It's hip to be square in pop, but do geeks leave us cold when they get too clever, asks RICHARD CLAYTON
We weren't prepared for being this popular," Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor admitted just before Made in the Dark went Top 5 last month. Despite producing an ear worming single, Over and Over, in 2006, Taylor never expected the band's appeal to stretch much beyond those whose T-shirts celebrate cult films, design fonts or electronic gadgets. Surely Hot Chip were too oddball, too knowing, too geeky for album-chart success?
Popularity and geekiness are not meant to fit. Geeks, say the precepts imported from American high-school slang, are bright but obsessive, socially awkward fashion retards. One up the cool chain from nerds - an important distinction - they seek solace in comics, complex role-playing games and cardigans. Yet, unlike nerds, whose only hope is to grow into software billionaires, geeks are redeemable. If they are music obsessives, they can emerge from their bedrooms with hits of their own and, suddenly, it's hip to be square.
Once tagged to a subset of US college rock (Weezer, They Might Be Giants, Fountains of Wayne), "geeky" now crops up in relation to various bands in various genres: Hot Chip play electropop, Lightspeed Champion countrified chamber-folk, the Whitest Boy Alive - lanky King of Convenience Erlend Oye's latest project - immaculately minimal synth-funk. Being thorough, you could say that Vampire Weekend (preppy) and Los Campesinos! (twee) seem kinda geeky - or even Kanye West, with his faux-freshman act. And cardigans are everywhere.
Hot Chip are "accidentally cool", reckons Rob da Bank, the Radio 1 DJ and Camp Bestival curator, who has programmed them three times at his summer weekenders. "They're the same now as when they started. They've not styled themselves as geeks, unlike maybe Lightspeed Champion. He purposely looks a bit Napoleon Dynamite. Hot Chip don't worry about how they look. But if being geeky means being really into the thought processes of making music, then, yes, they're geeks by definition."
Seeing Hot Chip live in 2005, I wondered if their calculation went further than that. They lined up like an alternative boyband, each member attired as a species of geek: the science spod, the bookish twit, the computer freak, the middle-class hoodie and the wannabe DJ. As Tom Cox, author of The Lost Tribes of Pop, and my anthropologist here, observes: "An intrinsic part of geekiness is being incredibly self-conscious about it." But how can music, as opposed to a band's image, be geeky? In Culture's review of Made in the Dark, Dan Cairns wrote of "sonic trickery that tries too hard, made by clever-clogs smirk merchants who 'love' the genre they work in, but spend their time subverting it". In sum, he found the whole effect "chilling". Unfair?
"I actually thought Hot Chip weren't as try-hard as some bands who've had the geek label applied to them," Cox says. "I know what Dan means by chilling, though. My problem with 'geek music' today is that it seems too pleased with itself, too aware of its own geekiness. Twenty years ago, when geeks revelled in their geekiness, they used music to reconcile themselves with the fact that they were unpopular at school. You can hear that freedom in a lot of great American indie records of the 1980s. But where's the freedom when everyone's a geek?"
MySpace has given geekiness greater licence, while a laddish rump of rock fans will dismiss as "geeky" anything slightly eccentric or smart. But some bands run for the hills when the term is used to describe them. Young Knives were dogged by it after their Mercury-nominated debut album, Voices of Animals and Men, and on Turn Tail - the string-laden anthem of the follow-up, Superabundance - they do just that. "Young Knives write songs about trying to escape your persona and situation, and going to a more fantastical place," says Tim Dellow, co-founder of Transgressive, the label that releases the trio's work. "That coldness ascribed to geekiness is more appropriately applied to artists who are seen not as geeks but as progressive icons, such as Aphex Twin. He'll spend hours working out a synth tone. In pop, too, the people working on Girls Aloud - hardly perceived as geeky - spend days finding the right drum beat."
Superabundance is full of brilliantly barbed and brassed-off sounds from beyond the suburbs, cut from the same cloth as XTC, Aztec Camera and the Cribs - the kind that's too often underappreciated. Like Arctic Monkeys, Young Knives expand their horizons on their second album; as well as brusque post punk, it includes glam fuzz (I Can Hardly See Them), ominous yokel knowledge (Current of the River) and psychedelic twinges (Counters). All are prime slices of Britpop. Two weirdly moving songs, Flies and Mummy Light the Fire, also give the lie to the notion that "geeks" - or those tarred with that brush - necessarily lack heart.
"Young Knives are just themselves," Dellow says. "They live outside Oxford, and the singer grows vegetables. The clothes they wear are natural to them and, when they play in London, they stick out. They've sharpened up their suits with a Gilbert & George vibe lately - but, fundamentally, it's the same old tweed."
It's hard to disagree with Cox that "geekiness is a wider, more confusing spectrum than it used to be". How Young Knives must have sucked their teeth when Arctic Monkeys went to the Brits as country squires. Why wasn't it cool and "ironic" when they dressed that way? By such threads, geek fortunes can hang. As with all playground name-calling, who you think is a geek says as much about you as it does about the sap in question. Still, any definition of geekiness must involve the wearing of glasses, even metaphorically. And, as I'm a four-eyes myself, you can't report me for speccy-bashing.
* Superabundance is out on March 10 on Transgressive