Hot Chip Young Knives and other pop geeks too cool for school
March 22nd, 2008, 10:06 pm Hobbies Ideas
We weren%26rsquo;t prepared for being this popular, Hot Chip%26rsquo;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%26rsquo;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 %26ndash; an important
distinction %26ndash; 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%26rsquo;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 %26ndash; lanky King of Convenience Erlend Oye%26rsquo;s
latest project %26ndash; immaculately minimal synth-funk. Being thorough, you could
say that Vampire Weekend (preppy) and Los Campesinos! (twee) seem kinda geeky
%26ndash; 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%26rsquo;re the same now as when they started. They%26rsquo;ve not styled
themselves as geeks, unlike maybe Lightspeed Champion. He purposely looks a
bit Napoleon Dynamite. Hot Chip don%26rsquo;t worry about how they look. But if
being geeky means being really into the thought processes of making music,
then, yes, they%26rsquo;re geeks by definition.
Related posts
