GLOUCESTER — The stars will be out on the Canary Island of Tenerife next week, where scientists, Nobel laureates, astronauts, and artists will gather for the Starmus Festival of science, culture, and music.

Queen lead guitarist Brian May will be there, as will producer extraordinaire Brian Eno, who will deliver the keynote address to the weeklong festival. On June 29, guest of honor Stephen Hawking will be awarded a medal, after which gangsta rapper MC Hawking will perform for him.

Wait. MC who?

That’s MC Hawking, who raps about astrophysics and drive-by shootings in the legendary scientist’s computerized voice. Created by Gloucester musician Ken Lawrence, it’s a parody act that toes the line between uproariously funny and uncomfortably offensive. Or it might, that is, if not for the fact that the author of “A Brief History of Time’’ pronounced himself “flattered’’ when he heard cuts from MC Hawking’s album, “A Brief History of Rhyme.’’

The feeling is mutual. Lawrence, 45, who started the act as an office joke in 2000, never imagined he would be performing for his rap alter ego’s alter ego.

“I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around it,’’ Lawrence said in the recording studio that occupies a room in the Gloucester condominium he shares with his wife. Lawrence, who has a degree in music composition and production from Hampshire College and works as a computer programmer in Wakefield, said he’s a lifelong rock fan who got into rap in the late 1980s listening to Public Enemy’s thoughtful lyrics about race.

In his home studio, Lawrence cobbles together his beats, styled after (and sometimes borrowed from) some of the edgier classic hip-hop outfits like N.W.A,Naughty By Nature, and the Geto Boys. His lyrics combine science-inflected gangsta braggadocio (“Time to give a Newtonian demonstration of a bullet, its mass and its acceleration’’) with expostulations on Hawking’s research on black holes (“No matter how low you go/ energy can never be destroyed’’).

The songs are peppered with little digs at creationists, MIT students, and Donald Trump, and rife with explicit lyrics. They are also full of references to Hawking’s groundbreaking research on the origins of the universe and the understanding of black holes.

The joke, Lawrence insists, is neither on Hawking, nor the rare form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that limits the 74-year-old scientist to communicating with a speech synthesizer he controls with movements of his cheek.

“What I’m doing is more a parody of rap,’’ Lawrence said. “Stephen Hawking’s disability allows me to fake his voice a lot easier, and there is something additionally ludicrous about somebody who speaks with a robotic voice wanting to be a gangster rapper, but beyond that it’s not taking any particular potshots at Stephen Hawking.’’

The first tunes he posted in 2000 got hundreds of thousands of listens, and landed him a deal to make a record, but Lawrence was still worried about what Hawking would think — not that he expected his music to reach the scientist’s ears.

What a relief, then, when Hawking’s office e-mailed him in September 2000. Hawking, who slips clever little jokes into his lectures on the weightiest of themes, compared Lawrence’s parody to “Spitting Image,’’ a popular British satirical TV show.

MC Hawking also won praise from Public Enemy’s longtime publicist, Harry Allen, who wrote: “I couldn’t believe I was listening to a robot voice, flowing about thermodynamics . . . and sounding *nice*!’’

Lawrence, who also plays guitar in a cover band, says he made some money off the album, but MC Hawking has since turned into “an expensive hobby.’’

Lawrence said he spends weeks studying the science, then “50 to 100 hours’’ putting lyrics to the beat. Years ago, he found a text-to-voice program that resemble’s Hawking’s computerized voice, and he stuck with it. The company that makes the program has since gone out of business, and it only runs on an outdated Windows operating system, so he has to use an old laptop to record the voice. This he uploads to his modern recording equipment, adding music and his own voice for the chorus.

When he got the invitation to perform at Starmus, he said, it took some time for the organizers to realize “that I can’t do Stephen Hawking live.’’ Instead, a video recording of “Fear of a Black Hole,’’ — the title is a nod to Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet’’ — the tune Lawrence wrote for the event, will play on a screen with MC Hawking’s voice. Lawrence will play guitar live, and he and another rapper, MC Lars, will join in to back up the computerized voice.

As with his other titles, Lawrence said “Fear of a Black Hole’’was written out of respect for the scientist. The track uses Hawking’s latest theory — that information isn’t lost in a black hole, it’s changed — as a metaphor for getting through life’s problems.

“I hope people laugh, but I hope they gain a respect for Stephen Hawking as well,’’ Lawrence said. “He’s an astounding human being and I try to make that clear in everything I do.’’

David Filipov can be reached at David.Filipov@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davidfilipov.