Alright thumbs up, let’s do this Leeeeroooooooyyy MmmmmmmJennnnnnnnnnkins!
This glorious moment from 2005 is the touchstone for much of what the modern day internet is at its core: buncha dudes trolling the shit out of people they may or may not really know solely for the schadenfreude, if for any reason at all. Since then, streaming, social media, memes, and a shitty dudes have made trolling exponentially worse and the internet a harsh place to be.
But that is why it is important to latch onto the things that are unequivocally great. And luckily for us Mega Ran, one of our favorite nerdcore originators, has always used the web to deliver positivity imbued hip-hop with invigorating flows and video game references for days. His latest masterpiece? An entire mixtape that mashes up lyrics about Warcraft and beats from classic Wu-Tang tracks.
From the initial “Orcs Vs Men”, which interpolates Wu-Tang’s “Meth Vs Chef,” to “Wowhead,” the 7-track tape features Ran and his accomplice K-Murdock acrobatically negotiating two fandoms that have some of the most diehard fans in the world. Sometimes it is a little cheesy, but mostly it bangs and has a sense of humor about itself. “Throughout the many years of Warcraft, tales abound of heroes…this is however, is not one of those stories,” begins the best track on the album “Leeeeeeeroy!”, which of course, is an oral history of our beloved Leroy Jenkins. If you stick around long enough, you get a full audio rip of the Leroy incident, which is still as funny as it was 11 years ago.
For more from Mega Ran, peep our conversation about what it means to be a music nerd last year at Comic Con.
Image: Mega Ran
Matt Grosinger is the music editor of Nerdist and never thought he would see the day that someone mashed up the Wu-Tang Clan with Warcraft. You can follow him on Twitter, @MattGrosinger.
