I went to high school in the 1990s; my peers were the first generation of children raised by bourgeois bohemians.1 Our parents lived by the principle that you could walk with one arm around the shoulder of the avant-garde and another around the shoulder of the establishment, drunk on art and money. You could practice law or run a foundation and still exercise the creative impulse in the placement of your rock garden or in letters to the editor or the Talking Heads song you played at your second wedding in a renovated industrial structure. I remember watching, at sixteen, my father get remarried, after weeks of macrobiotic dieting, in the Manhattan offices of the foundation where he worked. I was assigned to playing songs on a digital keyboard while people mingled at the reception, and we’d settled the repertoire carefully.
“Do not play ‘Come on Baby, Light My Fire,’” my father calmly instructed. “Do not play ‘Come on Baby, Light My Fire.’”
As I sat there playing “Love Me Two Times,” I watched one of the dudes from Girls Against Boys, a band whose bass player is now a book editor, file in with one of my father’s co-workers; I recognized him from a poster my friend had on the wall of his boarding school dorm room. After the ceremony, everybody danced to a program of music distinguished by its hybridity, its mix of jazz, rock, jazz-rock, dance, and dance-rock, black music and white music. Being sixteen, I thought to myself: How do I rebel against this? How does my generation do something new? How do we construe this epoch as a rotting husk adrift on dark waters, so thatwe can make our own creative endeavors seem romantic?
One answer is purism. When eclecticism is your parents’ thingyou revisit old genres and deliberately maintain their integrity (these genres may have once themselves been considered hybrids, but a really long time ago). Freak folk is the rock-criticism name for my generation’s exploration of folk music. New garage means my generation’s take on mid-1960s guitar rock. Nu wave means my generation’s take on early punk and new wave. In these albums, there is no hip-hop or jazz or Texas swing or house or any of the other flavors previous generations loved to mix. The sort-of-true clichés about what hipsters like—trucker caps, mustaches, Pabst Blue Ribbon, mullets—play with the idea of old school. They connote sophistication and cosmopolitanism by screaming, “We are not cosmopolitan! We are not culturally sophisticated!” This is an anti- Bobo trend, and one aspect of it is the flowering of nerdiness as an aesthetic.
To understand how the nerdiness aesthetic works, let’s go way back to 1950s Norman Mailer. In 1957, Norman Mailer wrote an essay called “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” His argument was that rebellious white people were learning from an oppressed, constantly endangered sector of the population— black people—how to behave in a time of conformity and fear of the atom bomb, in the wake of a war that proved the inhumanity of governments. “The Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,” he wrote, “and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the pleasures of the body.” The Negro, in other words, was used to living under threat (Mailer believed), and so by adopting his mentality white hipsters could find a way to preserve that which was precious in their souls during the atomic age.
What we have right now, in Brooklyn, the Bay Area, Portland, East Los Angeles—neighborhoods where bourgeois young people work at magazines, movie studios, TV shows, Web sites and advertising, so that cultural trends work like weather at sea, offering the newcomers a chance to prove themselves, upending the complacent— is a similar choice on the part of the privileged to identify with the outsider. The outsider in this case is the nerd, because nerds are people incapable of, or at least averse to, riding cultural trends. When your greatest fear is that you will become a loser because your intuition will fail to keep up with tastes, you embrace the nerd like a little harmless teddy bear who’s the one creature in the whole wide world who would never do anything to hurt you.
This doesn’t mean that being a nerd is like being black, let alone being black in the 1950s. (Mailer’s account of being black in the 1950s is maybe sketchy anyway.) It means that nerds are a group by definition incapable of riding trends the ways that people in the creative professions need to ride trends. Nerds are the outsiders that hipsters gesture toward as a way of signaling an awareness and rejection of those forces that shape their lives.
