What is the nerdiest band?

This can be read in at least two ways: what is the band whose output is the nerdiest? Or what is the band most disproportionately admired by nerds?

Some options:

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS -- beloved by nerds, obviously. Recently revised their old song "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas" to "The Sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma" for increased astrophysical accuracy. CONS: Now mostly record children's music, which is not that nerdy.

JONATHAN COULTON -- wrote "Code Monkey" and theme song for Portal, performs at video game conferences. CONS: association with John Hodgman pushes him close to "hipster-nerd" territory, which is not quite the same thing. Also, was a Yale Whiffenpoof, which is not nerdy, just weird.

BARCELONA -- mid '90s Northern Virginia indie, recorded nerd anthems like "I Have The Password To Your Shell Account" and "Robot Trouble." CONS: obscure.

DEVO -- art nerds extraordinaire. CONS: too much critical cred with non-nerds.

Question not restricted to nerdiness having to do with science and computers -- bands which are somehow reminiscent of reading a lot of Dragonriders of Pern or Piers Anthony are also eligible, but I couldn't really think of any such.

Blind Guardian, who released a Silmarillion-themed concept album in the 90's. Some nerdy dudes I know are into Mike Oldfield and movie soundtracks, too

ALL IDM

Arguably anything Mike Paradinas has been part of

Tool
Dream Theatre
Porcupine Tree

Most disproportionately admired by nerds, in the 90s at least, were TMBG, Barenaked Ladies, and Moxy Fruvous.

Blöödhag

Barcelona's twee-world associations somehow leaven the pure nerd action, I think.

One of the threads clowning xkcd has a bunch of c+p'd posts from the forums about those guys' music taste, so something off that I reckon

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS -- beloved by nerds, obviously. Recently revised their old song "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas"

fwiw they didn't write this song and it always annoys me that its credited to them. Its a very faithful cover of a Tom Glazer children's song from a 50s educational LP called "Space Songs".

pure nerds are into prog crap like Marillion and Dream Theatre and whatnot

^ nerd

TMBG are like the coolest band ever. They were from Brooklyn before any of youse.

Circulus.

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=17213

My God

I was considering mentioning both Marillion and Barenaked Ladies in the post, actually! But I had only some vague gestalt sense that "nerds like these bands" and didn't feel I could back it up.

the clipse

Obvious, but still: Rush

Many of my favourite musicians (friends too!) are total nerds, no matter what sort of music they play - it isn't just skinny white guys in horn-rimmed glasses. Anthony Braxton is a TOTAL nerd!

Feelies?

Wheatus

Pavement

Tool

atom and his package

Mick Collins appears to have massive nerd credentials, but keeps them mostly in the closet.

pure nerds are into prog crap like Marillion and Dream Theatre and whatnot

It's often been my experience that true committed classic-type U.S. nerds do not actually like (or get?) music enough to enjoy these sorts of things, hence devotion to certain acts, like TMBG, that can kind of be read as making fun of or parodying pop music itself, or at least the aspects of music that other people find cool -- or else listening to music mostly as a system for conveying other types of material or jokes, so that their tastes aren't based around anything musical but more around who sings funny songs about stuff they're interested in.

Either that or having really conventional tastes with a slight gimmicky overlay, like the guy I once worked with in a college computer lab who would go on about how everything was so dumb and silly and that was why he listened to "real music" like Squirrel Nut Zippers. That sentence is totally burned in my head: "I listen to real music, like Squirrel Nut Zippers." I got about thirty seconds into a follow-up conversation about why, if he considered that real music, he didn't ever listen to big bands or swing or anything, and so far as I could tell only ever listened to the first Hootie & the Blowfish album over and over, but -- and yes, I am congratulating myself for this -- I immediately realized this was a bad path and pretended to need the bathroom.

Atom and His Package. I think that's the first time anyone has mentioned that guy since 2001.

buddy holly

P.S.: If anyone thinks that first sentence is mean or condescending to nerds, please note that I would be totally fine with nerds telling me that I didn't like (or get) computers or comic books or whatever well enough to have tastes about them -- it's true, those are two things I approach solely through the lens of how they relate to things I am interested in.

and lawrence welk's orch, for that matter

xnabisc

"Obvious, but still: Rush"

Not real obvious, and pretty inacurrate.

xpost dorky nerds seem to like that really cheesy prog about elves and wizards, as well as weird darkhourse bands you'd never think anyone would ever spend free time listening to, like Rockapella or something.

smart nerds seem to like that twisted pop music that's like smart and artsy fartsy

WEIRD AL JANKOVIC

^which fits into nabisco's theory perfectly

Rockapella = "acts, like TMBG, that can kind of be read as making fun of or parodying pop music itself," sort of -- i.e., not just music, but "we did something zany on a super/meta-musical level"

xpost!

