Nerdcore and the New York Dolls
Written on January 16, 2007
I had a bitch of a time trying to sleep last night. At one point I got up and ended up flipping through music critic Frank Kogan’s Real Punks Don’t Wear Black. In an essay where he talks about the times he saw the New York Dolls back in the 70s he writes the following paragraph,
That was a year when a few crucial critics (Christgau, Paul Nelson, Dave Marsh) liked the Dolls, but most others and the music press in general had a general attitude of contempt. “All flash and no music” was what they said. I remember constantly reading putdowns. One jerk I think it was in Rolling Stone joked that the Dolls were really dental students who only dressed that way for the money. This was part of the atmosphere too, part of the event for me, standing up and dancing, withstanding the contempt.
And of course, that was part of what was happening with the Dolls. Yeah, I’m sure they wanted to be famous, but the contempt ran both ways. The fact that the established music media didn’t get the Dolls just showed how out of step they were. It created an elite group that anyone was open to join, but few bothered to. Entrance was simple, if you dug the Dolls you were cool. If you didn’t, then you were out of the loop. To borrow a metaphor from the wrong time period, the bus came by and you either got on or you didn’t.
After reading the quote though, I started wondering about that idea though. Taking all the negative press and dismissals and flipping them around. For those in the know about the Dolls. For the select few who ‘got it.’ Magazines didn’t write bad reviews because the Dolls weren’t great. The wrote bad reviews because they didn’t get it.
Specifically, I started wondering if something like that could be pulled of in the Nerdcore scene to fight the ‘those wacky nerd rappers’ stories (nod to Benjamin Bear for the quote). I’m not sure if it would work though. There doesn’t seem to be the necessary level of contempt to pull something like this off.
OK, there’s more to this idea, but I’m operating on three hours sleep and I don’t think I’m going to last much longer. Instead of going into a half coherent rant about post-structuralism and identity politics and the glory of geek kind, I’m just going to stop this here.
Nighty Night.
I think that there’s an interesting dynamic between the nerdcore community and the “haters†that, while it certainly doesn’t render the genre impervious to harm, does make it a bit more bulletproof.
Much like the Dolls, the nerdcore ethic is rooted in a duality of flash and substance, of music and mechanism. The show is the music and the music is the show; the whole package goes together, and separating one from the other is often problematic. Just as Thunders and Johansen caricatured themselves through their outlandish dress – the NYD were, after all, a collection of refreshingly sloppy, over-the-top personalities expressing themselves musically; the makeup and torn fishnets merely took these defining traits to the next (il)logical level of visual representation – Frontalot and Doc Pop play up their inherent nerdiness through appearance and mannerism.
The difference, and the defense mechanism to which I originally referred, lies in the nerdiness of the community and its denizens. When a journalist or scenester dismissed the Dolls, it was often in the spirit of condescension: “This is a gimmick†or “These guys are talentless.” The Dolls continued undeterred, because the boys and their fans understood that they were merely too far ahead of the rock ‘n’ roll curve for the masses to take note. They were, in a sense, hyper-hip.
Nerdcore, consequently, is nega-hip. When a journalist (or a forum troll, for that matter) states “This is lame†of “This is obviously a joke,†who are we to argue? These admissions simply serve to signal that the parties involved just don’t get it.
The fact that the genre is rooted in ostracism is the perfect out! It’s not supposed to be cool in a traditional sense. Furthermore, if you don’t get it and assume it’s all some ironic hoax, that doesn’t make the scene wrong; it merely makes it that much more a haven for the marginalized geeks for which it was intended.
Whereas the New York Dolls relied on their ability to redefine what cool was, nerdcore goes the opposite direction. By embracing what is patently uncool, geek music actively thumbs its collective nose at notions of hipster propriety. Those who try to quantify it in relation to such serve simply to demonstrate their own staggering level of misunderstanding.
You know, that occurred to me after I had posted my message. Specifically the idea that being a geek means that you don’t need to be cool.
A lot of stuff here, you’ll probably find, is just me working things out in my head in a public space.
Or then again, may be I shouldn’t post when I should be in bed. Kinda like tonight for instance. :)
Interesting. While I largely agree with Z, I think that the Dolls and Nerdcore are ultimately in the same space. In both cases you have a bunch of people saying, essentially, “OK, forget what everyone else is doing. New rules.” The advantage NC has is that the core audience has been doing that for their whole lives anyway, so they don’t have to be sold on the idea.