weird/quirky women in music

My daughter, age 13, is getting very into listening to music these days. The artists that she's into aren't at all the kind of stuff that gets discussed around here. All very YouTuber-adjacent: Tally Hall/Miracle Musical, Lemon Demon, Chonny Jash, Will Wood, Bo Burnham. One thing that ties them together, loosely, is that they are all musically eclectic: different genres across different songs or even throughout the same song. Often coming out as frenetic, synthy, slightly operatic pop-rock, I guess? A lot of the lyrics she likes explore sort of the dark side of emotions, without being too mournful or gloomy. Lightly horrific.

So even though none of these artists land for me, I'm thrilled because she is actually opening up about them and sharing their songs with me. So I've been giving them all a listen and I'll give her little notes about some of the obvious influences. "Hey, if you like that song, what they're doing here is kinda an Electric Light Orchestra thing (or Sparks, or Beatles, or They Might Be Giants, etc.)"

But what has been bugging me is that all the artists I'm recommending to her are dudes. And it got me thinking about what kind of quirky women musicians I could try to recommend to her as well. Like, was there ever a female They Might Be Giants or Residents?

When I try to pick my brain for this, I come up with artists like Bjork (who I've shared with her in the past), the B-52s (who she's definitely heard in my car, but doesn't seem to show any interest in), I think Kate Bush might be interesting. But those are all slightly off the mark from what I'm looking for. Hot Fruit could fit the bill sonically, but I'm not ready to introduce my kid to lyrics about "shit and blood" or "making the sky cum".

Just now thinking that Laurie Anderson's O Superman might be interesting.

It's got me thinking about dorkiness as an area of male privilege. Like, women musicians, even offbeat ones, often bring a lot of cool and/or beauty to the table, while their male counterparts can go more fully weird with irritating songs about arcane/wacky topics. But is that because women are innately cool and beautiful and bring those qualities to everything they touch, or is it because being a woman writing dorky songs is just more of a non-starter?

I dunno, I've been working on this post for a while and I feel stuck in a neverending process of editing and adding to it, so I'm just gonna post it as is. Probably as soon as I do, someone's gonna post, "how did you fucking forget artist x/y/z" and I'll be like "oh yeah, I'm a fucking idiot."

I think she's disfavored here, but Tune Yards (Merrill Garbus) meets this description, especially her first couple of albums.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Rita_Mitsouko

Joanna Newsom

Joanna Wang could be up her street? The Adventures Of Bernie The Schoolboy, Bob Music and Galaxy Crisis are more oddball lounge-pop meets TMBG or something along those lines, then House of Bullies was kind of her prog album. Avoid the mainstream pop records maybe, as she has a weird parallel career going and I can't imagine too many people liking all of it.

Azita immediately comes to my mind when I think of contemporary quirky female artists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8Unsyt_UzE

well, kinda contemporary (didn't realize that tune is 13 years old!)

Ann Magnuson in Bongwater

Jane Siberry can be awesomly dorksome.

Also, in a slightly different vein, Nellie McKay.

old school quirk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIJOO__jVo

At that age (and still, to be honest), most "weird" acts that I liked struck me as totally normal, at least by comparison to most of the pop charts.
"Wild and Wacky" TMBG did a cover of Cub's New York City that's pretty straightahead -- so if they qualify, why not Cub?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3L6SPM6xYs

Tina Weymouth on Genius of Love is as weird and dorky as anything from the Talking Heads catalog, right? Maybe the lack of enthusiasm for Bjork etc... isn't that they're not weird or dorky in the right way, but more that a lot of their music is less immediately catchy?

Diamanda Galás

Depending on her appetite for non-English lyrics there's a raft of Japanese artists and bands that would apply (outside of the idol sphere, I should clarify)

Siouxsie & Banshees?

Oh my god, thank you, ILM, for the outpouring of recommendations! This gives me a lot of homework to do.

Joanna Wang was the first thing that came to mind too, in fact I think one of the first things she recorded was a cover of a Lemon Demon track

kinda surprised she isn't into TMBG yet, guess it's only a matter of time

Not contemporary, but Rita Lee/Gal Costa?

xps: Siouxsie is awesome, but also one of those who I felt was "too cool" for what I'm reaching for here.

Shonen Knife
Cibo Matto

Kleenex AKA Liliput?

