Member Rajeev Bajaj has written and produced what is quite possibly the world's first rap album dedicated to engineering: Geek Rhythms. With it, he hopes to convince high school kids that engineering is cool.

"Geek Rhythms is a thinking version of rap music as opposed to a purely emotional one," he says.

The idea for the rap album came to Bajaj during a visit to his native India in December 2003 when he noted the contrast between how engineers are regarded in his home country and in the United States. In India, engineering is a highly desirable career, whereas in the United States, it isn't considered cool to be thought of as a geek. Bajaj wanted to change that, and though he had no formal training, he thought he could do it with music.

While on that visit to India, Bajaj met with an engineering student and professional musician to brainstorm the idea of an engineering rap album. In January 2004, Bajaj returned to his home in California and wrote the lyrics for four songs. Then he worked over the Internet with a pair of Indian engineer/musicians—one a rapper calling himself Jasz, the other a musician going by the name of Rikki, who plays guitar for a band called Euphoria—to compose and perform the music.

Bajaj, chief executive of SemiQuest, a start-up in Fremont, Calif., that's developing a new way to polish silicon wafers, registered his own label, RLPK Records, and produced a four-song CD with about US$15 000 of his own money.

"My music is a mix of hip-hop, some pop, and a little bit of funk," Bajaj says. "It's freewheeling, because we had to meld the music to go with the lyrics."

Bajaj had not been a fan of rap when he began his project, but he immersed himself in that world by listening to artists such as Eminem. "I was impressed with the style of rap," Bajaj says. "Rappers tend to have a lot of raw energy, and their songs are delivered with strong emotion."

Bajaj applied that energy and emotion to words that he hopes will "sell" engineering. "Enjoy the Ride," for example, is dedicated to computer engineering. Here's a sample: 

In a machine made of silicon and steel

My brothers in mechanical, electrical, and chemical fields

Created a chip with 50 million transistors

Lots of capacitors and resistors.

"Free Energy" takes on entropy and how energy is made. Bajaj came up with this as he pumped his car with gas at a filling station:

Making gas from crude takes a lot of distillation, dude

Next time you fill your tank, remember it used to be crude.

"Metamorphosis" celebrates the mechanical engineer and how inventions like the airplane, the air conditioner, and spacecraft have changed the world:

My crafts landed on the moon and Mars

There ain't no place that's too far

I make machines do what people can't

Crush a mountain or dig in sand.

"Geek Dreams" follows the growth of an engineer from learning math and Newton's laws of motion. It ends with the lines:

I am a quiet man

Do more with my hands

I made the airplane, car, and motorcycle

The refrigerator and air conditioner too

I made the calculator and computer too

'cause math is not something everybody can do.

About 1000 copies of Geek Rhythms have been sold so far for US $11.98 each, mainly by word of mouth. Bajaj is almost out of his first batch of CDs, so he's getting ready to burn a new batch. Slowly, his CD is being picked up by college radio stations such as KZSU at StanfordUniversity. It also has been championed by Senior Member Wayne Bequette, an engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., who wants to play it during the university's commencement ceremony. The disk also was written about in the San Jose Mercury News, the Seattle Times, and XXL, a magazine for hip-hop music fans. Now Bajaj is working with the multimedia department at Ohlone College, in Fremont, to produce a three-dimensional animation video of the "Geek Dreams" track.

For more information on Geek Rhythms, visit http://www.RLPKrecords.com.