The Last Emperor Remains Hip-Hop’s Nerd Pioneer

I’ve said this once but loving saying it repeatedly, hip-hop as a genre and an art form invited pop culture to the cool kid’s table. Lemme say it again, Hip-hop gave nerd culture and fandom a safe space to exist. There’s even a subculture of hip-hop called nerdcore. Personally, I believe hip-hop emcees/rappers deserve more credit for the way they’ve incorporated nerd culture. The Last Emperor is one of, if not the main artists that deserves that credit. Whenever I talk about the examples of an emcee letting the nerd flag fly on a hip-hop track, The Last Emperor’s Secret Wars tracks are always my first reference. My man had emcee battling comic book characters. That’s fucking genius. The Last Emperor even has an entire espionage-based track called Echo Leader that has an entire espionage theme running through the song. Don’t tell me hip-hop don’t go for this nerd culture shit when Last Emperor out here doing work. So imagine my surprise when I found out he was still doing that work with an entirely new album, Lord of the Fly.

Listen, I was minding my business googling why beavers build damns when my friend Ingamar sent me the Lord of the Fly album to listen to produced by Haak Filmore and said, “The Last emperor is a dope rapper who makes star wars references and other nerdy shit and it reminded me of you.” When I read the name Last Emperor and saw this was an album release in 2019, I screamed. It was a scream of excitement as well as one of anger at not having caught wind…