Edinburgh based comedian MC Hammersmith is the world’s leading freestyle rapper to emerge from the ghetto of middle-class West London and is set to release his debut single ‘G.I. Joe’ on 31st July, with an accompanying video. This comes just ahead of a month long run at the Edinburgh Fringe in August with his new live show ‘Straight Outta Brompton’. This single is taken from his forthcoming debut album ‘Mother’s Fettuccine’ on 6th October via Distro Kid.
“As a comedian, I always write my raps with punchlines first, then work backwards to fill in the gaps. I wanted to take a different approach with this track and prioritise flow over punchlines. So, with ‘G.I. Joe’ there are certainly bars with punchlines, but they emerged organically as a side-effect of trying to write a track continuous flow. This is my favourite track on the entire album, as it was extremely freeing to write in this manner. The first four bars sum up the lack of premise: No pretention of realness, no premises or no limits, no thought or justification, just bars for three minutes”. MC HAMMERSMITH
MC Hammersmith (a.k.a. Will Naameh) was born to an English mother and a Syrian father. He attended an all-male, middle class private school in Hammersmith. After escaping this, he took up improv classes and started performing freestyle rap comedy. Although technically mixed race, his middle class English accent and pale skin tone means he has always passed for white. This, combined with his awkward personality, made for the perfect framing device to draw comedy from his hop hop performances.
He has a Master’s degree in Linguistics, specializing in phonology, from the University of Edinburgh. He was studying at the same time he started rapping. His Linguistics expertise helped him become a full-time freestyle rapper, as he combined his love of hip hop with his academic studies into the mechanics of rhyming.
Since then, he has performed at Fringe and comedy festivals all around the world, headlined at major comedy clubs across the UK, and has won multiple comedy awards for his freestyle rap performances. Being a freestyle rapper meaning he raps spontaneously, unscripted, with absolutely no preparation and at lightning speed. The lyrics and rhymes of his raps are 100% improvised.
He also has OCD – in particular to do with obsessive thoughts. He has since discovered one of the benefits of OCD was developing an obsession with rhyming: if he had a thought of a rhyme, he wrote it down. He now has his own personal rhyming dictionary (and memorised it), and at last count it was 15,000 words long!
He writes and performs scripted hip-hop comedy. His video ‘Posh British Boy Raps in Car’ was a viral hit gaining over 10 million views on social media. Since then, he has released several more scripted hip hop comedy videos, that also went viral. He is also a writer for acclaimed YouTube web series ‘Epic Rap Battles of History’.
Outside of rapping, MC Hammersmith trained in improv at Second City and iO Chicago, the Annoyance Theatre in Chicago, and UCB New York. He regularly performs improvised comedy shows in one of the UK’s leading improv comedy shows including Spontaneous Potter: The Unofficial Improvised Parody. He has also supported comedy big wigs Jason Manford and John Bishop on tour.
WATCH MC HAMMERSMITH IN ACTION:
FREE STYLE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb0omXkeChw
POSH BOY RAPS IN A CAR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASpIdrjJ6pk
LISTEN TO G.I.JOE: https://soundcloud.com/mc-hammersmith/10-g-i-joe/s-9JPog8zvoYI
