So, I’m watching the naked, bald, muscled woman swing from the ceiling by her ankles whilst trying to order my eighth Corona of the hour when the DJ, who looks like Little Richard’s even gayer nephew, starts playing Korobeiniki (the Tetris music) over the club’s speakers. Even in the bizarre arty purgatory I was in, I was going to find gaming culture was omnipresent, and that gamers are set to get another boost up the cool-o-meter, heralded by the mainstream debut of Nerdcore.

What, who, how, and an exclusive interview after the jump…

It starts like this : I had somehow ended up in a painfully hip Alternative art club at the end of a row of curry restaurants in East London’s Brick Lane, holding on to my ninth Corona, watching a butch Australian girl, amongst other things , simulate masturbation with two lightsabers to the music of Edwin Starr.

Twenty minutes after the aerial routine set to Tetris finished, I was standing at the same bar doing the little pogo dance of happiness alongside what I believe contemporary gay culture refers to as a ‘twink’ over the fact that they played classic 8-bit game music in public. Suddenly aware of what I was doing, I settled back into looking cool and watched the big screen projection of what turned out to be a grimy montage of Halo, Space Invaders and hardcore clips of Deep Throat.

The heavily pierced and perfumed young gentleman had insisted if I like games that I go out and discover Nerdcore music. This was going to require research, the following day off work, and at least another fistful of Coronas if I was going to stay for the second act.

A little digging and this is what I turned up. In February this year the Club Panama in Amsterdam hosted Glitched: The Dutch Nerdcore Event, the first time this strange child of Hip-Hop and gaming culture had officially crossed the Atlantic. It came hot in the slipstream of documentary/manifesto movie Nerdcore Rising which has been doing the Indy film festival rounds for the last year, and is now to gain more momentum with a general release scheduled for July.

If you’ve noticed the G4TV adverts using the big names in Nerdcore, you can see why our corporate overlords are co-opting this particular bandwagon. Gamers are actually doing something that makes for sexy TV spots and soundbites and it isn’t just the Frag Dolls. The music is ostensibly MTV friendly beats, rhymes and outlandish clothes, but as one fan of leading ultranerd MC Frontalot said “They’re actually rapping about the stuff that I really care about – Magic the Gathering and internet porn”. Another called it ‘ like playing Halo whilst getting a BJ from Hello Kitty’.

Developing a distinctive musical style is practically essential for any sub-culture to establish itself  and to be able to identify not only externally but amongst its own members. Jocks, gangsters, art snobs, students, stoners, whoever, will be able to name a select fistful of bands or artists who are specifically ‘theirs’, representing a shared personality and set of values.

Despite the level of influence gamers have on popular culture – from the sheer dollar value of big releases like Halo 3 to our legacy of crappy movie adaptations – we have been slow in creating anything that might be called a distinctive sound. Cannon Fodder on the Amiga had the first in-game song complete with lyrics, and doubtless the latest Final Fantasy has Buddha himself playing session kazoo on the orchestral score, but Nerdcore represents one of the key-stones of legitimizing ‘gamer’ as a sub-culture.

Read on for more…

Tweet This Post

CONTINUE TO PAGE: 1 2