Nina Nastasia

The Shaggs

Fiona Apple?

Catherine Ribeiro and Brigitte Fontaine both have produced large amounts of great avant-garde stuff.

As far as the female Residents goes, Caroliner Rainbow has definitely had a number of female members over the years in addition to many dudes, but hard to verify exactly because they tend to keep their ids anonymous.

love tune-yards, all the h8rs can go fuck themselves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNkP-mbBMLo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrTUwwE66_I

Depending on her appetite for non-English lyrics there's a raft of Japanese artists and bands that would apply (outside of the idol sphere, I should clarify)

― MaresNest, Wednesday, October 4, 2023 12:55 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

For sure. Kazumi Nikaido is the first that popped into my mind, sort of a Japanese Bjork, totally arresting + otherworldly style imo (will take any opportunity to post this video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=528gtqYPO6s

Meredith Monk
Lisa Gerrard/Dead Can Dance
Cocteau Twins

100 gecs also doesn't seem too far off from the stuff you listed up top, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfGHOkPERsY

fiery furnaces!

Cate Le Bon would be my choice. Very eclectic and seems to be crossing over more and more each year.

Hello?

https://assets.vogue.com/photos/589182af8c64075803ad0bd1/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/yoko-ono-01.jpg

marina and the diamonds, first album or so. has that quirky piano pop.

Oh no, Yoko! I shouldn't have forgotten you!

Been listening to Joanna Wang for the past 15 mins or so and this is 100% something my kid would dig.

Yeah, Cate Le Bon was my initial thought. Betty Davis? Circuit des Yeux?

A lot of her stuff is straight-up experimental but I think 'Suki Suki Daisuki' by Jun Togawa fits the bill here. It's definitely quirky synthy pop, with saccharine but dark lyrics (they're in Japanese but the main thrust is 'love me or I'll kill you'). I think it had a bit of a TikTok ~moment~ a while back so she might actually already know it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWlugvcnuSA

+1 for Joanna Wang

frogbs and I have been members of a Cardiacs Discord server where people actually do like this stuff (and I really like Lemon Demon - pretty much can't stand the other things you've named mind). consequently this is a rare example of a request for music on ILX where I've encountered a lot of ILX-obscure material that might fit the bill. let me have a think...

I just remembered Bellatrix, I liked them as a young teen (Icelandic)

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, if she's not too close to the mainstream pop end of things.
Atarashii Gakko - ditto.
Maybe Haco?

Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Nina Hagen

The Space Lady

Ann Steel

Argh, I just learned about Ann Steel last year and then forgot after a week. Need to revisit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtmlfuEukMs

Sidney Gish seems in a similar vein to the stuff you mentioned

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtEFpVPhvco

Takako Minekawa
Lene Lovich
Zeek Sheck (maybe monitor for language before passing it off to a 13-year-old, though)

There's one name I think everyone is afraid to mention

Petra Haden
Shelley Hirsch

There's one name I think everyone is afraid to mention

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Wednesday, October 4, 2023 1:47 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Probably at least a couple who've spawned their own notorious threads over the years (CocoRosie? Amanda Palmer?)

That Dog
The Roches
Kate & Anna McGarrigle

xpost you got it

probably helps that a lot of the young people that grew up with Here Comes Science or Here Come the ABCs are now adults

my kids got a LOT of tmbg at their middle school. it was like mass indoctrination!

yeah I remember when they started making kids records thinking that was a real shrewd move, though it was hard to imagine that they'd be still regularly touring and pumping out records 20 years later

my daughter (13) also likes TMBG - the voice of the young people!

"nerd culture has _changed_ since the 1980s. it's not fucking _revenge of the nerds_ anymore. any strains of nerd culture that remain "strongly male-centered" are either old, or shit, or both."

amen to this. for real. that's the main thing that i like about the internet. today's nerd, no matter their gender or identity, can mix & match and take from the old like never before and make something new in their own image and it doesn't have to have any of that male baggage.

My two (elementary-school age) kids have recently been obsessed with that Constantinople song (I'm... not a TMBG fan myself).