Also, guys, I don't mean this in a mean way, but: Radiohead

It's often been my experience that true committed classic-type U.S. nerds do not actually like (or get?) music enough to enjoy these sorts of things,

but see this is precisely the reason I cited Marillion and Dream Theatre (Rush is a good one too, albeit to a lesser extent) because in my experience nerds have been more susceptible to accept the idea that the best music must be the music that is the most complicated and difficult to play, as if music can be somehow objectively quantified and ranked by the complexity of its mathematical underpinnings. And then there's the pretentious trappings of elves and unicorns or whatever that are just icing on the cake, i.e., familiar and acceptable conceptual territory

TMBG gets a lot of hype as being a fav nerd band..

but let me say....a great stealth pick:

CAKE

I feel like it would totally make sense for nerds to like Cake, but, empirically, do they?

Yeah, Shakey, that's true! I guess I usually just see that played out with some complicated/difficult thing that was never deemed cool by anybody, often some random artist seen at a local show or heard on the internet that the nerd in question seems to think other people might have heard of, or takes as a cool obscurity that only he's a connoisseur for noting.

We are so mostly talking about boy dorks, though. My vote for girl dorks: Mason Jennings

Some nerds used to like Cake, for sure, for exactly the reasons it's making intuitive sense to you. Dunno if that still holds up.

nerds are loyal

We've totally abandoned the original question, btw, which is what bands are nerdy, not what bands nerds listen to

Dragonforce? I can't imagine what someone who's nerdy enough to be really into Dragonforce without having tongue slighty in cheek is like, and I've studied computer science.

listening habits of nerds I have known (circa mid 90s)
Jethro Tull
Dr. Demento novelty songs
TMBG (probably #1)
Rush
Kate Bush
Billy Joel
Tom Lehrer
Yes
Frank Zappa

i think guitar hero really changed things for dragonforce

To keep on that path, nerds these days are also way into Dragonforce.

xpost Merdeyeux beat me to it.

But not other power metal, just Dragonforce. Nerds I know tend to be pretty bad at expanding their listening.

yeah Guitar Hero REALLY changed things for Dragonforce - OTM. I had to explain to my 15-yo niece why I think they're terrible, starting with how "Through Fire and Flame" is a fucking stupid title, given that fire and flame are um, the same thing.

at brunch yesterday one of my musician friends was talking about how his friend played him a bunch of Gentle Giant and how unbelievably nerdy they are (and they were too nerdy for me even when i was a prog-lovin' nerd in high school), and we figured out that the nerdiest possible band would be They Might Be Gentle Giants.

Most of the nerds I knew when I was younger were just been into classical music, plus maybe a prog band or two.

Lately, the nerdier students I've known have been into video game music, including remixes of them and symphonic versions (e.g. of the Castlevania theme).

the guitar hero effect is fucking weird actually....dudes at work that usually like the decemberists and shit suddenly are all like "oh the sword is great!"

We've totally abandoned the original question, btw, which is what bands are nerdy, not what bands nerds listen to

nerdy in what sense? nerdy about music itself? bands whose music is nerdy a la TMBG? Or are we looking at the big picture, like the Weezer dude with his Harvard readmission essay?

Weezer is pretty nerdy too.

We've totally abandoned the original question, btw, which is what bands are nerdy, not what bands nerds listen to

Not at all -- the original question was a two-parter and these are the two parts!

Weezer is pretty nerdy too.

Agreed - though I'd call them more "dorky" than "nerdy" - not to start a semantic argument or to derail ...

Ha, right, sorry, I was being a question-pedant without re-reading the question!

the guitar hero effect is fucking weird actually....dudes at work that usually like the decemberists and shit suddenly are all like "oh the sword is great!"

