m4rkim

#artist #music #geek #🌿

m4rkim is a young brazilian artist (born in 2002), that creates nerdcore music, or as it's known in portuguese: música nerd/música geek. i.e. music inspired by/that reflects themes from nerd culture: anime, manga, games and such. his style blends mostly rock/metal, trap and rap.

listening stats

m4rkim is my #1 most listened artist in the past 5 years (with 4.725 plays tracked in last.fm - last updated: sept 9th, 2024)

my favorites

a playlist with a few of my favorites: [br nerdcore] m4rkim favorites (14 songs)

a list of my most listened songs (1-50): https://www.last.fm/user/cassiuscarvalho/library/music/M4rkim/+tracks

why nerdcore

i find it fascinating how often cultural artifacts - works of fiction in general, but especially anime, manga and games (which usually reserve the right to not be as "close to reality" as other tv shows or mainstream music) can portray subjects/narratives that are deeply symbolic, philosophical and psychological. similar to devotional/ritualistic music, they're interested in conveying meta-narratives instead of just talking about immediate suffering, needs, challenges, goals that are widespread in our society today - and most other forms of media.

themes like the cycle of hatred and war, changing yourself and growing by taking multiple perspectives, the futility and profundity of many of our desires, how egocentric/infantile/traumatized our morals usually are, the oppression of modern extractive systems and lifestyles...

if you take both mainstream anime like naruto, attack on titan, chainsaw man or more niche like vagabond, serial experiments lain, evangelion, shuumatsu no valkyrie i find the kinds of reflections they (can) generate deeper than most other media i have watched. a lot of it is also just power fantasies and kids learning to make sense of the world and take responsibility for their lives and the state of the world, which have their pros and cons...

granted - m4rkim isn't the most philosophical of the nerdcore artists. he's actually one of the most literal ones - his songs often portray more his emotional interpretation of the characters and a literal storytelling of what happens in their lives - yet, he finds a way to capture musically the vibe of that character/story in a way that resonates deeply with my adolescent (and even adult) self. by the way he creates his songs, it feels like he completely "gets" it. i feel heard/understood on a deep level. (more on this later)

for a deeper/historical introduction to this genre, see the next section - an introduction to nerdcore.

a curated introductory collection

this playlist is a curated collection featuring a little bit of everything i find fascinating in the nerdcore scene in a reasonable amount of time. (5h hehe) i'm currently in the process of writing about it (and most of its songs) in more detail, and will update it here once i do so.

for now, it has 2-3 songs from many artists, a little more from my favorite ones, and a special place for cyphers (which feature artists with multiple genres/styles), that although are not my favorite to listen to continuously, i find them really cool to watch to be introduced to these new artists.

the brazilian scene is by far the biggest in the world. channels like 7 minutoz rack up 13.5M subscribers, tauz 9.3M, MHrap 3.7M, and many others in the range of millions.

if you don't speak portuguese, i've created a smaller playlist with a selection of my brazilian nerdcore favs w/ english subtitles (Xh). it also contains a few songs like henrique mendonça's songs that mix english and portuguese, like fallen hope and the iconic cursed, and also a few songs that feature collabs between brazilian and english-speaking nerdcore artists, like fabvl, halaCG, johnald.

an introduction to those new to nerdcore

if you search for nerdcore online, you'll find a description like chosic's:

"Nerdcore is a subgenre of hip-hop that focuses on themes of geek culture, such as video games, science fiction, and technology. The lyrics often contain references to popular culture and the music is characterized by fast-paced, intricate rhymes and electronic beats. The genre has gained a dedicated following among fans of nerd culture and has expanded to include elements of rock and pop music."

masterclass' "Nerdcore Music Guide" also shares a bit of the history and introduces some of the artists/precursors of the scene.

in brazil though, nerdcore really started its scene as "anime rap". mostly people rapping about a character or interpreting the story as that character (from anime/manga like naruto/dragon ball, games like GTA/the last of us, tv shows like the walking dead/game of thrones and such). i don't know much about the history of the scene in the world - from what i know, it's a reasonably small scene - people just created songs about these topics, not interpreting as the characters themselves.

in brazil, this scene grew A LOT and differently from the rest of the world. today we have the biggest nerdcore channels of the world (with over 100M/200M visualizations in some of their most famous songs). over the past ~10 years, it grew from being mostly rap, to a whole set of styles of "geek music" (how it's often called here).

the result was a new generation of young independent artists making songs in their bedroom, that got inspired by this gradual development of the scene (old-school player tauz), catapulted by 7 minutoz's hits such as the cornerstone naruto's "akatsuki rap" (220M views), the innovation of enygma (who started making "anime metal"), and the URT (a group of artists that for a long time kept releasing songs every week) which gathered a very engaged fanbase and consistently raised the bar in the last few years in terms of musicality, production and video quality (it's absolute madness what the editors do nowadays. they're basically animating entire animes out of mangas [static illustrations]).

on the musical aspect of it:

nerdcore as a genre has a much bigger focus on storytelling and interpretation than most other mainstream styles.