I was thinking about this thread in the shower and thought of Linda Perhacs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9VbJmbtMW8

someone already mentioned Joanna Newsom, but Milk-Eyed Mender era is prob the closest thing I can think of to "fully weird with irritating songs about arcane/wacky topics" at least in songs like "Inflammatory Writ" (this is not a criticism, tbc)

My ex-gf was a huge TMBG fan and yeah, the couple of times I saw them, the crowd was predominantly kids, many of them girls. By focusing on them and another older act, Ween, I was just trying to say that the avenues -- economic and gender-based -- for a female artist to nurture the kind of long-term career that would allow them to become "the female TMBG" were pretty nil. Now it's considered more socially acceptable for a female musician to express their dorky side in their work but, as Kate points out, a lot of the doors to make money and sustain yourself doing that have closed. So it's still going to be difficult for female musicians to cultivate the kind of following TMBG or Ween have had over the long haul in that regard; or at least female rock musicians... hip hop and R&B might increasingly flourish as avenues for "weird" self-expression.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di3C9urWZCc

my kid is a huge TMBG fan and also a big Camper Van Beethoven fan (speaking of quirksters.) sometimes he'll play "Take the Skinheads Bowling" on the piano.

Can't wait until my kid moves on from Imagine Dragons and Minecraft raps

i think gen z is skewing kinda gen x in tastes, friend went to slowdive last night and saw tons of young kids, lots of parent/young teens going together

a song by Duster has 161 million plays on Spotify - it's a weird new world

Duster got big on Tiktok somehow

i think gen z is skewing kinda gen x in tastes, friend went to slowdive last night and saw tons of young kids, lots of parent/young teens going together

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

idk i just think it's all over the map... my tms tech was telling me that kids these days are getting into the sopranos. which, sure, it was a good show, but it was a little after my time, i feel like. same way, kids are getting into slowdive because they're _good_. it's not an infallible barometer of taste, but their album from '17 has as many ratings as "just for a day" or "pygmalion", which isn't what you usually see from reunion records.

amen to this. for real. that's the main thing that i like about the internet. today's nerd, no matter their gender or identity, can mix & match and take from the old like never before and make something new in their own image and it doesn't have to have any of that male baggage.

― scott seward

idk i don't see it as being the _internet_ as such. i came up on the '90s internet, and it was a very different place. i feel like there's kind of a dual legacy of the internet... you do have fashnerds who are very much part of the nerd lineage. one of the things that fascinated me reading about... i forget the book, but it was about the origins and roots of D&D... and when you get into 60s wargaming culture, they're all fucking wehraboos. there _are_ still bastions of the old nerd culture, all the misogynist bullshit that was part and parcel of being a nerd. incels are descendents of all those nerds who couldn't ever get laid, for instance, for sure. the term was coined by a woman, the film the concept of "redpilling" was taken from was made by two trans women. that's the interesting thing... nerd culture, like a lot of other forms of culture, has split. and right now, as in so many other forms of culture, the fash are more _visible_, more _prominent_. in the older generations, at least. not so much in the younger generations.

what do fashnerds listen to?

rhodesian patriotic songs. no, seriously.

So it's still going to be difficult for female musicians to cultivate the kind of following TMBG or Ween have had over the long haul in that regard

yeah this is sort of the problem, right now it looks like there can't really be another male TMBG or Ween either. though maybe King Gizzard is sort of the new generation of that, though obviously you can't expect anyone to work as hard as they do

A lot of this recent nerd music feels like "stuff on the internet" rather than songs by bands doing world tours or whatever.

Like your new album is called "Gaming Culture Vol. 25"

A lot of this recent nerd music feels like "stuff on the internet" rather than songs by bands doing world tours or whatever.

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Thursday, October 5, 2023 9:53 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Like your new album is called "Gaming Culture Vol. 25"

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

or "chuck person's eccojams vol. 1"

this daniel lopatin fellow is actually fairly popular, it turns out

like, omnia fuckin' mutantur, y'all. the benchmarks of "success" aren't the same as what they used to be.

it may be hard to remember immediately, being that she was one of the most prominent pop artists in the field for two or three years, but Cyndi Lauper's artistic raison detre/ marketing niche i.e. "brand" rested on a notion of quirk, odness, etc etc

"oddness"

Unusual even

this daniel lopatin fellow is actually fairly popular, it turns out

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, October 5, 2023 12:01 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yea I saw a George Clanton show recently and this stuff really has crossed over from being a niche internet thing into the new, I dunno, electroclash or whatever

i saw cyndi lauper on the she's so unusual tour and it was just..............wow.

