MC Lars Added to the Lineup

MC Lars, everyone's favorite post-punk laptop rapper, has officially been added to the lineup. Here's the thing about MC Lars - generally speaking, I feel as though I'm fairly "with it", as far as music goes. You might even call me a music nerd. I can talk for hours about obscure 1930's delta blues and its influence on all popular music of today. I can ramble on and on about the evolution of old-time music into bluegrass and the further evolution and devolution into country. I can name all of Bob Marley's children and all of the Balfa Brothers. I write one of the most popular websites about world music on the internet. I'm pretty much a hard-core music nerd, and I make it my business to know what's going on in the world and folk music scenes.

However, in a 10-minute phone conversation with MC Lars, he stumped me about 8 times. I asked him how someone was doing, and he said, "Oh, he's doing great, he's working with *Insert Band Name I Can't Remember* - you've heard of them, right?" No. No, MC Lars, I have not heard of them. Top 10 Hit, you say? Huh. As it turns out, I don't know everything. In fact, I know next to nothing about what most people my age are evidently listening to.

Now don't go thinking this makes me feel bad. I LOVE that there are people out there who geek out at the same level I do, but for totally different music. And I super-love that we have those sorts of encyclopedia-brains bringing their viewpoint to our festival. And I super-ultra-love that MC Lars is actually totally into learning about all the different stuff that we've got going on at our festival - last year, though he was only there for an evening, he made a point of seeing Nawal, Vieux Farka Touré, and Los Pochos. Cool, right?

There is a moral to this absurd, rambling story. Cultural crossover doesn't always look like what you expect it to look like. And that's the beauty of something like GrassRoots, where the crowd is as diverse as the musicians, where there are as many viewpoints as there are faces, and where we've all got something to learn from each other.