
    13. "UFT For The MC"
    14. "Excerpt from a Radio Interview (Pt. 3)"
    15. "What We Need More of Is Science"
    16. "GTA3"
  • Songs released in MP3 format only
    • "Led Zeppelin Medley" (no longer available)
    • "QuakeMaster"
    • "Why Won't Jesse Helms Just Hurry Up and Die?"
    • "Rock Out with Your Hawk Out" (appears on Rhyme Torrents Vol.1 )
  • Appearances

[edit] Fictional discography

As part of the parody, a fictional discography was created on the MC Hawking's Crib website. None of these albums were actually created, and any songs not listed in the above discography were never actually recorded.

  • The Hawkman Cometh EP (1992)
    1. "The Hawkman Cometh"
    2. "Big Biz-ang"
    3. "The Dozens"
  • Fear of a Black Hole (1994) (originally called A Brief History of Rhyme until Hawking's real album was given that title)
    1. "Crazy as Fuck"
    2. "The Mighty Stephen Hawking"
    3. "Nanomachine"
    4. "Black Holes"
    5. "Faster Than Light"
    6. "Why Won't Jesse Helms Just Hurry Up and Die?"
    7. "Big Biz-ang (Remix)"
    8. "Doomsday Device"
    9. "Cut It Up"
    10. "Bitch Slap"
    11. "Entropy"
    12. "Fucking Shit Up Old-school"
    13. "F.Y.M."
    14. "Bring the Noize"
  • E = MC Hawking (1997)
    1. "A Brief Dissertation on Gravitational Entropy, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle."
    2. "Fuck the Creationists"
    3. "Event Horizon"
    4. "All My Shootin's Be Drive-bys"
    5. "Space Time"
    6. "Wrong Again Albert"
    7. "What We Need More of Is Science"
    8. "Bitch Slap"
    9. "F.Y.M.A.S.M.D."
    10. "Dark Matter"
    11. "TKO"
    12. "Paradox"
    13. "E=MC Hawking"
    14. "Kick That Shit!"

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC_Hawking"
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