Lunachicks
The Meat Purveyors
Life Without Buildings?

my kid's tiktok is so dope. i would say that. but i get lots of great recommendations from him! he just did one of his favorite vocalists. he's 19. elis regina is his fave vocalist right now. that right there is some sort of evolution. blaming/thanking spotify for this world.

https://✧✧✧.tik✧✧✧.c✧✧✧@real✧✧✧.virtue✧✧✧?_t=8bt2tuXLNm7&_r=1

oh i guess ilx doesn't link to the tok.

i guess what's kind of bugging me about the thread direction, about not just talking about nerdy/weird/quirky women making music but also qualifying it with "successful" (which peace, man wasn't doing in his original post) is that it's fundamentally rooted in not just obsolete, but in specifically _capitalist_ notions of success... you're "successful" if you can make a living making your music. and that's kind of funny to me because i'm not sure they might be giants themselves would frame it that way! like, here's a band who are not just nerds but have been pretty openly marxist for pretty much their entire career, and suddenly here's this definition of "success" that's mostly dependent on the material conditions created by white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. like yes that's going to make a difference but it's pretty boring having to talk about that, particularly when peace, man is just looking for some awesome nerds making music who aren't cis guys.

sure but a lot of the appeal of TMBG and Ween is that they've been around so long which has allowed them to do a lot of odd things and really refine their chops which you can't do if you don't get promoted and sell 0 records

xp
that's true, but tbf to the thread, I think that turn happened because some people were interested in identifying the structural barriers to non-cis-men nerd musicians creating an audience for their music. and ofc white supremacist patriarchal capitalism holds a lot of power over how you can do that and all the power over how (and why) it gets metrified, so it depressingly becomes a convo about ticket sales and streaming numbers

for the record, i don't care if anyone sells anything. i don't want people to starve. but i don't care about sales. most of my friends who have been making cool music for decades haven't made a cent. and they are cool with it. that's the way to be.

Geneva Jacuzzi

One answer that occurs to me is Happy Rhodes, who rarely made deliberately funny songs but certainly made deeply nerdy ones - e.g. “100 Years” is about an intelligent computer who outlives human civilisation; “Roy (Back From Offworld)” is basically a bid to write a musical version of Blade Runner; “Save Our Souls” is about aliens etc. In some senses this is a direct extension of e.g. Kate Bush singing about dancing with Hitler, but Bush explored sci-fi tropes only in passing (“Experiment IV” and “Deeper Understanding” and maybe “Breathing”); Rhodes’ work felt more invested in and engaged with nerd culture, at least in terms what that meant in the pre social media era.

Otherwise most of the female artists I like who I would describe as “quirky” tend to be on what you might call Dionysian end of the Dionysian/Apollonian divide - e.g. Mary Margaret O’Hara is deeply “quirky” but is also the opposite of a nerd in the archetypal sense.

Otherwise most of the female artists I like who I would describe as “quirky” tend to be on what you might call Dionysian end of the Dionysian/Apollonian divide - e.g. Mary Margaret O’Hara is deeply “quirky” but is also the opposite of a nerd in the archetypal sense.

I might be getting the definition of the Dionysian/Apollonian divide a bit wrong here, but if you take it as something like - Apollonian = ordered, rational, clear, carefully constructed and Dionysian = chaotic, irrational, emotional, messy, sloppy - then the thing about a lot of the music that I think is being described here:

frenetic, synthy, slightly operatic pop-rock, I guess? A lot of the lyrics she likes explore sort of the dark side of emotions, without being too mournful or gloomy. Lightly horrific.

stuff in the Residents/Cardiacs/Devo/Sparks/They Might Be Giants vein, is that it kind of combines those two things, it's both rigidly ordered and messy, is based in this tension between 'messiness' and 'neatness/hygiene'. Like the way that Frank Zappa is simultaneously prissy and scatological

or music that sounds awkward and uncoordinated, but not in a way that suggests the instinctive, or natural or vitality, but in a way that suggests self consciousness and artifice - music for people for whom being natural does not come naturally

Otherwise most of the female artists I like who I would describe as “quirky” tend to be on what you might call Dionysian end of the Dionysian/Apollonian divide - e.g. Mary Margaret O’Hara is deeply “quirky” but is also the opposite of a nerd in the archetypal sense.