Yeah I loathe guitar hero for contributing to some really weird version of canonization. Next person who is like "oh yeah Green Grass and High Tides" as if everyone knows that atrocity is on notice.

haha playing green grass on drums is redonkulous...keeping that 2-step boom-cha beat going through the guitar solo when he keeps reversing it is hard as fuck

yeah one of the reasons I bought Rock Band 2 was so that I'd be able to progress on drums w/o this fucking song; it felt good to delete it after importing the other songs. Is this song well-known outside of Rock Band?

it's funny what being forced to hear the same song like 50x does to you

Return to Forever
The Champs
Magma

i.e. The Fucking Champs, obviously

Is this song well-known outside of Rock Band?

― Euler, Monday, December 15, 2008 8:48 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

um sorta? "green grass and high tides forever" is what my local classic rock station KQRS refers to as a "deep cut"

haha playing green grass on drums is redonkulous...keeping that 2-step boom-cha beat going through the guitar solo when he keeps reversing it is hard as fuck

Good god yes: took me forever to get past this on hard, if only because you spend like 8+ minutes chugging along and then by the time you get to the hard bit you're tired as hell and glassy-eyed and hate the song way too much to bear paying attention to what's happening.

I mean, at least the original drummer was using those fills to avoid boring himself to death; having to replicate them does not accomplish this purpose.

I was happy for video-game canonization the other day, though, when I was going through Juliana Hatfield's memoir and there was a story about how her mom spent her whole marriage madly in love with the bass player from Mountain.

probably unknown to many of you but THREE DAY STUBBLE has to be the answer to the topic at hand.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/31/101889510_637db12f06.jpg

xpost

hahah you mean felix papalardi (sp?)

xpost: lol @ turkington

Yes, Felix. Seriously, the most interesting part of the entire book is about how her mom dated him in college, married a doctor instead, and then spent her whole life pining for him. The doctor, Juliana's dad, builds things: he builds his wife an entire harpsichord, from a kit. After the birth of her third child, Juliana's mom runs away for several days to meet Mountain on tour and find Felix, who's now married and sends her away; she gets home and her husband knows exactly where she's been. He gets an axe from the garage. He proceeds to chop the harpsichord to pieces. (Reader thinks: wow, the story of Juliana Hatfield's parents is about a billion times more interesting than anything she has to say about herself.)

holy crap that's nuts

talk about a (mississippi) queen

Lots o' nerds suck in the 70s - I'll just go ahead and finger Jonathan Richman/Modern Lovers and Talking Heads and Rush for ultimate 70s look nerdiness.

Talking about old-fashioned nerds & geeks here: socially marginalized, aspie-ish, mostly (but not exclusively) guys, super smart but in a very limited way, into tech stuff and probably sci-fi, out of touch with most pop culture, NOT music geeks.

I kind of am one of these people (except for the smart part) and I've known a LOT of 'em. As well as the random pet favorites that everyone picks up along they way, they tend to be into anything dramatic, complex and musically ambitious -- especially if it's got nerdy themes build in, like Blue Oyster Cult or whatever. When I was younger, this meant Pink Floyd, Rush, Jethro Tull, Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtracks, maybe Hawkwind, and proggy pop of every sort -- now it's more like Tool and Radiohead. Plus a pronounced taste for "endearingly eccentric" pop stuff like (as folks have said) Squirrel Nut Zippers, TMBG, Flying Lizards, Barenaked Ladies, all the way out to fringe crap like the Residents. Nerd musicians tend to stick with the most athletic sorts of prog, fusion, metal, funk and jazz. That or old-timey stuff like bluegrass.

The nerdist bands I've ever known have been local garage, ska and funk/metal outfits. No one too popular, as I think human attention/interaction tends to diminish nerdiness. Garage punk fans are hella nerdy. Plus what every happened to all people who would have been in ska bands if there still were any ska bands? Did they find some other kind of band to be in, or did they find something else to do with their creative energies?

Also occurs to me that goth and industrial must rate high as nerdmusic, both in terms of the fans and the artists. But I'm outta the loop there.

nerdiest

Oh god, yes: low-level ska bands = wacky songs about comical topics + five of your high-school band friends as a horn section + guitar player always playing geeky metal solos for fun

am I wrong here, but was there this weird little period in the late 90s where crappy ska was a "thing"? (mustard plug, etc.). Seemed to go hand in hand with late 90s emo. If it is true, then I hope to god there is never a late 90s retro revival.

You're not wrong.

Do nerds listen to Mew? And if not, could they please start?

(we?)

I've seen Devo, Rush, Three Day Stubble, Bloodhag, etc. But the answer to this thread is WENDY CARLOS.