The fake nerd, like the white Negro, is a way of dealing with constant threat. The threat, in this case, is a lot milder than that of nuclear war, but it’s the single largest threat that hangs over the lives of creative professionals in major cities: losing momentum in your career, losing the aura of an up-and-comer, acquiring the odor of failure. In practical terms, losing your job or losing some or all of your freelance jobs, acquiring a reputation for “struggling” that turns into pariah status (one of the worst features of life in the creative professions is that one professional mishap or gap between jobs can make you a perceived failure and this scent can repel potential employers and render you an actual, quantifiable failure). The nature of work in the media, broadly defined, is that it’s insecure and transient. Survival depends on maintaining a register of acquaintances who think you’re good at what you do, think you’re cool, want to hire you, have the power to do so, and haven’t been rejected by you sexually. There’s often careerist hustle in the depths of friendships, even when the surface is calm. Nerds, by contrast, go through life getting advanced degrees and being recruited and applying for things, learning rules from textbooks. Sometimes, to the media/entertainment industry’s young, sensitive, subproletariat, that sounds like Shangri-La. On the streets of major cities and college towns, you see the bulky glasses, the cardigans, the high pants, the Loopnerish plastic barrettes. These are tributes to nerdiness.
There is a new version of Richard Yates’s immortal couple in Revolutionary Road, the Wheelers. They live in Park Slope, or Silver Lake, or Wicker Park. “God,” they sometimes think, “in a way, wouldn’t it be kind of nice to be an engineer in the fifties? Not really with all that sexism and conformity and general attitude of fascism, you know? And discomfort about sexuality? But just not trying to be someone you’re not?”
I took my first stab at being a fake nerd when I was seventeen, roughly three years after I initiated my effort not to be a real nerd. I bought a pair of black Elvis Costello/Malcolm X glasses. I cut my hair from a bass-player volcano to a midlength floppy mushroom shape. I was supposed to be an attractive parody of my old self. For being a fake nerd, like being a white Negro, can be a way of putting even more distance between yourself and the object of your imitation than there was before. In the imagination of the fake nerd, the nerd is attractive because he is unaffected, untrendy to the point of primitivism, a kind of inert noble savage. Going through life making the exertion of affecting noble savagery makes you feel even less a noble savage than you did before. Being a fake nerd leaves you less of a nerd. Which is why it’s an excellent strategy for former nerds. You can both acknowledge your past (obeying the teenage principle of don’t-reinvent-yourself-or-we’ll-call-you-a-poser) and distance yourself from it (I am so indisputably un-nerdy I can wear accessories and even pants that are nerdy and not be a nerd). This is why when you go to a party full of young music studio engineers, or arts journalists, or book editors, you look around and see a fake nerd uniform (bulky glasses, floppy hair, sweaters, low-top canvas sneakers useless for athletic activity).
You hear fake nerd conversation. It follows a model. You bring up an “obsession” or “total fascination” with a purportedly unfashionable subject. “I am such a dork about old Hawaiian slide guitar. I actually have every King Benny record. I’ve so got a problem.” “Dude, you want to hit In-N-Out burger? I basically live on their Protein Burgers when I’m in LA.”
This is a way of whipping out cultural capital, but not in the same way as leaving guests in the living room to retrieve a hollowbody guitar or a first edition of To The Lighthouse. The Gretsch and the Woolf say, “I am creative and educated, so I have an understanding of the blues and the Bloomsbury Group.” The Hawaiian slide recordings and the In-N-Out Burger, which are both low-end consumer products, say, “I love the things I love because I am guided by some untamed voice within me that causes me to have random obsessions. I will follow my individualized obsessions, not trends, and be transparent about those obsessions, even when those obsessions tell me to like things widely considered ugly and cheap.” It’s the cultural capital of quirk.
To receive transmissions from God, the people doing the Quirky Nerd thing cultivate hair that reaches for the heavens. The hair is the hair of Booger, the violinist in Revenge of the Nerds, of Albert Einstein, of Napoleon Dynamite. There’s no appreciable cult of Booger, but pictures of Einstein with his hair in bloom, his eyes serene, hang in offices and teenage bedrooms, including those where physics are seldom discussed, as a watchful agent of God. Napoleon Dynamite has become part stuffed animal, part clown, part saint.