― Tim F

soooo is this the bit where we start talking about autism and neurodiversity, the way ASD relates to our understanding of "nerds", and the way white patriarchal cultural norms have shaped our understanding of neurodiversity?

i know, i know, i'm back to talking about structural barriers

i'm a very different person now than i was five years ago, even though not that much has really changed about me. part of it is that i'm being the person i want to be, and part of it is that i've _had_ to adapt to meet a radically different set of expectations, even in a world that, to my view, allows women more latitude to be nerdy than would have been permissible 30 years ago. i guess that colors my views on what it means to be a "nerdy" girl.

or music that sounds awkward and uncoordinated, but not in a way that suggests the instinctive, or natural or vitality, but in a way that suggests self consciousness and artifice - music for people for whom being natural does not come naturally

― soref

or maybe our "natural" is just different from cultural norms about "authenticity"! i've found that often it's when i'm at my most real and authentic that people accuse me of being inauthentic.

I can't speak to ASD and related issues specifically. From a political/philosophical perspective my kneejerk assumption would be that living in patriarchal society as a woman might be more likely to result in the creation of art that is disruptive/oppositional/questioning with respect to social structures, and hence that female artists who are making (deliberately or otherwise) "weird" music may be less likely to make music that aligns with a culturally-technocratic* view of the world.

*I'm using "culturally-technocratic" here to gesture vaguely towards a worldview that is broadly positive and normative with respect to the basic structures of human society (and hence patriarchy) - e.g. Asimov not Ballard and also not Le Guin.

(Mary Margaret O'Hara's 'Miss America', to use the example I cite above, strikes me as a very thoughtful and thought-through critique of the limits of language and in particular the limits of language in patriarchal society to express women's lived experience - most obviously in "Body's In Trouble", which circles around the question "When your body's in trouble, who do you talk to?" This is "intellectual" but cuts against the notion of "nerd", or at least my conception of it, which overlaps heavily with a culturally-technocratic (though not necessarily politically-technocratic) worldview.)

(Mary Margaret O'Hara's 'Miss America', to use the example I cite above, strikes me as a very thoughtful and thought-through critique of the limits of language and in particular the limits of language in patriarchal society to express women's lived experience - most obviously in "Body's In Trouble", which circles around the question "When your body's in trouble, who do you talk to?" This is "intellectual" but cuts against the notion of "nerd", or at least my conception of it, which overlaps heavily with a culturally-technocratic (though not necessarily politically-technocratic) worldview.)

so i'd never really heard mary margaret o'hara before... first i didn't have access to her music, then i felt like listening to music made by women would be, like, invading women's spaces, which yes, i know that was stupid. but that's what i thought. and then i stopped listening to music as obsessively as i used to.

anyway oh my GOD i relate to this so hard, not as a woman - i don't hear anything specific to _women_ in this song, personally - but as a NERD. (and yeah also as a trans person, definitely, but i'm leaving that whole thing out of it.)

like one of my big formative experiences as a nerd was being what today is known as "dyspraxic" but at the time was known as "bad at sports". yeah i was into a lot of music with herky-jerky rhythms because i COULDN'T FUCKING DANCE.

and so yes, my body was a source of endless anxiety and frustration to me, and it wasn't just the "wrong puberty" thing it was _any puberty at all_. i was fat and awkward and when i tried to talk to girls my body wouldn't let me. my body was in trouble and i didn't know who to talk to about it or _how_ to talk to anybody about it. so i decided to just think about how awesome led zeppelin was instead. it was a coping strategy.

the mind-body dichotomy isn't all it's cracked up to be, is my experience. there's this whole myth, the apollonian myth, nerds are supposed to be _rational_ and _logical_ and holy shit have you ever _met_ one of us? i had a tendency to have fucking meltdowns if you moved the milk to a _DIFFERENT PART OF THE FRIDGE_ without telling me. that's just not rational and orderly behavior. this idea, apollonian, dionysian... it's as much a social construct, to me, as the gender divide (fuck if i know about gender vis-a-vis the social contruct thing, but the gender _divide_ sure as fuck is. like seriously when i was 18 some asshole sold millions of books saying that men were from mars and women were from venus. what the fuck is that horseshit?)

