I mentioned a while back that Rjyan (aka Cex) recently resumed his long-running diary/blog thing, and since it's been going again, he's been posting mostly long diatribes about what the world or the music world needs to do to arrive at some moment of epiphany or liberation or something like that, the vague ideal of a big cultural Nevermind moment that I don't buy into at all. But now and then I've found a kernel of something I identify with or am intrigued by in what he's saying, and this is one in particular:
From whom do we hide our nerdiration? This is a good question. It's not from the squares, because the squares have no voice. Squares don't have a real strong opinion about anything, although they occasionally try on the passions they see on television. But the heart and soul of the square is his desire to BLEND IN--- he doesn't want to call any real attention to himself, because he knows that will bring CRITICISM his way. So any time you read something in a magazine or on a website that claims to speak for the squares, it's really a nerd writing that. People whose hustle is writing=nerds. Do you know how long writing takes? It takes a fuck of a long time (sometimes weeks), and you know that nerd with the e-zine column isn't typing his shit on somebody else's laptop. To extend the metaphor for a second, self-denying nerd-writers=Pharisees, capitalizing on the guilt present in all nerds for their own benefit. Basically, all of humanity has been converted to Nerdism, they've got the Nerdist altar glowing in their homes and they pray to it regularly, but rather than show them the true way to the mountaintop, the self-denying nerd-writers have played to their basest instincts and we've got waterfalls of ill will pouring out of virtually every crack in the virtual world.
I'm kind of proud of the fact that I've managed to almost never bring up the spectre of the whole blogger/critic obsession with "rockism" and "popism," and I hesitate to do so now, but it strikes me that he's come up with a kind of different outlook on that dichotomy without meaning to and perhaps without even being familiar with that whole debate. The whole rockism/popism thing has always rung a little hollow to me precisely because the self-identified "popists" are laying claim to a certain kind of populist everyman status as a weird reverse elitism over the obscurantists, even if by very real social standards, both sides of the argument are pretty much all nerds. So, this kind of boils the two sides down to a matter of nerds and squares, instead of rockists (=nerds who revel in nerdy elitist values, who are maybe unaware of the inherent biases of those values) and popists (=nerds in squares' clothing, who understand the nerd value system and probably once subscribed to it, but have since decided to defect to some vague ideal of what the common man or working class joe believes). Anyway, I just liked his perspective on it. But then, he's also written some stuff that I think is really toxically wrong lately, so I'm not necessarily co-signing all of it.
This entry isn't really on the same topic, but rings true with me for other reasons, especially this part:
I must admit, I didn't go out of my way to hear any Bloc Party or Thrills or LCD Soundsystem before last night, and I kind of maintained this ignorant idea that their music was probably OK, just not really my thing. But now I've heard it, I've seen the videos (which I imagine are for these bands' singles, Jesus help us all) and I feel like an old Southern belle catching the vapors.
From whom do we hide our nerdiration? This is a good question. It's not from the squares, because the squares have no voice. Squares don't have a real strong opinion about anything, although they occasionally try on the passions they see on television. But the heart and soul of the square is his desire to BLEND IN--- he doesn't want to call any real attention to himself, because he knows that will bring CRITICISM his way. So any time you read something in a magazine or on a website that claims to speak for the squares, it's really a nerd writing that. People whose hustle is writing=nerds. Do you know how long writing takes? It takes a fuck of a long time (sometimes weeks), and you know that nerd with the e-zine column isn't typing his shit on somebody else's laptop. To extend the metaphor for a second, self-denying nerd-writers=Pharisees, capitalizing on the guilt present in all nerds for their own benefit. Basically, all of humanity has been converted to Nerdism, they've got the Nerdist altar glowing in their homes and they pray to it regularly, but rather than show them the true way to the mountaintop, the self-denying nerd-writers have played to their basest instincts and we've got waterfalls of ill will pouring out of virtually every crack in the virtual world.
I'm kind of proud of the fact that I've managed to almost never bring up the spectre of the whole blogger/critic obsession with "rockism" and "popism," and I hesitate to do so now, but it strikes me that he's come up with a kind of different outlook on that dichotomy without meaning to and perhaps without even being familiar with that whole debate. The whole rockism/popism thing has always rung a little hollow to me precisely because the self-identified "popists" are laying claim to a certain kind of populist everyman status as a weird reverse elitism over the obscurantists, even if by very real social standards, both sides of the argument are pretty much all nerds. So, this kind of boils the two sides down to a matter of nerds and squares, instead of rockists (=nerds who revel in nerdy elitist values, who are maybe unaware of the inherent biases of those values) and popists (=nerds in squares' clothing, who understand the nerd value system and probably once subscribed to it, but have since decided to defect to some vague ideal of what the common man or working class joe believes). Anyway, I just liked his perspective on it. But then, he's also written some stuff that I think is really toxically wrong lately, so I'm not necessarily co-signing all of it.
This entry isn't really on the same topic, but rings true with me for other reasons, especially this part:
I must admit, I didn't go out of my way to hear any Bloc Party or Thrills or LCD Soundsystem before last night, and I kind of maintained this ignorant idea that their music was probably OK, just not really my thing. But now I've heard it, I've seen the videos (which I imagine are for these bands' singles, Jesus help us all) and I feel like an old Southern belle catching the vapors.
Labels: Baltimore music, meta
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on Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 3:32 PM.
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