Nerf Herder
How To Meet Girls (Honest Don's Corndog Emporium)
by Marc Hirsh
Nerf Herder
How To Meet Girls (Honest Don's Corndog Emporium)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Spring 2001
Okay, I'm the first to admit that I'm a colossal dork (actually, a former girlfriend was the first to admit it, but I realized immediately that she was right). I've come to grips with this fact and decided that the best way to deal with it is to use it to my advantage. Occasionally this means capitalizing on what many see as a liability, but it usually consists of little more than embracing my dorkdom and happily accepting it.
Nerf Herder's second biggest mistake is in ignoring that all-but-crucial last bit. They are dorks, yes. They know that. But in celebrating geekdom, How To Meet Girls fails utterly to have a shred of confidence in it. Instead of asking why anybody else would choose to be otherwise, even implicitly, Nerf Herder manages to make nerdiness sound utterly unappealing. "Lamer Than Lame" wallows in total unlikability (there's no earthly reason that the girl being addressed, or anybody for that matter, would waste her time with the guy who describes himself here); "Pervert" hammers it home. For a band that seems so desperately eager to impress, they're working with the wrong material.
Is this fatal? Not necessarily. Nerf Herder's biggest mistake is in its total disregard for the fact that a knowledge of pop culture does not equal an understanding of it, nor does it replace actual life experience. So scattered through the tuneful but not particularly tuneworthy punk-pop of Girls is an interminable litany of pop-cult references (not the least of which is its Empire Strikes Back-derived moniker), for the purpose of... actually, there is no purpose, at least none that makes itself clear. Ten of the eleven songs drop some name or other that's supposed to make you go, "Hey, cool! They just mentioned ["Crazy Train"/Hollywood Squares/ Haysi Fantayzee/etc.]!," after which Nerf Herder sits there self-satisfied, a job well-done.
I found this sort of referencing to be distracting on Fountains of Wayne's Utopia Parkway, where it was done sparingly to set the scene or make a point. Here, it's actively, maddeningly annoying, like some guy at a party who, having overheard that you've seen the Go-Go's in concert twice, won't leave you alone for the rest of the night, trailing you with mutterings of, "Hey, do you remember 'Come On Eilleen?' How about 'Love Plus One?' Oooh, wasn't 'Don't Forget Me When I'm Gone' a great song?" It hits its nadir on "For You," a list of what the singer would do for his honey that is nothing but '80s touchstones ("I'd sing the whole soundtrack to Xanadu/Dance like Kevin Bacon in Footloose/I'd catch Pac-Man Fever too"), with a shout-out to bread-and-butter Buffy The Vampire Slayer to appease whatever twist of fate got them the gig to record the theme song. In Nerf Herder's world, love and sex, or the unobtainability thereof, are merely ways to mark time in the absence of some truly bitchin' flicks or tunes.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Wasn't that the entire point of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity? Probably, but why bother when it's so much easier to rattle off highlights of your wasted youth? So instead, we get a run of do-you-remembers and did-you-catch-its (I picked up on quotes of "Rocket Man," "Born To Run" and "Don't Fear The Reaper" scattered throughout, but believe me when I tell you that it's not worth the effort to locate them) in addition to a pair of odes directed at pop-cult icons themselves. "Courtney" (Love, natch) is too star-struck and earthbound to do anything more ambitious than tick off events in her career, without giving a hint as to what any of it could possibly mean to the guy singing to her. Worse still is "Jonathan," about another proud and famous dork. Over an obvious and dumb "Road Runner" rip that goes a half a mile an hour, Nerf Herder, forgetting that the guy at least managed to reach beyond geekdom to evince actual human emotion, beg, "Please, God, don't let me end up like Jonathan Richman/Turn the radio off." That last part's a bluff; if they could do that, Nerf Herder wouldn't be singing about it in the first place.