---

technocratic? i mean i thought computers were cool and i had an unrealistically utopian idea of technology. for sure. a lot of it came out as, like, power fantasy, wish fulfillment. i actually remember saying as a teenager that my goal in life was to have "a fast computer and a hot wife". i mean i didn't know what a "hot wife" was, exactly, i wasn't sure what that meant or what one would _do_ with a hot wife exactly. i mean basically i just wanted a world where i fucking belonged, you know? and it sure as hell wasn't the world i grew up in.

"technocratic" is a little bit of reductive way of putting it, though. like, if you listen to DEVO... i was a _huge_ fan of DEVO, and they're not exactly culturally technocratic. they had lyrics like

Rockets rust, attack, decay
Things fall apart while spacemen play

(i mean that was the album i had by them... i liked the idea of "hardcore" anything and i thought the cover was cool)

they might be giants, i never saw them as more than retro-futurist at best. a scientifically inaccurate song about the sun, an album named after a lunar mission that never happened. and songs about james k. polk and james ensor, belgium's famous painter.

i mean ultimately the social structures in place _didn't_ work to my benefit, and yeah, i thought computers might change that. they didn't. i guess there are a lot of people whose goals in life never grew beyond "a fast computer and a hot wife", who have found themselves satisfied by the world the internet made, and i have a hard time not having contempt for those people. the narcissism of small differences, perhaps.

that's just not rational and orderly behavior. this idea, apollonian, dionysian... it's as much a social construct, to me, as the gender divide (fuck if i know about gender vis-a-vis the social contruct thing, but the gender _divide_ sure as fuck is. like seriously when i was 18 some asshole sold millions of books saying that men were from mars and women were from venus. what the fuck is that horseshit?)

yeah, obv any binary is going to be reductive, and of course Apollo vs Dionysus is (necessarily! we're talking about mythological archetypes here) a social construct - to the extent that I think male and female artists have been more likely to to fall on one side of the other of these notional divides (put another way, have been depicted as doing so) it would only or primarily be because of social constructs - not just in terms of what we have historically considered to be "male" or "female" signifying art but also in terms of what we consider to be self-consciously intellectual.

But I think Devo are interesting to raise here as directly corroding any pat notions (including my own) with respect to what "nerd" refers to, especially the assumption of nerdishness as de-emphasising the body. This is probably true of a lot of post-punk and adjacent stuff (e.g., is David Thomas a nerd?).

For my part I never self-identified as a nerd, despite otherwise fitting a lot of the indicia, perhaps because by the time I self-identified as anything I knew I wasn't straight, and it seemed like the latter fact was disqualifying - it wasn't until I saw Araki's 'The Living End' that it occurred to me that the queer nerd could not only exist but be a whole identity in itself.

several years ago my daughter got really into a genre of music I can't exactly describe but was also youtube-adjacent, specifically...fan made songs about indie horror games? five nights at freddy's, bendy and the ink machine, hello neighbor, and while this colored the video/lyrical aspect of the song there was also a sensibility across the board I couldn't quite nail down at the time, or today for that matter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLeQSd7R-jU

I like this song a lot, it has 200+ million views on youtube, but I don't know what else I would share with someone if this is their jam

I suspect there is a meta-appeal that includes the video, the game, the lore behind the game, and the community, but yeah I believe frenetic, synthy, lightly horrific and slightly operatic nerdy-pop-rock is a new thing and am all for it

my daughter (13) also likes TMBG - the voice of the young people!

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, October 5, 2023 11:36 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i mean, they were for even my generation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqJXxHi6RwQ

xp to Florin Cuchares: yes, songs about Five Nights at Freddies is where my daughter was around the beginning of the pandemic. I haven't heard that tune in a while, but I definitely remembered it as soon as I clicked on the YouTube. I watched so many Afton Family fan-fic videos with her that I have no idea what the actual story is supposed to be.

She hasn't been into FNAF for a minute, but I actually just bought out a row of cinema seats for the FNAF movie's opening weekend later this month, so that she and her friends can all see it together.

I just remembered that I made a comment about the video game-inspired music she was listening to about 3 years ago: ILM's 2010's blindspots

But I think Devo are interesting to raise here as directly corroding any pat notions (including my own) with respect to what "nerd" refers to, especially the assumption of nerdishness as de-emphasising the body. This is probably true of a lot of post-punk and adjacent stuff (e.g., is David Thomas a nerd?).

