Slate's Mark O'Connell (here) highlights one of the main virtues of Nardwuar the Human Serviette:
One of the most interesting things about watching a lot of Nardwuar’s interviews (and if you watch one, chances are you’ll end up watching a lot) is the way that they tend to reveal aspects of artists’ personalities that we’re not accustomed to seeing. His aggressive uncoolness—the silly hat, the grating manner, the relentlessly pursued obsession with minutiae—amounts to a kind of challenge. The respect he gets from people like Big K.R.I.T., Grimes, Brother Ali, Pharrell, Snoop Dogg, Joanna Newsom, El-P, Questlove, and Ian MacKaye reflects the extent to which these people are, in their different ways, smart and empathic enough to see past the geeky, gimmicky surface to the value of what he’s doing.
But that uncoolness brings out a lack of basic decency—a shabbiness and stupidity—in others. A 1991 interview with Sonic Youth, for instance, was especially difficult for me, a Sonic Youth fan, to watch—first for how it reveals their stunted and clichéd conception of what it means to be a bunch of cool people in a cool rock band, and then for how it reveals them as just standard-issue schoolyard bullies. Lee Ranaldo breaks a rare 7-inch record Nardwuar has brought them, and then he and Thurston Moore (then age 33 and 35 respectively) grab him and pull his T-shirt over his head as he struggles and shouts. “You idiot!” he screams at Ranaldo. “You fucking piece of shit!” It’s a grim spectacle, but worth sitting through as a reminder of how shallow and transparently fraudulent the performance of countercultural cool can often be.
Patrick Lyons (here) also sees this virtue of Nardwuar, with the list of the three best and worst (to my list of bests I would add Questlove (his beautiful laugh, the way he is reduced to tears at the fifth or sixth present Nardwuar gives him at around the thirty-two minute mark, and the end of the interview), Pharrell Willliams (the way he turns the table and interviews Nardwuar and also, with Snoop, helped Nardwuar get over so largely in the hip hop community), and Courtney Love, who cherished Nardwuar long before he had gotten over with other musicians). Kyley Elison (here) has provided musicians with a list of rules for dealing with Nardwuar (it's actually pretty good general advice: (1) Do Nardwuar impersonations, (2) Don't do cocaine, (3) Do come bearing gifts, (4) Don't underestimate Nardwuar, (5) Don't act defensive. Please follow the link, as each rule is illustrated with a Nardwuar interview.)
In any case, the Sonic Youth interview makes me recall K-Punk's wonderful diatribes against the band (for example, see here and here). It also makes me realize just how prone humans are to become the very things they take themselves to be against.
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