Nardwuar the Human Serviette. Phot courtesy of William Jans/Nardwuar.com
If you?re already familiar with the work of the Canadian music journalist Nardwuar the Human Serviette, please forgive me for stating the obvious: Nardwuar the Human Serviette is one of the greatest living practitioners of the art of the interview. If you?re not already familiar with his work, and you decide to check up on that claim by watching a few YouTube videos of his interviews for Vancouver public radio station CiTR-FM, he might not at first seem like all that noteworthy a figure. Or rather, he might seem noteworthy only for the most shallow and inconsequential of reasons. His style of dress, for one thing, is peculiar, occupying a sartorial no-man?s-land between first-wave punk and PGA Tour. His style of interviewing is even odder: a frenzied staccato catechism in which he bombards his interviewees with a succession of questions and prompts in the excitable, high-pitched speaking voice of the stock geek in a teen comedy. And since 1986, he?s insisted on concluding every interview by saying ?Keep on rockin? in the free world! Doot-doola-doot-doo,? to which the interviewee must reply ?Doot-doo!? The whole setup, in other words, looks like a gimmick. But Nardwuar might in fact be the most revelatory interviewer of musicians in the world.
His on-screen persona is a counterintuitively attractive synthesis of?bear with me here?Ryan Seacrest, Studs Terkel, and Screech from Saved By the Bell. If that sounds nightmarish, let me assure you that the Seacrest and Screech components are largely aesthetic, and that it?s the Terkel element that runs deepest. Nardwuar is a living repository of the history and folklore of popular music; his wayward erudition is almost overwhelming, and the fieldwork he does on his subjects is often so thorough as to be unsettling. What?s most compelling about his best work?his fantastic interviews with Pharrell Williams and Waka Flocka Flame, for instance, or last month?s deeply enjoyable 46-minute conversation with Questlove?is watching the combination of wariness and fascination his apparent omniscience is met with. Nardwuar?s subjects are inevitably people who have spent a fair portion of their careers having microphones thrust into their faces?but who have never encountered an interviewer who?s done anything like this level of research into their musical backgrounds, their cultural enthusiasms, or their personal histories.
The interviews tend to be organized around the subjects? responses to particular objects in Nardwuar?s bag of tricks. And there is, literally, a bag. His shtick?which, like all great shticks, transcends shtick?is to present people with a series of personally significant items: obscure records from local music scenes, fanzines, posters, and other cultural artifacts. When these interviews go especially well, there?s a real joy in watching the subjects? accumulating awe at Nardwuar?s ability to get a hold of this stuff, and their perplexity at how he knows what he knows in the first place. (As with all good magicians, Nardwuar refuses to reveal the mechanics of the trick.) Impressive as it is, though, the device is effective not for what it reveals about Nardwuar?s dexterity as a researcher, but for how it tends to disarm his subjects into revealing something about themselves they would never normally reveal in an interview. It?s much less about the sleight of hand, in other words, than it is about the reaction.
Despite his hyperactivity and his impenetrably quirky persona, he knows when to keep quiet and let a reaction develop. There?s a particularly affecting moment towards the end of the long Questlove interview when Nardwuar presents him with a copy of the fanzine Rocktober, featuring an article on Soul Train in its early incarnation as a Chicago variety night. Questlove has just spent a few minutes talking about the formative influence of the show (his parents, he says, used to wake him up at 1 a.m. to watch it), and mentions that he?s currently involved in a book project on the subject. When Nardwuar hands it to him, he is rendered literally speechless; he turns his back to the camera, faces the wall, and stares down at the zine for a few wonderfully awkward seconds. ?Not gonna cry,? he says. ?I?m not ...? It?s a lovely exchange, and a rare enough example of a celebrity and interviewer meeting on level ground. Questlove is visibly affected and excited by Nardwuar?s gifts as an archivist and researcher. ?I truly believe you could have found Bin Laden,? he says, clearly only half joking.
One of the most interesting things about watching a lot of Nardwuar?s interviews (and if you watch one, chances are you?ll end up watching a lot) is the way that they tend to reveal aspects of artists? personalities that we?re not accustomed to seeing. His aggressive uncoolness?the silly hat, the grating manner, the relentlessly pursued obsession with minutiae?amounts to a kind of challenge. The respect he gets from people like Big K.R.I.T., Grimes, Brother Ali, Pharrell, Snoop Dogg, Joanna Newsom, El-P, Questlove, and Ian MacKaye reflects the extent to which these people are, in their different ways, smart and empathic enough to see past the geeky, gimmicky surface to the value of what he?s doing.
But that uncoolness brings out a lack of basic decency?a shabbiness and stupidity?in others. A 1991 interview with Sonic Youth, for instance, was especially difficult for me, a Sonic Youth fan, to watch?first for how it reveals their stunted and clich?d conception of what it means to be a bunch of cool people in a cool rock band, and then for how it reveals them as just standard-issue schoolyard bullies. Lee Ranaldo breaks a rare 7-inch record Nardwuar has brought them, and then he and Thurston Moore (then age 33 and 35 respectively) grab him and pull his T-shirt over his head as he struggles and shouts. ?You idiot!? he screams at Ranaldo. ?You fucking piece of shit!? It?s a grim spectacle, but worth sitting through as a reminder of how shallow and transparently fraudulent the performance of countercultural cool can often be.
There?s also a horrible 2003 interview with Blur, in which drummer Dave Rowntree intimidates and threatens Nardwuar, stealing his hat and glasses, physically pushing him around while the other band members titter in the background. (Rowntree publicly apologized for this eight years later, around the time he also just happened to be embarking on a political career. He blamed it squarely on a coke habit, rather than any deeper flaws in his personality.)
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