In the three years since he walked away from his job as a lawyer to make music full time, Eugene Ahn -- better known as rapper Adam WarRock -- has carved out a niche in the nerdcore community, rapping about superheroes and spaceships with ferocious sincerity. So far, he's been something of a blunt instrument, propelling himself along mostly on raw talent, enthusiasm, and a work ethic that's a superpower in itself. Now, with the release of his third full-length album, The Middle of Nowhere, he's proven that he's got not just heart but chops to match.
Adam WarRock may be easiest to classify as "nerdcore," and he's performed alongside genre icons like MC Chris and MC Frontalot (the latter is featured on "Salieri," the final track of The Middle of Nowhere), but he's always chafed at the reductionist overtones of the label. Instead, he prefers the term "Silver-Age Hip-Hop," a nod not only to the second wave of American comics, but also to the comparable era of hip-hop where WarRock situates his work and that of his contemporaries.
Superheroes, video games, and genre media are ongoing motifs in WarRock's work, but not its focus: Instead, WarRock uses those points of popular reference as lenses for content that's often deeply personal. Interweaving pop-culture touchstones with his own story is a strategy WarRock has been working for years, but in The Middle of Nowhere, his voice has matured into a powerful and precise instrument. The album isn't polished so much as burnished: There's no veneer. The shine is all substance.
WarRock is notoriously prolific, and his previous albums have been enthusiastic but diffuse. Here, he's retained the frank intensity that defined his earlier releases, but tempered and focused from explosion to laser scalpel. The Middle of Nowhere is deliberately crafted and carefully curated, and the result is the seamless narrative cohesion of a concept album, a progressive escalation with devastating impact. This is Adam WarRock grown up.
The album opens with "Nowhere," a dark, strange monologue of frustrated stasis, written and performed by The Venture Brothers voice actor James Urbaniak. It's a weird, sinister spin on a daily grind, laying the foundation for the arc of the album as Urbaniak's narrator chafes against and finally abandons his corporate prison. "I could walk out of here," he says, in slow recognition. "I could do anything."
It's a theme echoed again and again throughout the album -- the imperative to and cost of freedom -- but nowhere more directly than "Shoulda Beens," which explores WarRock's decision to shelve his hip-hop aspirations in favor of the more practical path of law school, then abandon a successful legal career to become a full-time rapper. "Shoulda Beens" is a defiant anthem in defense of the road less taken, stripped of naïveté and pipe dreams.
The other side of "Shoulda Been" is "This Is How You Die (On the Internet)," a scathing look at the impact of fan entitlement and the frenetic Internet economy on artists, featuring Schafer the Darklord and int80 of Dualcore. This is territory that's been covered before -- MC Lars's "Black and Yellow T-Shirts," featuring MC Frontalot, is one notable example -- but "This Is How You Die" is a darker and more personal examination of its impact on artists, and the medium in general.
Throughout The Middle of Nowhere, there is a push-and-pull between hope and cynicism; perseverance against external pressure and the resignation of recognizing intrinsic limits. It's a theme that comes up again and again. Sometimes hope reigns, as in the triumphant "B.S.F.X." -- short for "Batman Sound Effects" -- and the wryly romantic "Internet Crush"; elsewhere, it's crushed flat, as in the villain anthem "Sinestrocore" and the bittersweet "Nuclear Family." Each layer builds on the last: Stand-alone songs grow into diptychs and triptychs; tracks that seem simplistic out of context are inverted and crenellated when they take their place in the album's progression.
The climax is "Salieri," a heartbreaking, breathtaking track featuring nerdcore pioneer MC Frontalot as a brash Mozart played against WarRock's Salieri -- a composer seasoned enough to know true genius when he hears it and recognize that it's forever out of his own reach. Composed from what WarRock saw as a point of creative and commercial plateau, "Salieri" sharpens the collective themes of The Middle of Nowhere into a single, devastating dilemma: the fear that all of the sacrifice and sweat will end not in masterpiece but mediocrity. It's the backbeat of doubt in every artist's head, the insatiable whisper of "What if this is all for nothing?"
Ultimately, the quality of "Salieri" answers its own question. The path Adam WarRock has charted for himself may be steep, but if The Middle of Nowhere is any indication, mediocrity is nowhere on the map. The Silver Age of hip-hop has arrived.
