MC Frontalot

MC Frontalot is the stage name of Damian Hess, a musician and author currently based in Brooklyn.
Born December 3, 1973 is a San Francisco hip hop musician and self-proclaimed "world's 579th greatest rapper." He is best known in nerdcore hip hop and video game culture, for naming the nerdcore subgenre, and performing at Penny Arcade's annual Penny Arcade Expo.
He studied English and electronic music at Wesleyan University, graduating in 1996. From 1993 to 2003, Damian rapped, sang, and acted onstage with the San Francisco Bay Area's premiere rock opera company, Emerald Rain Productions. He moved to the east coast in 2004 when his pop/rock musical Young Zombies in Love (co-authored with Frontalot keyboardist Gaby Alter) was featured at the New York International Fringe Festival (top songwriting award '04).
In late 1999, Damian pioneered the subgenre of rap music called Nerdcore Hip-hop, a once harmless movement that has metastasized into an internet phenomenon. Nerdcore's live-audience draw grows yearly, with acts such as Frontalot, MC Chris, MC Lars, and Optimus Rhyme filling increasingly larger venues on national tours. Damian's independently produced MC Frontalot tracks have earned a devoted audience and his two retail albums Nerdcore Rising (Aug 2005) and Secrets From The Future (Apr 2007) are in their fourth and third printings respectively. He is the official rapper of Penny Arcade (net’s most popular comic with 3.5 million daily readers) and headlines at their annual convention to an audience of over 5000.
MC Frontalot has been featured in Newsweek, XXL Magazine, The New York Times, Esquire, The Guardian (UK), London Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, and Wired Magazine, on NPR’s “Day to Day,” CBC’s “Definitely Not the Opera,” WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show,” and Pacifica Radio’s “Technology Bytes.” He has appeared on “Whatever” (Channel 4, UK) and “Barrio 19” (MTV Europe), and in the book Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America by Jason Tanz (Bloomsbury Press, Feb ‘07). His first contribution to Sesame Street is a song about a toilet paper factory, featured on the DVD “Elmo’s Potty Time” (Aug ’06).
A documentary feature about nerdcore hip-hop and Frontalot's 2006 national tour is in the works from Vaguely Qualified Productions (New York) and is expected in late 2007.
He towers over small hedges and ferns at a mighty 6’1.