Well that covers the one thing about the literal audio quality I was going to mention.

Have you given thought to playing tracks in blocks of two or three at a time instead of track-talk-track-talk-track-talk? It’s something Marc does on The Real Congregation and Hex did with The Hex Grid. Not saying that it’d be an objectively better choice, but I think it might be worth considering; it can be good to hear a track you might not have heard before without knowing what to expect, or just to hear a solid chunk of music, followed by a solid chunk of talking.

Regardless, it was a good first episode. I’ll never be interviewed, but let me answer your question anyway: no, I don’t think nerd music is a genre. I think it’s a cultural background that inspires an artist’s instrument and lyrical choices. The styles that nerd music can be heard across are many, but they are styles and genres that already exist. When nerd music started blowing up, we called them subgenres of the genres they sounded like. MC Frontalot was nerdcore hip-hop, JoCo was nerd folk/nerd rock, Metroid Metal was videogame metal, etc. And I think that worked at the time because nobody wanted to say that these new artists were, ultimately, the same as the big stars that existed already. But, while I think that “nerd music” is a good banner term to describe the artists for convenience’s sake, it doesn’t help it be something that “normal people” will really “get”.

Someone in the Nerdcore Rising documentary had said something along the lines of “A regular person isn’t going to say ‘Hey, I’m gonna listen to nerdcore.’ They might hear one of these guys and go ‘That’s pretty funny, I like this,’ and someone else might say ‘Oh, you like nerdcore.’ And then they’ll go ‘Wuh, what? No way, I like jockcore. I like coolguycore. I’m not a nerd!” I know the ultimate goal of nerd musicians isn’t always to have mass appeal and be famous with millions the world over, but I’m sure everyone would like for more people to, if nothing else, give their music a chance. Sticking “nerd” in front of something immediately creates a certain dismissal and automatic bias against the thing being presented, in the eyes of the average consumer.

In the same documentary, Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys said “The more you genrify things, it makes what comes after it that much less interesting…Be careful with your own stereotype, it could become a prison.” It’s clear that nerd musicians have fun writing songs about nerdy material, or making songs that have their base in game melodies, or whatever else, and that’s fine. The problem with saying that their music is “nerd music”, however, is that it makes it hard for them to do much else. The first DJ Roborob track I heard was a remix of Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”. Steam Powered Giraffe got a lot of new fans because of a cover of Rihanna’s “Diamond” that they posted on YouTube. The best nerd artists are good musicians in their own rights; they just happen to have certain interests that they bring into their music. By just being artists in the broader genres as we know them, it gives them the freedom to not be judged by one group of people or another for being too nerdy or not being nerdy enough.

I think I was working towards a point, but then I started playing the documentary to confirm Jello’s name and got distracted, and then it turned out to be 1:30am, so…that’ll do, I suppose.