since artists create music about fictional universes, the way they choose to portray it - be it having a focus on the emotional/psychological aspects of the character/story or making metaphors/parallels between that world and our reality - says a lot about the artist's worldview/focus and also select/affect how the public receive it.

it's often common to have a mix of styles - a song that goes from calm/reflexive instrumentals, with ethnic elements reminding the character's theme, to parts with trap/rap influences and metal somewhere in between. i've seen the same character being interpreted as love song, a sad/reflexive song, aggressive, mocking, and sometimes all of it in one song - after all, characters/stories are complex and they often mix these things.

a personal review - why m4rkim is my #1 most listened artist:

text written in july 26th, 2024:

disclaimer: m4rkim is by far my most listened to artist in the brazilian nerdcore scene. (3x more than the second/third anirap/kaito, and 4-5x more than most others basara, oshaman, secondtime, etc) i love the guy. my analysis/reflection below is not being overly critical, but just pointing out things i really enjoy and things i think he could be even better at.

update (sept 24th, 2024): it's like m4rkim read exactly what i wrote below and decided to up his game for [murciélago - ulquiorra]. it's a great song. if it weren't for a few aspects of the mix (slightly too loud violins and a slightly too high chorus, i missed a bit more heaviness in it), it'd be my favorite song. still, it's super good and it honors how good of a character ulquiorra is.

i really like m4rkim's primarily trap/rock style, mixing a lot of flow and aggressive deliveries. it can be seen early on on songs like gon, erwin smith, and saber, and more refined later on on songs like [ichigo], kenjaku, rob lucci. and as he kept evolving, i think he really found his sound in this style and capitalized on it. his cypher hashiras x kokushibou, castelo infinito captured this spirit and was for a long time my favorite while he still hadn't released some the songs that were soon to become my favorites.

for example, my two favorite m4rkim songs - hantengu and crocodile - have nothing to do with the characters, but because of how it actually sounds/how it was delivered. the construction/build up is great and their choruses are explosive - very powerful and surprising. they kept me at the edge the whole time. gilgamesh, also one of my favorites, has a bit more of the character flair shining through - the orchestral instrumentation, the debonair demeanor, the lyrics themselves. props to him and the producers/editors!

one thing i noticed though, as i was looking through my most listened songs, i started noticing/comparing the characters they were about vs the characters in the songs i really like from other brazilian nerdcore artists.

a few of my favorite characters for a song would be like: sung jin woo and eren for some of the most epic yet meaningful/troubled stories. others like aki hayakawa (i really like rodrigo zin's and oshaman's renditions) and sasuke can have way more reflexive songs, which is not his style. sukuna and madara with the all-in glorious epic music. yet, m4rkim's renditions of them (with the exception of aki, which he doesn't have one) are hardly in my top 50 of my most listened songs from him.

in my opinion, it's a missed opportunity by him. daarui was able to capitalize on that on his songs on sukuna and satoru gojo, for example. henrique mendonça (of course), with guts and geto, as well. okabe with denji and kokushibo. anirap with eren and akaza...

sure, it's also freaking awesome to take a weak character like hantengu and elevate him with a song like m4rkim did. but also taking a badass character and making a song that lives up to their expression, is freaking awesome.

if he wants to rise to an even higher level in terms of emotional connection/storytelling, i believe these reflections provide some clues.

i also really like some of his soft-spoken, more melodic lines, like the ones in [musashi miyamoto, caminho da alma] (x:xx and y:yy). i love the trilogy of [musashi] songs, but really think some of it could be way slower-paced and more experimental compared to other characters/narratives. but also, i understand the appeal of keeping it primarily high-tempo, especially for a younger audience. even in the [eren] song i mentioned, my favorite part are the melodic/reflexive lines talking about mikasa (x:xx), which also setup for a big chorus.

i believe the same missed opportunity happened with beelzebub, which i also really like how it sounds, but i believe he could have explored a lot more the choir/ambience and make it less electronic, so it could hit more in the feels.

he does some surprising stuff at times as well, like [shaka de virgem], rob lucci itself (with some crazy cool flows and a very different texture in the chorus), chihiro (invoking a much more anirap style of singing), johnny joestar/makima (invoking a more lgbtq style), which i believe bring a great deal of novelty/freshness to it.

there's of course lots of other good/hit songs like buda, doflamingo, fushiguro toji, yoriichi, kaneki, barba branca, kaidou, the mask, lampião...

just like he was able to develop more techniques (especially for the metal stuff) in the past 2 years, i think if he's able to explore more of these aspects (melodic, ambient), he'll go even beyond. henrique mendonça and daarui are good references for this, embracing this kind of more wholistic "producer mindset" and exploring less conventional approaches.

yet again, they haven't been freakin' posting a song EVERY WEEK since basically the beginning of their channel. m4rkim is a beast in this sense. so i guess these thoughts apply for the time when/if he feels that he wants to change a bit directions and maybe dive deeper into these aspects i brought. he may well be happy continuing on this path for many years until him or his audience gets saturated, if they ever do.