Whilst working on the playlist for the Fellowship of Middle Earth Monash's annual Masquerade Ball, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that nerds only really seem to like Pop songs that have been on their favorite tv programmes and films. This can be evidenced with Stan Bush's "The Touch", from the 1980s Transformers animated film (read: 2 hour toy advertisement). This song has a cult following and is lauded by nerds the world over for its 80s hair guitar work and tight-pants vocals. Even I will admit an appreciation for "The Touch" in a "so bad it's good" capacity. This however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to the nerdy followings of programmes like Scrubs and Supernatural, the musical base of the average nerd is growing in strange directions.
Need a little background first? Ok. So we all retain an appreciation for the music we hear our parents playing when we're kids, for me it was The Who and Dire Straights. As we grow into surly teenagers we find music that we can identify with and use to annoy our parents (Yes, I own two Linkin Park albums). Typically you'll pick up things you hear on the radio (Smash Mouth) so you know some of the pop music of your youth. Nerds aren't big radio people (typically, I'm generalizing on purpose to save time), so they get their favorite music from film and television that they like. Basically, because seeing the Transformers movie when you were a kid made you almost wet yourself with excitement, so you attach that same emotion to the song when you hear it.
Because of the above, songs like "The Time Warp", "I'm Gonna Be" and the theme from Ghostbusters are on every nerd's iPod, along with Goth Metal and Electronica. This phenomenon is at its worst, mildly annoying; there are few songs I truly hate, and I can deal with listening to a not very good song repeatedly, knowing I can crank up the stereo on the drive home. The problem is that thanks to every nerd's secret power to make stuff survive ad infinitum, even the worst songs chosen to appear on a soundtrack are around forever. Supernatural and Scrubs at least tend to go for thematically appropriate music in most episodes, but there's always something to set your teeth on edge. From the just plain bad songs (Journey - "Don't Stop Believin'), to the annoying (anything from the Buffy musical) to the downright plagiarist (the Ghostbusters theme sounds almost exactly like Huey Lewis' "I Want a New Drug), nerd music has a lot to answer for.
So here's my solution; I'm going to go down to the video store and rent every nerd movie and tv show I can and record over the bad music with something good so that the next generation of nerds will love Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen, The Smiths and Elivs rather than Stan Bush and Journey.
P.S. Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" is a masterpiece and has my approval to survive.
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