Editor's note: 3OH!3 may have lost to Lady Gaga for best new artist at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, but the duo had already caught the eye of many fans last year. The following is a Q&A with Nathaniel Motte, half of 3OH!3, from October 2008.

Boulder may conjure visions of snow bunnies and jam bands for most people, but Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman are determined to stick their city on the map for a different reason.

Thursday at Pipeline Café, they'll show why.

The party-rap duo known as 3OH!3 is on the rise with a grimy, grungy debut album ("Want") that pulls heavily from crunk and electro.

In recent years, they've been inciting sweaty young fans to throw faux gang signs and sing along to lines like "Shush, girl, shut your lips/Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips."

Their single "Don't Trust Me" went platinum and cracked the top 10.

Motte sat down with Metromix to discuss beat-making, partying and parodying.

You and Sean met in physics class. Were you good students?

Yeah, I actually graduated summa cum laude-like 3.95, I think. Sean did an English major and math minor and I think he graduated with a 3.93 or something like that. So, yeah, we were both really good students.

If you guys are just out at a club or at someone else's concert, are you two still the party starters? Is that strictly stage persona?

We're not going (crazy) every second of our lives. [laughs] I mean, it is a persona and it is something that we adopt and can quickly get into when we have shows. I think in life we're just a couple of dudes who like to have fun. We're not wasted and throwing up all the time with tons of babes all over — not by any means. It's mostly dudes hanging around.

But there's a lot of girl drama on the disc. Have any of the real-life inspirations ever nailed you for putting them in a song?

Not too much. We definitely draw from some specific life experiences in our songs, and Sean does a little more of the lyrics than I do, but I think it's mostly witty, sassy stuff that can be applied to a lot of different aspects of our lives. But, yeah, for one reason or another, a lot of that comes out as based around chicks.

There's a tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top quality to much of "Want." Most of your fans who throw up gang signs are presumably not in gangs. Does that make it all a parody on some level?

There's an important distinction that we draw: rather than making fun of music, we're having fun with music. Coming out of the scene we came out of, we felt sometimes that it was taboo to have fun. Music had to be so heavy. We want to have fun with the (stuff) we do -whether that's rap or that's electro. We're dead serious about the music we make. We try to make music that's new and different and progressive. But one of our main motivating factors is to have fun.