Just go to her website and read all the glorious shit she has to say about eclipses of the moon and early Moog components and how she has to bake her master tapes to preserve them. So awesome.

Although I guess she isn't technically a "band".

TS: nerdism vs. jockism

Doesn't Momus deserve a mention here?

Oh another contender has to be Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. They write songs inspired by Lovecraft, dress in monster costumes, gig at RPG and horror movie conventions, and have album art like this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/415TM7N5M2L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

http://www.bookman.ca/images/Toren.jpg

And then there's my brother's band STOVOKOR (the Klingon word for "Vallhalla"). They play death/war metal, dress as Klingons, sing in Klingon (at times), and played atop the Space Needle at the 40th anniversary Star Trek convention. They were also featured in Trekkies 2 the Documentary. Note the singer is 6'8" and has one hand.

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/833/klingoncc7.jpg

Nate wins.

haha damn nate dogg that is awesome!

Ha, Sundar, I was thinking about Mew earlier: they're like the perfect midpoint band for nerds and people who like unicorns. (I mean that as a total compliment.)

Has anyone yet mentioned Man... or Astroman? or robotic offshoots Servotron? Servotron dressed as robots that were bent on the extermination of humanity. I once saw them drag the cigarette, soda, and pinball machines up in front of the stage so the machines could have the best view.

http://b0.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/00082/00/35/82355300_l.jpg

Nerd music has been a long term focus of mine.

On that tip, Captured! by Robots. Are they/is he still around? This opens the gate to costume bands in general, all of whom wins: Harry and the Potters, etc.

supernova was rad

I was gonna mention Harry & The Potters tho they toured in the UK a few years ago and their audience was I think mainly DIY punx who thought it sounded like a laugh rather than the HP-obsessed kiddy nerdz they might get elsewhere

Sorry I posted the wrong version of that photo:

http://a770.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/63/l_d7076853aeca5610e12644f60fe63b91.jpg

based on the shared iTunes libraries of astronomy grad students in the UK, the answer is muse and classical music.

damn straight

if the question is, what band is the nerdiest rather than what band has the nerdiest fans, the answer is still muse.

all the ska and TMBG and stuff is very U.S.-centric. There's a whole world of nerd music listened to by European grad students. I will investigate properly tomorrow and get back to you.

"Damn straight" was supposed to be for 2nd picture of Stovokor. Now it's for astronomy grad students loving Muse. Either way...

Here's a bit of vintage Stovo-video shot at Lewis & Clark college. Watch particularly at the 1:52 mark when the one handed singer decks the Star Wars fan in the front row. So awesome.

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=2924457&albumID=72776&imageID=7205792

Sorry wrong url.

Here's a bit of vintage Stovo-video shot at Lewis & Clark college. Watch particularly at the 1:52 mark when the one handed singer decks the Star Wars fan in the front row. So awesome.

And this one has a pretty good anti-Star Wars comedy intro:

HA! Though if you hadn't said he was Star Wars guy, I woulda thought he was just decking some tall dude.

all these Star Trek band posts and no mention of NO KILL I??!?

http://www.theskyline.net/artwork/somethingfierce.jpg

I guess I should nominate Voivod for this thread too. I mean, really.

http://www.nokilli.com/nokilli/images/babes.jpg

the European grad students I know are totally ignorant of pop music. I'll be at a meeting in Paris or Munich and want to talk about newish dance music out of their city, and they're like, uh, I don't know pop music. I gather that I'm running into class issues here; whereas in the US it's ok for an educated person to be into pop music (here, defined as non-classical music), I'm under the impression that it's not as accepted in Europe. It could be an age thing, too; the older nerds I know, in the US and Europe, who were certainly young enough during the 60s or 70s to be into good stuff, are all just opera fans. The younger ones are somewhat more open to pop music (albeit of nerdy types).

The winner is, The Lord Weird Slough Feg - Traveller

An awesome concept album about the 70s sci-fi role playing game...when Advanced D&D just wasn't nerdy enough. Not nerd related, but I should mention that the previous two albums are full of Thin Lizzy/Iron Maiden twin guitar goodness. Singer Mike Scalzi teaches college in San Francisco. I have no idea if he has a Ph.D. or is tenured, but he seems pretty nerdy.

(here, defined as non-classical music), I'm under the impression that it's not as accepted in Europe.