For my part I never self-identified as a nerd, despite otherwise fitting a lot of the indicia, perhaps because by the time I self-identified as anything I knew I wasn't straight, and it seemed like the latter fact was disqualifying - it wasn't until I saw Araki's 'The Living End' that it occurred to me that the queer nerd could not only exist but be a whole identity in itself.

― Tim F

this actually corresponds really well with a lot of my thoughts last night, when i was asking myself why i'm so emotionally invested in this thread. and the best way i can think of to talk about it is by going back to what chris l said yesterday morning:

there's a certain strain of nerd culture that TMBG and Ween represent that remains strongly male-centered

― Chris L, Thursday, October 5, 2023 6:49 AM (yesterday)

that's one way of putting it. another way of putting it is misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic. in saying that, though, i want to be clear that this isn't something about TMBG or ween themselves. i haven't seen any indication that TMBG are any of those things. ween, honestly, i don't know their early work that well, but i just don't get that vibe from them. like mostly the vibe i get from them is that they're super high. (which is also, i should note, in opposition to the "nerd" stereotype i grew up with!) nor is it, i think, any sort of reflection on peace, man.

this is personal to me because i _did_ come from that strain of nerd culture and i _was_ misogynist and transphobic. i don't see things like gamergate and incels coming out of nowhere. they come out of this deep sense of entitlement and superiority that a lot of nerds, including me, had back in the day. the interesting thing about it is that that sense of superiority is, for me, innately coupled with my equally strong sense of _inferiority_ and fragility. i think the best way of describing it is nerd _exceptionalism_. that's why, i think, binaries do break down. i don't feel like i was unique in believing myself to be simultaneously categorically better and categorically worse than "normal" people. i _do_ think devo is maybe the best expression of this aspect of nerd culture, just because they're so much more _honest_ about it.

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that's a big thing for a lot of... ok, i'll just say it, it's a big autism thing. one of the big things associated with being a nerd is a lack of social skills, and the neurodiversity framing pushes back on that a lot, but to some extent it's true. nerds are very very good at saying the quiet part out loud.

i think this is pretty well exemplified by devo's minor hit "through being cool" (covered by TMBG, quite well i should add, though it doesn't have the excellent beat alan myers contributes to the original) immediately cries out "eliminate the ninnies and the twits". devo, i think, are overt this way because they're more insightful and capable of self-criticism than a lot of the nerd culture they represent.

the nerd approach to social skills is, i think, delightfully represented by john hodgman's description of john adams' time as ambassador to france. he says - i'm paraphrasing here - that john adams headbutted the french ambassador to america, explaining later that "i was only trying to get the information in my head into his more efficiently." well, i mean, that makes sense, that's _logical_.

that's not logical. information transfer doesn't work that way. to nerds, though, god, wouldn't the vulcan mind meld be _great_? like, not just as a narrative shortcut, we wouldn't have to go to all the trouble of _explaining_ things to people and being misunderstood and all that frustration...

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coincidentally, peace, man asks if women are "innately cool and beautiful". in my younger days i absolutely _did_ see women that way. we're not. women aren't innately cool and beautiful. if women were innately cool and beautiful, there is no fucking way i could be a woman, haha.

the belief that we _are_ innately cool and beautiful is... i think related to nerd misogyny, which, again, i'm _not saying peace, man is misogynist_, i want to be totally clear on that. one of the tenets of orthodox nerd culture, sometimes unspoken, sometimes spoken, is that women, queer people, and nonwhite people can't be nerds.

another adhd digression - there's something about nerd culture that's either childish or childlike, depending on your perspective. when calvin, in calvin and hobbes, founds a club called "G.R.O.S.S." (for "Get Rid Of Slimy girlS"), that's got a lot of resemblance to nerd misogyny... not just for how fundamentally juvenile it is, but for the way misogyny doesn't quite _fit_, but they find a way to shoehorn it in anyway and act like it works.

i mean what _works_ is for nerds to not see ourselves as exceptionalist, but as yet _another_ group portrayed as inferior by prevailing social and cultural norms. instead, nerds associated themselves culturally with the dominant cultural norms, with racism, with misogyny, with homophobia and transphobia. i mean, you want to look at the changing face of nerd culture, look at D&D.

