How many super-cool kids did you see wearing 'Vote For Pedro' t-shirts in the early noughties? Behind the velvet rope at every nightclub sidewalk line on a Saturday night, among every clutch of faux-hawked and bleck-tipped lads at least one deliberately-distressed tee emblazoned with the Napoleon D reference. If you listened in carefully to those trendy kids, over the course of the night you might have even picked up the odd "GOSH!" among the homophobia and expletives.
Napoleon Dynamite made nerdy cool. It crossed cultural and sub-cultural divides, and had everyone cheering for the hopelessly daggy. And along the way, while the kids were laughing and rooting for Napoleon, nerdy got appropriated by cool. It isn't bona fide nerdiness, but that doesn't seem to matter when t-shirt sales are at stake.
And I'm not ok with it. I'm very fucking un-ok with it. Nerdy isn't cool - nerdy is the antithesis of cool. The existence of nerdy defines cool. Geeky might be able to straddle the gulf of cultural improbability into cool, but nerdy is and forever will be outside of cool. Those punks in their nightclub lines have no right to nerdy. Even the vasaline-lensed, quaint and redemptive kind of nerdy that 'Vote For Pedro' symbolises.
Cool kids get everything else. They're not allowed to have nerdy too. Not on my watch.
..........
2 comments:
It's hip to be square.
- Quoth Huey Lewis and the News.
Agreed. It just confuses everyone when bros become geeks, like the time/space continuum gets fucked up or something.
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