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My wife bought me tickets to M.C. Frontalot's Northampton show at the Iron horse on the 25th. I'm very much looking forward to the show, despite the fact that it starts at 10pm. It's gonna be a late night.

I know that I don't have many readers of this blog familiar with The Front's music, but I figure I'd lay out my favorite tracks of his as a sort of set list wishlist. Here are the songs I really hope that he does at the concert. The nerd pop culture in the following paragraphs may be far more than most of you are able to withstand, so proceed at your own risk.

• Penny Arcade Theme - I hit L-shift-O to the quote and then dollar, if you know the DIR of the nerdcore rhyme, you holler The chorus is a direct reference to the Commodore 64, but the song overall is a tribute to Penny-Arcade.
• Bragadoccio - perhaps my favorite song that Frontalot has. In the time-tested style of bragging rappers, Frontalot throws around brags like I stand seventy-seven feet tall, I've got eight balls, and all of y'all are subject to my thrall. The rhymes he comes up with and the way he delivers them are just amazing.
• Secrets From The Future - This song is about encryption, and uses a lot of elaborate language to basically state that no matter how advanced your encryption is today, tomorrow's computers will be able to brute force their way through them with ease. It's just a lot of fun to hear The Front rap about encryption algorithms.
• Black Box - One of Front's more political songs, Black Box is about vote fraud, an issue that I personally find hugely important. Aside from that, the song just rocks. The record scratching just works so well here.
• Final Boss - Another contender for my favorite song of his, the title track from Frontalot's Final Boss is the first song of his I ever heard, during the final credits of the first Penny Arcade video game. Sung from the perspective of a video game's final boss taunting the game's protagonist, Final Boss subtly references one of CATS's famous nerd quotes from Zero Wing. How could I not love that?
• Charisma Potion - Although I was initially jarred and somewhat bothered by the opening line of "Fuck you, look at my cool hat", it's grown on me. This song is about the escapism offered by tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons. The aforementioned cool hat is a +8 helm of glamour. And speaking as one who was consistently chosen last for kickball in 5th grade, I can totally identify. The song actually discusses that.

Front also has a number of songs that I love for the musical riffs and vocals on the chorus, but I can't expect those to be as good live as they are on studio recordings. I love the southern rock style riffs in Origin of the Species, the harmonies in the chorus of A Little Bit Broad, and the steel drums in Forbidden Planet, but I don't expect to hear any of those tunes at the show.