In Napoleon Dynamite, the saintly aspect of Napoleon’s character comes from his inability to conform and the way that inability excites a rebellious spark in others. The climax takes place at an assembly at an Idaho high school, where the two candidates for class president compete for the affection of their peers and Napoleon performs a funk dance routine on behalf of his friend Pedro. Instead of booing, the crowd rises in a standing ovation and awards Pedro the election over the popular girl expected to win. It’s not like the class has secretly admired Napoleon the whole time. It’s that when the nerd goes over the top into super-nerdy he makes everyone want to be more authentic and less judgmental. That shoot-the-moon play for social acceptance is what informs the quirky-nerd look when performed by self-conscious young hipsters. You’re a menace to social uniformity, in some unspecified fashion, through your natural and heedless iconoclasm.
It’s also just barely possible to think you make a statement about gender when you work a fake nerd look. While nerds, as everybody knows, tend to be male more often than female, dressing like a nerd rejects conventional ideas about what a hunky young man looks like. Since conventional notions of what makes a young man look handsome are so bound up with conveying power and wealth and the capacity for punching somebody out, making yourself look like a nerd on purpose is a gesture that says, “I renounce the privilege of being a young swinging dick.” At the very least, it’s a refusal to make your outfit a monument to your own authority. For a woman, dressing up as fake nerd is a refusal of plumage. In an androgynous paradise where adults of both sexes look like enlarged spelling-bee champions, it’s easy to forget for a moment, or even an entire night of drinking beer, that privilege is unevenly distributed between genders. At least, it’s easy if you’re male.
Being a fake nerd doesn’t just offer a way to downplay gender privilege; it offers a way to downplay class privilege. Tom Wolfe wrote a piece for Commentary magazine in 1976 that described American politics as a high-school cafeteria writ large. He argued that people vote according to their high-school identity; jocks and cheerleaders vote conservative, hoods and nerds vote liberal. (This is not unlike Paul Feig’s ruminations on the same subject.) When Americans vote for a particular candidate, they vote for the candidate who reminds them of the kind of person they would have eaten lunch with.
Fake nerds are acting out this lunchroom version of American politics. The overwhelmingly liberal artists, grad students, editors, and so on who practice fake nerdiness are taking an identity that people are assigned as children and choosing it as an identity in adulthood. Whereas people used to dress in such a way that showed they belonged to a particular socioeconomic class, fake nerds dress in such a way that refers to a bygone phase of life when they didn’t occupy any particular place as workers in the economy, when they were members of separate but not necessarily always equal tables in high school.
Looking out over a party on the Lower East Side thrown by a journalist and a editor, I saw a crowd of people dressed as if the creative industries were a high-school clique: nerds. All of the symptoms rarely manifested themselves in one person, but about half the guests displayed at least one nerd accessory (big glasses, short pants, hand-me-down rugby shirt). To look at this party, you’d think fake nerd was the uniform of the cash-poor upper middle class.
Has the fake-nerd uniform replaced the hippie one? Is fake nerdiness countercultural? Sort of. Among the boomers’ kids, and the middle-aged punk-rock generation that came of age in the late 1970s and 1980s, there’s an established skepticism toward the idea that the most important thing about the 1960s counterculture was that it was an authentic, anticommercial, anticorporate flowering of rebellious spirit. In 1997, Thomas Frank’s book The Conquest of Cool argued that the victories of the counterculture took place in the realm of pop culture—in chart-topping albums like Beggars Banquet, in hit movies like Bonnie and Clyde—and were partly the results of marketing, radio promotion, and publicity campaigns. As Frank remarked, what was so interesting about the late 1960s was the way that corporate executives embraced the freaks. The movies sympathetic to the counterculture that came out in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Easy Rider, Shampoo) showed young hippies and outlaws losing their struggles against the iron heel of conservative America (the heel was made of rednecks with shotguns, police, and Republican financiers). But in retrospect the story of the sixties counterculture looks not so much like a battle with business culture as a joint effort to reshape the status quo. Advertisers designed trippy green ads for 7UP. Time ran trippy covers featuring Swinging London and eventually The Band.
