A news item appeared in IEEE spectrum magazine:
Link
Excerpts from the article:
Geek Rhythms
By Tekla S Perry
Can rapping make engineering hip? Semiconductor engineer Rajeev Bajaj thinks it can
 | Geeks. Nerds. Gearheads. These are the words that typically label engineers today, at least those in the United States. Hip? Cool? Unlikely. Back in 1989, when he left his native India for graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, Rajeev Bajaj discovered that his choice of chemical engineering as a career was decidedly unhip. Law, business, medicine—these fields were revered, but engineering got no respect. That never seemed fair to him. So in late 2003, after nine years as a successful developer of advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes, he decided to do something about it. “I figured that in a typical high school, you had the geeks at one end and at the other end you had the rappers, the rock bands—those kids were in the cool crowd,” Bajaj says. “So if you could get the geeks rapping, you’d close the distance between the two.” Bajaj had never listened to a lot of rap. He isn’t proficient on a musical instrument, and he doesn’t know much about music production. But he figured his writing skills weren’t bad, and his years in high tech had taught him that you can outsource just about anything. |
|
In January 2004, Bajaj wrote lyrics for four songs. In October, the first CDs came off the pressing line. Today Geek Rhythms has sold 2000 copies at a list price of US $12 each. An additional 300 people have downloaded the audio tracks from iTunes. And an accompanying music video that features three-dimensional computer graphics is now also available for purchase online [for a sample, see http://spectrum.ieee.org/sep06/geekrap]. (The above news was forwarded by Nitin Mohan, ECE 1999) | |