My freshman year of college, I finally came to terms. I decided that it was time to come out of the locker and announce to the world: I am a nerd.
But by the time I was ready to tell everyone that I had memorized Star Fleet’s Prime Directive or could expertly debate the strengths and weaknesses of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon versus Dash Rendar’s Outrider, no one seemed to care. While I had spent the past few years doing my best not to let references to Farscape slip into everyday conversation, the nerdy went mainstream.
One might first think of the film adaptations of comic books that continue to dominate the box office. Bryan Singer’s X-Men, which came out in 2000, can be said to be responsible for the recent spate of spandex-clad superheroes at the cinema. The lowly comic books have even infiltrated highbrow culture, with Alan Moore’s Watchmen making it onto Time’s list of the 100 all-time greatest English-language novels. A show like CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, hugely popular among the highly coveted 18-49 demographic, functions as little more than Nerdology 101: The Basics of Pop Culture Allusions.
Now I’m all for the writers and artists that I love making money off their creations—everybody has a family to feed. Alan Moore, cantankerous prick that he is, deserves to make as much money as he can off of his work. Even if that work results in the film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
The problem arises when the wrong people make money off of others’ creations. Elvis Presley made a career of co-opting African-American blues and rock music and making it palatable to the masses. Brett Ratner, the auteur behind the immortal Rush Hour and Rush Hour 2, essentially committed the same cultural crime with X3: The Last Stand, exploiting the work of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby—in the process, destroying the goodwill that Bryan Singer had engendered with his first two films in the series.
I’m fine with a lot of people enjoying nerdy things. I would love to argue with more people about the greatest captain in Star Trek history (Answer: it’s Captain Janeway of the USS Voyager) or about the point at which The X-Files jumped the shark (Answer: the release of the first film, Fight the Future). I know that some hold the view that true fandom can only be measured by some ideological purity. The moment something becomes too popular it is immediately disowned as “selling out.”
But there is a moment of discomfort for me once a comic, television show, or book series becomes popular. All of a sudden, a host of middlemen—people who should be nowhere near the creative process—step in with talks of monetizing the property and ancillary revenue streams and the next thing you know, kids are playing with Rorschach the action figure, with kung-fu grip ability.
Merchandizing and sponsorship isn’t even the problem—I could care less whether Spider-Man prefers Pepsi or Coke. Trouble sets in when the profit becomes the only reason for a series to continue, treading creative water until every penny has been bled dry. Just try and sit through Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
When media that was previously only popular in nerd circles becomes profitable on a mass scale, everyone suddenly wants a piece of the action. Occasionally, this means that everyone gets to see the J.J. Abram’s wonderful reboot of Star Trek, but more likely it means that the world has to suffer through Jennifer Garner’s disastrous Elektra.
The downsides makes me want to side with the ideological purists, and forsake the possibility of popular appeal for anything I like. This way, there will be no dilution of the product, no attempts to soften and broaden plots and storylines to make them more palatable to the greater public.
But then I think about some of the most enjoyable entertainment I’ve encountered in the past couple of years. There is no way that the thoroughly delightful Chuck, which packs more nerd allusions into forty-two minutes than most series do in their entire run, would have even made it to the air, let alone gotten renewed past its first season, without a certain popular appeal. And Battlestar Galactica—not broadly popular by any means, but easily one of the best shows of the decade—was vociferously opposed by the majority of nerds, who remained ever faithful to the ridiculously campy 1970’s original.
As much as I may hate what happens to some of my favorite nerdy entertainment, it’s clear that the new creative blood (and money) brought by wide popularity can infuse vitality and originality into media that have otherwise gone stagnant. When I see a Twilight fan at Comicon, I may not welcome her, but I’ll grind my teeth and pray that having her there pays off.
The problem does not always arise when the wrong people make money off of others’ creations. The problem is when writers are misinformed. Assuming Elvis was the wrong man to do it, then this, in addition to disqualifying any other white american to have taken his place, would necessarily lead to us expecting that someone other, ostensibly an African American, would have had to make a career of singing African-American blues, and rock music, and make it really palatable to the masses. But this had been tried before, for years, decades before Elvis, so is the writer of the article suggesting that we should have waited 50 years so that someone, say, an African American today, would act as a catalyst bringing the blues, rock, soul, raggae, r&b, and rap, all rolled into one, as if Presley’s fusion of R&B and Country, which created rockbilly, one of the four major styles in early rock, had never existed? Wishful thinking, in reverse, I say.
Or, is the writer suggesting that someone as James Brown, a fully developed artist, by 1956, when he electrified the Apollo, or any of the Chicago greats, like Berry and Didley, or the Genious himself, Mr. Ray Charles, or Fats Domino, in New Orleans, could have galvanized public attention, and forced people to focus on rock, as a way of life, like Elvis did? If that was the case, that he did it because he sang African american songs, why then Pat Boone, and not Elvis, or why did Rick nelso, not Elvis, galvanized the world when the former attempted to sing every Little Richard song, on national television, whilst the latter did also, in his parent’ television show, in which he always appeared?
And, moreover, is the writer suggesting that the concerts that some of these early rockers gave, in far away places, could even begin to mean as much to people the world over, including inside the Iron Curtain, as a siongle event in Presley’s lufe made possible, his Army stint produced, and this without him ever stepping on a single stage in Europe?
Come on, get over criticizing Presley who was, luckily, the one who naturally loved the blues from the word go. First in Tupelo, in the poorest state in the Union, with African American neighbors, as poor as he was.
And then, as of age 12, in Memphis, the home of the delta blues, in the second poorest state in the Union.
At the crossrods of American music, that’s where he was.
The above notwithstanding, the unvarnished truth is that of the 18 number ones he had in the singles charts, 16 were written by white americans, the remaining 2 from the pen of one African American, the great Otis Blackwell, who wrote both “Don’t be cruel” and “All shook up”.
Or is the writer of the article unaware that “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock” to givetwo examples, were written by Leiber and Stoller, two jewish “kids” form New Jersey?
Which brings me back to the sentence that stated it all. Presley did not build on a career that co-opted African-American blues and rock music and made it palatable to the masses. He built on a career that included the above, but he had a tremendous palette of other colors to go with it.
Or are we to suggest that “Heartbreak Hotel”, “Love me tender”, his first and fifth number ones, or “It’s now or never” and “Suspicious Minds”, his 13th and 18th, his last, were blues inspired?
The man had the knack, as they say in Britain, and he was the complete package, from the start. And in 1856, no singer was expected to be a songwriter.