Comic Sociology

Yesterday, Spencer remarked that "reading David Brooks awkwardly name-drop Vampire Weekend makes me prefer the columns of his where he pretends that neoconservatism is an invention of anti-Semites."

Meh. I liked the Vampire Weekend column. It's just that while I almost always enjoy the "comic sociology" pieces that made Brooks famous, I wish they came with footnotes or something so we could learn whether or not there's actual sociology to back up the stuff Brooks is saying. Is there real evidence that the rise of geek culture is politically relevant as he implies toward the end? It's an interesting issue, which makes it an interesting column, but while I liked the joke about Barack Obama being the Prince Caspian of the iPhone set, I'd also kind of like to know the answer.

Comments

David Brooks is sloppy and morally sickening. Kristol has the decency to be a Republican operative, while Brooks wants to have it both ways.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | May 24, 2008 4:28 PM

wow! that neocon column is a classic. how can somebody who was supposedly there at the creation get so much wrong.

Posted by dj spellchecka | May 24, 2008 4:46 PM

I'd also kind of like to know the answer.

That's the difference between you and Brooks. You'll never get the NY Times gig until you get this.

Posted by Ben V-L | May 24, 2008 4:55 PM

This really isn't a diss on Vampire Weekend (I like 'em okay), but they seem like exactly the kind of new band that isn't awkward for a 40-something New York Times columnist to name drop.

Posted by Bryan | May 24, 2008 4:58 PM

But his name dropping was pretty competent for an old dude. Must of ran it by interns a few times...

Posted by Mike | May 24, 2008 5:07 PM

Vampire Weekend--reminds me of a certain Mr. Show sketch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo4tzrxyXsA

Posted by Lev | May 24, 2008 5:12 PM

Always nice to see chiphop and nerdcore a mention.

Posted by bago | May 24, 2008 5:22 PM

What kind of idiot thinks that the Nerds' skill set is 'tech support'?

I have lost any residual respect that I had for the man.

Posted by gregor | May 24, 2008 5:39 PM

I liked the joke about Barack Obama being the Prince Caspian of the iPhone set

For some reason it reminds me of Diana Vreeland saying pink is the navy of India.

Posted by Delicious Pundit | May 24, 2008 5:43 PM

Wow, so no less a pop-culture observer than David Brooks has noticed, finally, that it's cool to geek out?

Man, he's really got his finger on the pulse of the nation, doesn't he? Quoth Nick Burns, "maybe later we can go watch Tron on your Betamax." What is he, like 20 years late to this party?

Posted by Chet | May 24, 2008 6:01 PM

For some reason it reminds me of Diana Vreeland saying pink is the navy of India.

With the major difference that Vreeland's line was perceptive and clever. What makes Brooks' line annoying is twofold: 1) using the iPhone as a signifier of youth and hipness is beyond-lazy and 2) Prince Caspian is a bland and forgettable character, as anyone who's actually read the book (i.e., geeks) would know.

Posted by James Gary | May 24, 2008 6:18 PM

But it's not as embarrassing as watching wannabe hipsters get all huffy went some square has discovered 'their' band.

Posted by Andrew | May 24, 2008 6:37 PM

...so we could learn whether or not there's actual sociology to back up the stuff Brooks is saying.

Nope. There isn't.

Well, I suppose it's hard to prove a negative without abducting Brooks' research assistants, but the claims just fly too thick and are backed up by too much off-the cuff psychologizing to make it plausible that there's real sociology there.

It's also hard to distinguish which parts of what Brooks says are supposed to be factual and which are supposed to be hyperbolic. After all, you could just read his column as saying "hey, geeks are becoming cooler" which is pretty uncontroversial and doesn't require so much sociological data. But that ambiguity is a bad sign--if there was specific data there, it would tend to make its presence felt.

Posted by Justin | May 24, 2008 6:48 PM

I always thought the main distinction between geeks and nerds were that nerds were smart. Bill Gates = nerd, Steve Jobs = nerd, tech support = geeks.

Posted by lfv | May 24, 2008 7:26 PM

I always thought the main distinction between geeks and nerds was that nerds were smart. Bill Gates = nerd, Steve Jobs = nerd, tech support = geeks.