If this is your story of the late 1960s, there’s something faintly ridiculous, or at least insufficiently self-aware, about dressing like a hippie to be rebellious. Being a hippie is outdoorsy, left-of-center, chill, but not subversive. The most enthusiastic proponents of the sixties counterculture in the 1990s rural Massachusetts of my youth were the boarding-school kids who went to Phish shows. It was a good-natured acknowledgment of privilege to go on the jam-band circuit, a preppy thing. Hippies were politically conscientious but inoffensive, too derivative to make anybody nervous.
Dressing like a punk was not a solution. Everyone knew that aesthetic was helping to move twenty-dollar Warped Tour tickets. There was no reason to even consider hip-hop; nobody who lived in a city with cable television and billboards could doubt that was a movement working in collusion with business culture to sell suburban teenagers stuff, even if was admirably forthright of rappers to dress like gay Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton executives and sing about how purely commercial their motives were. Of course in all of these movements, hip-hop included, there were artists in garrets, making music for the music, but nobody wanted to run the risk of being mistaken for one of the kids who fell for the marketing.
With the biggest subcultures built around a style of music and comportment out of commission, there was still an identity left to try on. We know which lunch table we’re circling now. If you want to become an adult member of the chattering classes, the words “I’m such a punk,” or “I’m such a hippie” refuses to roll off your tongue. “I’m such a nerd” comes more naturally. The nerd receives his calling from God or nature, not from television and magazines, even if that calling is playing video games or programming computers. The nerd can’t sell out because the nerd is incapable of selling out.
Soon, this tactic will be obsolete. The Tripwire, a music-focused trend-reporting service affiliated with Fader magazine, has a piece today about an English clothing company that incorporates images from Atari 2600 games into the patterns on its polo shirts. There’s a Geek magazine, and there are “I Love Nerds” shirts with the letters designed to look like homemade iron-ons. Self-styled “nerdcore” rappers wear pocket protectors and rhyme about hard drives. As I write this, CBS is working on a new fall sitcom called The Big Bang Theory, in which two nerds try to win the heart of one pretty woman, even though its corporate partner, the CW network, will be airing a new season of its hit reality show Beauty and the Geek, in which eight nerds try to win the hearts of eight pretty women. Last spring, the CW’s president of entertainment, Dawn Ostroff, offered a simple justification for this seemingly inexcusable, unsynergistic, nerd/hottie courtship programming glut: “Nerds are really in right now.”
Advertisers and writers alike have been selling America on the uncool outsider for a long time. At first the call was to be nonconformist. The 1950s were the decade when “conformity” became a frequently discussed social ill, but Sinclair Lewis wrote Babbitt, a novel in which the “standardization” of American suburban life is the chief subject, during the early 1920s, not long after America first emerged as one of the most powerful and economically healthy countries in the world. Then the appeal to consumers to not conform by trying too hard to be nonconformist cropped up in advertising in the 1960s, when a magazine ad for Volvo (of course) depicted an enemy Ford dealership plastered with slogans proclaiming Ford “The New Fun Look of Youth.” Volvo’s copy read, “Your car is out of style. Again. And the irony of it is, a big chunk of the money that you paid for your out-of-style car was used to bring out the very cars that put it out of style.”2 The supposed appeal of the Volvo was the appeal of the nerd: I’m cool because I don’t waste effort on being cool; I have too much substance for that. But of course if that strategy becomes overly familiar, practiced by a critical mass of trendy individuals and advertisers, it becomes suspect.
Let the publication of these words then herald the death of nerd chic. People will find another class of person supposedly incapable of fashionable affectation. Soon there will be a trend piece, in some respectable publication somewhere, called “Revenge of the Jocks.”
From American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent, copyright ©2008 by Benjamin Nugent. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY.
arealnerd