when i was young, there was all this talk about d&d being occult and satanic. it was this whole big thing, there was that infamous tom hanks movie. and that was based on a guy named james dallas egbert iii, a big d&d fan who disappeared during his freshman year in college. his parents hired a detective to investigate his disappearance. and what did the private dick hired to investigate the case say? that egbert was queer, and that was why he ghosted.

d&d has _always been queer_. there's just a natural affinity there. d&d gives players, who when i was young were often young, were often teenagers, the chance to create their own personae, to experiment with different ways of being. one of the big transfem stereotypes (and it is a transfem stereotype because again, nerd culture of the time excluded women) is the person who consistently roleplays as a woman and wow, big shocker, turns out to be a woman.

d&d wasn't _created_ queer, mind you. it wasn't _intentionally_ queer. D&D has complex roots. wehraboo wargamers, tolkien high fantasy nerds, and the mediating influence of gary gygax, who, far from being satanic, was a conservative jehovah's witness.

which, hell, let's talk about jehovah's witnesses and nerd culture. that's a whole weird thing, right? i mean, you brought up david thomas, who's a JW, who put out a record called _Why I Hate Women_, and i don't know if he's doing it ironically or what but the guy is a misogynist. prince wasn't a nerd - it wasn't possible for him, he was black - but him being a JW manifested itself as some pretty strong homophobia. he loved the company of women but treated them pretty consistently poorly.

at the same time, a lot of your new atheism kind of stuff... that's got strong roots in frank zappa. i mean i was a fucking _huge_ frank zappa fan. i overlooked and dismissed his misogyny for a long time, oh you know "he's not a _misogynist_, he's a _misanthrope_, bullshit the man was a fucking massive misogynist. he was also a _hugely_ influential figure in nerd music. you hang around nerd culture and it's not unlikely that you're gonna run into someone like i was, who won't ever fucking shut up about a misogynist shithead like frank zappa and will cape for him so fucking hard if you bring up the misogyny.

it's just _accepted_. it's a normal part of the culture. and orthodox nerds don't understand it's a problem. orthodox nerds seriously ask why there aren't more women in stem, and i mean, have you fucking read any of the stuff james watson said? about women, about bipoc, about queer people, about fat people? he's an extreme example, but that was always an _acceptable_ part of orthodox/trad nerd culture. nerd culture presented itself as being for outcasts but was just as hostile to a lot of us outcasts as "normal" society, possibly moreso.

but there were lots of ways it manifested. one of the most important ways it manifested was in the way the boundaries were drawn. to me, one of the best ways of understanding that is early star trek fandom. this was a show that just had no strong or interesting female characters. look. this wasn't an accident. roddenberry was _definitely_ a casting couch kind of guy. if you were a woman and you wanted to be on star trek, you had to sleep with him. if you didn't want to sleep with him, like grace lee whitney, he sexually assaulted you anyway and then fired you from the show for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about it. star trek tos reflected the deeply misogynist perspective of roddenberry at that time.

despite this it _wasn't_ just a show that appealed to men. a lot of women loved this show, just as much as men did, this show that had no place for them. so they made a place. they made Mary Sue. they made slashfic. and they spent the entire 70s being vilified and mocked by the guys who took star trek as _their_ show, _their_ narrative to control.

women can be nerds today because women fucking _fought_ for it. fought hard. tmbg, ween, they came about during that struggle, and though they were claimed by a lot of people from the misogynist nerd culture, they weren't part of it. they didn't belong to it. i guess the important thing is to... acknowledge that fight, acknowledge its consequences. they came to prominence in an age where women couldn't be nerds. this is a view that orthodox nerd culture still holds. my nerd credentials have never been a matter of dispute. hopefully this sheds some light on why this is a topic i'm so invested in.

and this also probably goes a long way to explaining why i am so dogged in fighting for an expansive view of nerd culture both past _and_ present. no, there was no female version of devo, there was no female version of TMBG. there were _plenty_ of women who were nerds, though, even if they were excluded from the orthodox narrative. i think it's worth taking an expansive view, of when one talks about quirky acts to not exclude women who seem "cool". hopefully i've made a persuasive case for doing that!

B-52s were better than all these other nerds anyway.

Earth Girl Helen Brown

The new underscores album is noisier than maybe fits here, but full of drama, genre fuckery, and hooks, so maybe?

THIS IS HOW WE DO IT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1c2KzJbcGA