Posted by lfv | May 24, 2008 7:26 PM

So he name-drops Vampire Weekend but fumbles the name of a band that is of his generation - it's "Talking Heads," Davey boy, not "The Talking Heads."

Sheesh. Sounds like my mom wondering if I ever "smoked the pot."

Posted by Woody Bombay | May 24, 2008 8:42 PM

I read his "Patio Man" column in the Weekly Standard - I was a planner, I'm interested in development issues - and I spent three days thinking about it before I realized it was garbage.

You owe me three days, Brooks. Three days!

Posted by joe | May 24, 2008 8:54 PM

I've always used nerds shy, geeks outspoken as differentiator.

Posted by dbt | May 24, 2008 8:56 PM

So, basically, what you're saying is you'd like Brooks to tag his work so you can tell when he's full of shit?

Posted by Anthony Damiani | May 24, 2008 10:17 PM

UGH! Brooks is like a MoDo who hasn't given up on pretending to seem credible. And P.S. Vampire Weekend is overhyped suck

Posted by essrog | May 24, 2008 10:41 PM

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma indeed.

Posted by Sir Charles | May 24, 2008 11:14 PM

"Steve Jobs = nerd"

No - Steve Wozniak was the nerd/geek.

Steve Jobs was a rich asshole.

As for the Microsoft duo, Paul Allen was the true geek/nerd of the team. Gates was the rich asshole. Gates is a nerd only in appearance. Allen did most of the early development work of what became Microsoft software. Gates has good technical knowledge, but he's not really a hacker.

I'm not sure there ever was a distinction between "geek" and "nerd", at least to non-geeks/nerds. Both implied being smart, or at least good at educational/technical subjects (which isn't the same thing as being smart), while being socially challenged.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 24, 2008 11:32 PM

I agree with Bryan. The only thing that is ultra-indie about Vampire Weekend is their name. The music is perfectly grown-up and only moderately edgy.

I finally had had it with Brooks' "comic sociology" when he praised Bill Richardson for being "Budweiser not microbrew" (so being reverse-hip is now a real qualification for the presidency), and when he included Sufjan Stevens fans in the kind of insufferable "hipster parents" who must be done away with. Sufjan Stevens is an unpretentious Christian folk singer who happens to get rave reviews from pitchfork. But that's dusgusting to Brooks, who's at times consumed with hating the alleged cool kids.

"The horror of being bourgeois is bourgeois". True enough. Brooks captures this truth from time to time. But he goes really wrong when he hints over and over again that this kind of horror is confined to the left (beltway conservative urban elites romanticize about "middle America" all the time), and when he goes so far as to develop a horror of the horror of being bourgeois.

Posted by Colatina | May 24, 2008 11:54 PM

There IS progress, but there is a lot more to be done.

For starters, Bush is still a president, Obama is not even a nominee. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Nothing says "power" better than being "in power".

Second, most corporations are still being (mis)managed by MBA a-holes, a few Silicon Valley outfits notwithstanding.

Hollywood? should I remind you that the bad guy in Batman is a nanotechnologist?

Finally, we still have the vast middle of the country that gets offended by the notion that humans evolved from apes... Any "geekpower" there is eons in the future...

Really, despite all of this progress, one needs to spend some time outside of the USA (as I am doing now) to see how militantly anti-intellectual this country still is.

Posted by Krassen | May 25, 2008 12:13 AM

"Finally, we still have the vast middle of the country that gets offended by the notion that humans evolved from apes...Any "geekpower" there is eons in the future..."

Not exactly, heh, heh.

As they will discover by the end of this century.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 25, 2008 12:19 AM

The thing that struck me is... well... is Vampire Weekend really nerdy? They talk about esoteric "brainy" things (Oxford commas, mansard roofs, Khyber pass) but to me, it seemed preppy and elitist and show-offy, not nerdy and outcast. Then again, I've never seen them perform. Maybe they are nerdy folks in person.

Some of the other bands in David Brooks's list are also supsiciously non-nerdy. David Byrne is definitely a nerd (and that's a compliment). Nerdcore is beyond nerdy. But is Elvis Costello really nerdy? And Moby is far from a nerd other than his prediliction for electronics, and the fact that he seems socially inept. I mean... he's a christian ex-punk rocker for heaven's sake! And he makes music for commercials. Ugh.