There's this running gag in my circle where a Russian guy who was another linux administrator in different department saw me out one evening in my biker jacket (buying ice cream with my 4 year old daughter) and report to my boss, quite nervously, "I saw Bendy last night....ALL DRESSED IN LEATHER."

And then there's these guys, who used to play with Man or Astroman, and were playing live laptop based in the mid-90s with their own software reverse engineered from a bit of eduacational toy software. They were invited to the Apple campus....

http://www.reinformation.com/

god i am kicking myself for not going to see slough feg about six months ago.

anecdotal, but my friends that work at the club they played said they partied liked tru 70s rock dudes, not nerd style....also did a guitar solo on the bar

I'm in bioinformatics and there's a lot of love for both jazz and prog.

Hey Bendy--That was Operation Reinformation (formerly REVO). My old band toured with them an MOA? clone bands back in the late 90s.

Slough Feg--good choice. Terrorizer interviewed Scalzi about Gary Gygax's death earlier this year. I was stoked. The first time Scalzi stayed at my house, we geeked out for hours because he had hired Erol Otus to do some cover art for a Slough Feg album, and I had stolen and Photo-shopped an Otus piece for an album cover of my own years ago.

Nerds unite!

Back in college all the nerds in my computer science classes were ridiculous Tool fans. Except of course me.

One of the Revo guys coined the name Bendy, actually...

good call on Three Day Stubble.

I only saw them once open for Boredoms in 1994.

I guess Negativland, too.

Actually, not a band, but the nerdiest performer ever was Little Theodore, who opened for Negativland on the Fair Use tour in 1993.

The nerdiest band ever must be Machinae Supremacy, a Swedish band that plays power metal cover versions of classic computer game tunes.

Machinae Supremacy is a metal band from Luleå, Sweden. Their musical style is based on the use of the Sidstation synthesizer, which incorporates the SID (Sound Interface Device) of the Commodore 64 home computer. The retro-electronic sound is blended with a metal sound to produce a special kind of “SID-metal” . Their album, Redeemer (released March 18th, 2006 as an ‘Underground Edition’), was described by the band in an interview as everything DXM (Deus Ex Machinae, the debut album) wasn’t. It was re-released on November 8th, 2006 as a remixed version under Spinefarm Records.

Machinae Supremacy has already made their place in history by being one of the first bands to embrace and utilize the Internet and file sharing to gain a huge fanbase without ever having signed a record contract, received airplay or any sponsored promotion. They’ve reached out to all corners of the world and today their site receives roughly 100,000 song downloads every month.

Computer games + retro-electronics + epic metal + fame through file sharing = ultimate nerds.

Yes, but do cover bands count?

They have non-cover tunes too, I think the covers comprise only about 50% of their music.

Based on the definitions given here, you'd have to say BOC were pretty nerdy. Awesome, but nerdy.

Blue Oyster Cult, not Board of Canada, I'm assuming.

Yes, the real BOC.

Some nerdy dudes I know are into Mike Oldfield and movie soundtracks, too

A guy I knew in college who was kind of nerdy (physics major, Star Wars geek) but also socially well-adjusted and likeable once asked a group of us if we could guess what his favorite genre of music was. After a dozen wrong guesses, he said, "Give up? It's movie soundtracks!" By which I think he specifically meant scores, like John Williams, James Horner, Thomas Newman, etc. (In retrospect, this kind of makes sense given what others have already pointed out: he's not that interested in music as a whole, so he gets interested in music that's associated with other media he likes.)

"he's not that interested in music as a whole, so he gets interested in music that's associated with other media he likes"

I've been interested in the point throughout the thread. Is this a nerdy phenomenon specifically for music? Or, is it similarly a nerdy thing to get interested in, say, movies that are associated with other media she likes? Like only liking movies with music she likes?

for video game cover bands the tru-nerd O.G.s are the Minibosses.

i saw them play at the Classic Game Expo in Vegas once.

Nerdy people are often both unaware of / unconcerned with larger narratives about pop culture and prone to obsessive engagement with the things that do stick out and snag their attention. So they'll get really into the soundtracks of movies they like, or pick a few seemingly unrelated bands to go totally gaga over (J-pop?), or only like music that crosses over with geek culture somehow. I think it applies in other ways, for instance sci-fi freaks who like any kind of literature, movies, music with those themes.

Fountains of Wayne.

In a different way, Flock of Seagulls and Mr. T. Dolby.

Sparks.