Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you: the first-ever rap review here on theLogBook.com. But don’t assign too much street cred to me, for this is incredibly geeky rap. The whole humorous premise behind MC Hawking is as follows: what if Professor Stephen Hawking was moonlighting as a gangsta rapper? If you’re wondering what in the world that would sound like, you may already know more than you think: MC Hawking – the brainchild of parody webmaster Ken Leavitt-Lawrence – sounds like the voice synthesizer used by the real Professor Hawking (who, if truth be told, doesn’t go around popping caps on anyone’s ass). The lyrics are a combination of the prerequisite topics of gangsta rap – getting even against one’s rivals by any means available, drug deals, the ever-popular topic of bitches, etc. – and real live honest-to-God theoretical physics. MC Hawking tries to explain the basic tenets of entropy, and then busts out the refrain “You down with entropy? Yeah, you know me!”
It’s hard to explain the appeal to those who perhaps just don’t “get” this kind of humor – I, for one, file this under the same category as Ben Folds’ ironically pretty cover of a certain Dr. Dre tune – but if I’m in the mood for MC Hawking, this stuff is hysterical. It’s not something to play with the kiddo within earshot, to be sure, but it’s damned funny – and word has it that a certain Professor Hawking himself is fully aware of the joke and thinks it’s funny too. (C’mon, we’re talking about the same Stephen Hawking who wanted to do a guest shot on Star Trek: The Next Generation and once appeared in a Red Dwarf special. Aside from being one of the most brilliant human beings to have emerged from the 20th century, Stephen Hawking, God bless him, is cool. I’d like to think I could hang on to my sense of humor in his circumstances.)
Now, of course, there will be those who just don’t find the humor in “Hawking”‘s profanity-laden tirades about taking out rival physicists from MIT in a drive-by, or things like the skit in which he beats Moby senseless on general principle (presumably, he’s trying to see if fission initiates, in which case we really are all made of stars). But it’s hard for me not to be dragged out of a downer mood by howlingly funny tracks like “Big Bizang”, “E=MC Hawking” or “Entropy”. Others, admittedly, miss the mark – I find myself routinely skipping “Bitchslap” and “The Dozens”. This is rap for the cool geeks, the people who took time out from high school science homework to memorize Monty Python movies (not that I’m talking about myself there, mind you…I was too busy memorizing Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes in high school).
Most of this material has been available for some time on the “official MC Hawking fan site“, but in 2004 several of the raps from that site appeared with a few new skits and songs on this “greatest hits” album (in actuality, the 
first and only physical CD that “MC Hawking” has released). This is one of those things where I vote with my money, sort of like buying the Homestar Runner DVDs, to show my support for not-quite-mainstream talent – and after you check it out for yourself, if you’ve got even one wickedly funny bone in your body, I have a feeling you’ll be doing the same.
- The Hawkman Cometh (3:01)
- The Dozens (2:04)
- The Big Bizang (2:53)
- Excerpt From A Radio Interview, part 1 (1:14)
- Entropy (3:22)
- The Mighty Stephen Hawking (2:00)
- Crazy As Fuck (2:23)
- Bitchslap (4:25)
- Excerpt From A Radio Interview, part 2 (1:41)
- Fuck The Creationists (2:23)
- E=MC Hawking (3:27)
- All My Shootings Be Drive-Bys (3:36)
- UFT For The MC (3:28)
- Excerpt From A Radio Interview, part 3 (1:20)
- What We Need More Of Is Science (2:42)
- GTA3 (2:56)
Released by: Brash Music
Release date: 2004
Total running time: 42:55
