Monday, August 25, 2008

You would if you had robot ears.

Many people have heard of Jonathan Coulton, the artist who wrote "Still Alive" for Portal, as well as the famous "Code Monkey." A hilarious singer / songwriter who isn't afraid to write songs related to computer science, he also has a pretty sweet take on music piracy (see the "Already Stole It?" section on his site: http://www.jonathancoulton.com/store/downloads/).

But Jonathan isn't the only one representing for computer science. Take a look at Monzy's "So Much Drama in the PhD: http://www.monzy.com/intro/drama_lyrics.html. With lyrics like:
Your mom circulates like a public key,
Servicing more requests than HTTP.
She keeps all her ports open like Windows ME,
Oh, there's so much drama in the PhD.
How can one not love his music? Okay, so I've only listened to that one song, but I really didn't feel like hunting through his blog to find more. Really, why do some people feel the need to write irrelevant blogs than no one even reads? His last post had a measly eight comments for crying out loud.

If you listen to his song, you may catch wind of a bit of a rap war between Monzy and a MC++ (http://www.mcplusplus.com/). Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news, MC++ has two albums for free download on his site, and I can say with confidence that it is the best hardcore gangsta rap that has ever been made about coding. Ever. The bad news is that the rap war is over, and MC++ has no one to battle.

Except Max Flow, the AI program that he writes for the specific purpose of rap battling! You really need to check these songs out, there are hilarious and of amazingly high quality. These guys don't mess around. The lyrics are smart, and it takes a few sessions to get everything that they are saying. For example, "Master and Apprentice" has some biting commentary on the state of hip-hop today buried in there.

So next time your coding and listening to some pounding techno ("Are you afraid of it?" "No, I just don't like techno."), change things up a bit and listening people rap about coding, as you're coding.