Regular nerds are okay. They’re willing to stay up until six in the morning watching horror movies and drinking mountain dew, and they eventually grow up and get rich and let you sleep on their couch as long as you want. Sure, they may be a little too fond of D&D&D (Dungeons and Dragons and Dio), but that doesn’t mean they aren’t cool in their own way. But some nerds are more than just nerds. Some of them are real creeps. I’m sure you knew a few in high school: the kids who liked trains and transistor radios and freaked out if anyone mentioned sex and then had to change schools because they got caught masturbating in class.
The worst of the nerds tended to pair off. There’d always be one who was a squirrelly, introverted spastic, and one who was a tiny bit better-looking and had maybe kissed a girl but was still a complete dweeb. Of course, the squirrelly one secretly thinks that his dapper friend is the coolest dude in the universe and is eaten up by jealousy, and the dapper one secretly thinks that the squirrelly one is cramping his style. This dynamic generally manifests itself as loud arguments over Star Trek minutiae. These duos can be found at just about any school in the nation, drawn together by the fact that nobody else can stand them.
Imagine two of these kids forming a band. Surely they would have shrill, irritating voices, “hilariously weird” lyrics, and zany music videos. Their music would be just like them: sexless, and jittery; hiding behind wackiness and intellectual airs to conceal torment and misery; pathetic and annoying. Their fan base would consist of all the outcasts nerdy enough to tolerate them, mirroring the sad rejects-sticking-together dynamic of their friendship.
I guess I don’t have to be coy about naming the band to which I refer, since you already read the title of this article (unless you navigate the internet by closing your eyes and clicking on stuff). I’m talking about
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, the novelty-indie-pop group with a massive cult following of nerds, children, and poor souls who don’t know any better. They started out as a typical nerd-duo like the one I described:
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the skinny introverted spaz and
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the slightly-more-hip one. It’s easy to picture them in school pretending to be robots, asking to smell girls’ hair, and refusing to change in front of the other boys in the locker room. When they got home, I imagine that they’d put ice packs over their black eyes and fuck around with tape recorders all night.