The cicadas are here, along with a new rap about the insects from local hip hop artist MC Bugg-Z.
“Brood X-cellence” is a deep, rhyming dive into the entomology, science, and origins of Brood X, the periodic cicadas that have just emerged from their 17 year old slumber underground.
Lines like “I’ve chilled underground with my friends to sip root juices” and “It’s a fitness thing, you experience the saturation of predators” will surely flap wings and shoot red eyes.
The song was written and performed by MC Bugg-Z, who isn’t some old bug-loving underground hip-hop artist. He is a entomologist and a biologist who works for Fairfax County.
“I’m part of the Environmental Health Division of the Fairfax County’s Department of Health and within the Environmental Health Division we have the disease-carrying insect program,” said Andy Lima. “This is my normal, real job.”
Lima has been writing and recording underground hip-hop with an emphasis on intelligent lyric writing since his college days in the mid-2000s.
“It’s more about the rhymes than the beats,” said Lima. “I love to convey the knowledge of the things I love and the world I know … by putting it into hip-hop song form.”
In Lima’s case, these are mistakes, and this isn’t his first foray into the nascent insect rap genre.
In 2016 he published “Zika 101” to protect against pathogenic mosquitoes. In 2018 there was “Tick-Check 1-2” about checking for ticks and avoiding Lyme disease, followed a year later by “West Nile Story”.
Although cicadas are not known to transmit disease, Lima couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a new song about a beetle.
“Brood X-cellence” is kind of a remix or continuation of a cicada rap that he wrote in 2004 when the Brut last appeared. He was a student at Indiana University at the time, and the noise of the cicadas was indeed heard in the background of the recording.
“I just wanted to release this album one more time this year and I felt like there were things about the song that I wanted to change, new information that I wanted to include, and some mistakes,” said Lima. “I’ve learned a few things in the last 17 years … Now the focus is much more on biology than on the spectacle itself.”
When writing songs, Lima takes a backward-looking approach. He thinks about how he would like to end a line and then finds a suitable rhyme.
“I am not afraid of the scientific words because they are polysyllabic,” said Lima. “Often times you can find a way to rhyme them or even define some of these terms [in the rhyme]… like predatory satiety. “
It took about two weeks to write, revise, and record Brood X-cellence. The beat was provided by Kelton Williams, another Fairfax County employee who Lima met while helping with the COVID-19 emergency response.
“He’s a great musician,” said Lima. “As soon as I hear it [his beat]I thought, ‘Oh man, this is going down.’ “
The main takeaway that Lima wants to give people from the song is that this cicada takeover is an incredibly rare and amazing occurrence.
“It’s a fleeting event, a miracle of nature,” he said. “It really only occurs in the eastern half of the United States and nowhere else in the world … It is only so rare that the public is overwhelmed by insects.”
He hopes his bug rap will educate, entertain, and allow people to have a little fun after a difficult year.
As the temperatures warm up, especially in the evening, it is expected that the cicadas will pop up in large numbers within a few days and want to play their own song.
“We’ll really see the climb that is right behind,” said Lima. “So, hopefully my song is well tuned.”