Posted by Sho | May 25, 2008 12:19 AM

The thing that struck me is... well... is Vampire Weekend really nerdy? They talk about esoteric "brainy" things (Oxford commas, mansard roofs, Khyber pass) but to me, it seemed preppy and elitist and show-offy, not nerdy and outcast. Then again, I've never seen them perform. Maybe they are nerdy folks in person.

Some of the other bands in David Brooks's list are also supsiciously non-nerdy. David Byrne is definitely a nerd (and that's a compliment). Nerdcore is beyond nerdy. But is Elvis Costello really nerdy? And Moby is far from a nerd other than his prediliction for electronics, and the fact that he seems socially inept. I mean... he's a christian ex-punk rocker for heaven's sake! And he makes music for commercials. Ugh.

Posted by Sho | May 25, 2008 12:20 AM

The only thing that is ultra-indie about Vampire Weekend is their name. The music is perfectly grown-up and only moderately edgy.

Yeah, there is something loathsome about the complete mainstream safeness of every single "cool geek" item Brooks cites. Suggesting that Moby and Tina Fey are hip and cutting-edge in 2008 really does cross over merely being clueless and into what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." (I bet you never knew they had a common border.)

I mean, Brooks' "geek music continuum"--Elvis Costello (geeky, I guess, because he wears glasses) and Talking Heads, through Weezer, Moby and Vampire Weekend--notably includes only mainstream bands that display the signifiers of social awkwardness while producing music that's 100% car-radio compatible.

If Brooks had drawn his time line, say, from the Soft Boys through Guided By Voices to Joanna Newsom--artists whose genuine interest in odd and non-social topics qualify them as eminently geeky in my book--he maybe might've at least demonstrated that he understands the word "geeky." As it is, he's shown that not only does he hate the cool kids, he doesn't even know who they are.

Posted by James Gary | May 25, 2008 12:38 AM

"If Brooks had drawn his time line, say, from the Soft Boys through Guided By Voices to Joanna Newsom--artists whose genuine interest in odd and non-social topics qualify them as eminently geeky in my book--he maybe might've at least demonstrated that he understands the word "geeky." As it is, he's shown that not only does he hate the cool kids, he doesn't even know who they are.

Posted by James Gary | May 25, 2008 12:38 AM"

Good point. Vampire Weekend is so Clear Channel-safe. Why so many Pitchfork types go crazy for them I'll never understand. They're just a younger, more indie version of Jimmy Buffet.

You have to wonder if Brooks's whole life is just shtick. He's the champion of the Christian heartland who is also a Jewish professor at Harvard Law. He's the small-government conservative who wants the state to coerce society into pursuing national greatness. He's the sociologist who replaces field work with stereotypes and being the creepy old guy at frat parties. He's the culturally middle class guy who thinks every middle class guy should read Joe and Leo Strauss. My personal favorite example of his cluelessness was in that anti-hipster parent column in which he was attacking a book about a hipster dad complaining how his lifestyle had to change without realizing the book was a parody of hipster parents. He's intellectually embarrassing.

Posted by Reality Man | May 25, 2008 2:01 AM

If Holden Caulfield was the sensitive loner from the age of nerd oppression, then Harry Potter was the magical leader in the age of geek empowerment.

Except that Harry Potter is not a geek, but a jock, albeit a benevolent one who befriends geeks (Ron) and nerds (Hermione). Or is this a contradiction in terms?

Posted by Patrick | May 25, 2008 8:41 AM

over the years, i have discovered this really interesting way to approach music: i listen with my ears. it's a great sorting mechanism. one can still argue about the perceived merit of the music and the lyrics, but the labels and costumes that make up so much of music-fan identity fall away. in the end, in all but the rarest cases, it is the sound that works or doesn't and lasts or doesn't. the risk is, you may end up liking something you're not supposed to according to all your friends, blogs, and social cues.

Posted by bigbadwolf | May 25, 2008 11:08 AM

Dorothy Gambrell was years ahead of Brooks (and more helpful in explicating some of the distinctions) in this early “Cat and Girl” strip.

Posted by Brian Robison | May 25, 2008 3:11 PM