NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)

By: Eric Weisbard
November 29, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of (one of) their nerdy obsessions.

illustration by Ping Zhu in The Independent

SUMMATIONS

Somewhere in the still under construction database of Village Voice issues, probably appearing one Wednesday in 1993, there is an essay I wrote, about Rhino Records compilation CDs, in particular the label’s multivolume 1970s AM radio hits collection, Have a Nice Day. And in that essay, at some point, for reasons I never bothered to explain, I summarized the argument of one paragraph with the line “Let Basehead judge.”

Now, if, in something like 1993, you had read your Soviet dissidents, you probably did know that, alongside Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov there was one named Roy Medvedev, who in 1969 had published a critique of Stalin called Let History Judge. And if you were also up on hipster music in 1993, you knew there was a group called Basehead who, a la De La Soul, had engineered an indie album, Plays With Toys, that combined the two great trends of the time: hip-hop and slacker rummaging through pop junk. So what I meant, speculating on the likes of “Indiana Wants Me” as a “cheese” aesthetic different from camp, was that the Rolling Stone, Woodstock view of rock history was Kremlinology and a set of randomly curated, individually issued volumes of apparently limitless, pretty great, half-remembered, inessential recordings had the termite-like power – if they replaced Dylan, Stones, Beatles – to tear down the Wall.

How had I become this obscure writer, accused by a friend who wrote his undergrad thesis on Derrida vs. Austin in re speech acts of being harder to follow than Wittgenstein? Well, my nerd passion is for too-quick and yet too-long summations. There was the 47-page paper I wrote for a high school social studies class on my family’s script typewriter, comparing the anti-USSR critiques of S, S, and M – “holding a mirror up to a mirror,” Mr. Marienhoff wrote. The junior paper in college on Sabbatai Sevi, Gershom Scholem’s beloved “mystical messiah,” whose failed religious revolt corresponded in gnostic ways with Protestant modernity. And my own 1988 senior thesis, about how reading Birmingham cultural studies could help you distinguish R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, and Top 40 as equally riddled with questions of authenticity and commodification. Turned it in late, deleted whole sections—been revising it ever since!

In grad school, my cohort went to dinner at the late, great Leon Litwack’s and were taken to view this radical man’s conservatively composed home office, books he needed on every wall around a massive desk. I wrote a research paper for him based on reading two-plus decades of a weekly column on Black theater in The Freeman, struggling to comprehend the Bert Williams world of Blacks in blackface. He gave me high marks for content, low marks for form, but quite enjoyed my subsequent Voice writing. I’ll never complete my research, nor curtail my references. Let the Songbooks judge.

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NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)

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