This week I picked up 50 Words For Snow, the latest record from Kate Bush, music’s dream queen. It’s more a collection of song-poems rather than pop ditties, pretty pictures full of piano-and-drum atmosphere and her voice with new age-given cracks like a patina on an antique vase.
The songs range from a a snowflake hoping to be caught, to a pair of lovers traveling through time, to a sexy encounter with a better-than-average snowman.
Man, this is gonna sound great on a snowy night.
And, I also think, this is why I have my blerd card.
Among the many things that I’ve used to forge my racial/cultural identity as a black nerd, music is high up on the list. You’re not the coolest kid on the block blasting Billy Joel in your Walkman, or, even worse, getting together with your musician friends and performing Billy Joel and Elton John songs in a middle-school assembly. (Yes, I did that. Yes, I’m embarrassed and proud of it at the same time.)
Music and the music industry used to be about as racially divided as you could get. There was “white music” and “black music.” White people and rock were over here, and black people and R&B were over there. The radio stations were separate, the TV shows were separate (American Bandstand and Soul Train), the magazines were separate (Rolling Stone and Ebony). Even Michael Jackson and Run-DMC had to fight to get on MTV.
So I always felt a bit off once I figured out, around age 10, that I liked rock music.
Before that it was all R&B and jazz from my father, who has thousands of records. I started off slowly, moving from the hip-hop/R&B station to the adult contemporary station to sleep at night, and then the rock station during the day. Listening to lots of Queen. And before my friend Rob educated me on real punk and David Bowie, my rock-fan foundation was forced in “alternative” rock.
You couldn’t escape the stuff in the mid-’90s.
Grunge rockers, goths and sad-eyed guitar janglers in outfits made of black T-shirts and jeans, trench coats, Doc Martens and flannel. Sitting around figuring out R.E.M., U2 and The Smiths, playing Cranberries and Jesus and Mary Chain. Tolerating Pearl Jam but liking Soundgarden, picking up both The Breeders and Belly. Blissing out to Mazzy Star, dancing to Bjork and getting lost in Cocteau Twins once I’d ditched MTV’s Alternative Nation and Buzz Bin for their older brother, 120 Minutes.
In other words, about as far from a black kid in West Philadelphia as you could get.
Here I was, in the golden age of rap, and I wasn’t interested. No 2Pac, no Notorious B.I.G., no Wu Tang Clan, no Ice Cube, no nothing. Sometimes other black kids would ask me why I was listening to that white music, call me a sellout. I just knew I liked what I was hearing. That kind of experience weighs on you after a while. I mean, it’s just Tom Petty and some Genesis.
Why are Tom Petty and Genesis wrong?
My favorite of the alt-rock music freakshow was Tori Amos. I first heard Amos at age 10, when “Silent All These Years,” showed up on pockets of cable TV. And I went to a couple of her concerts in the mid-’90s, only to see that my face was the only black one there.
I was starting to get that a lot with whatever nerdery I’d pick up: comic books, rock music, chess club, theater. And you don’t really ever get used to it. I’m still not used to it now, and that’s the majority of my life. You feel the defensive shields go up around you, whether from other people or your own. Don’t want to give too much away, or say something that you know they wouldn’t understand or agree with, something that shouted, “I really am different from you, you just don’t realize it!”
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| Any further explanation why the term shouldn’t be used? |
All the same, I still listen to my nerdy music. The stuff that makes me feel nerdiest tends to fit in that dream queen Kate Bush mold: Tori Amos, Bjork, Bat For Lashes. (Yet I don’t like Florence and the Machine. Go fig.) I mean, it’s not the stuff you’d expect to hear blasting from my coupe at a stoplight, and I don’t really care. It’s pretty stuff.
I also have my collection of blerd musicians: Living Colour, Bad Brains, Fishbone, TV on the Radio, Reggie Watts, Chocolate Genius and the like. Rap also is deep in the blerd game now. Theophilus London is in there. Donald Glover of Community fame has released his debut album under his rap moniker Childish Gambino. The Roots keep moving further into indie rock while playing for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Mos Def does indie-jazz-rap and fronted his own rock band, Black Jack Johnson. Kanye West keeps sampling old R&B and prog rock, which means he’s King Blerd of the moment.
So I guess I don’t have to feel too weird about my music.
Who’s gonna mess with Big Boi?
