Personally, I take "nerd" as an intellectual compliment. I am quite sure that I wouldn't call Scott a nerd in the stereotypical and unflattering sense of the word. As a performer, he dazzled on stage, and was a legitimate rock star, if only to a limited audience. As a person, every account from those who met or corresponded with him is consistent: he was intellectually dazzling, but also generous, earnest, approachable, and self-deprecating. He was sociable in a way that many nerds aren't.
Perhaps the nerdiest of nerds are those with Asperger's Syndrome. I will begin by saying, as unequivocally as I can (with no medical education), that I don't think Scott Miller had Asperger's Syndrome.
I have a family member with Asperger's. In childhood and beyond, Asperger's often manifests in serious difficulties in comprehending social interaction. They may be brilliant, verbal, and multi-talented, but they lack the social intuition that comes naturally to others. They may need to be taught to do things like looking at a person they're talking to, instead of looking downward. They may need to learn that there's a purpose for this, enabling them to systematically evaluate the facial expressions of others, and match them against a mental catalog of what a particular facial position might mean. They might need to be taught appropriate responses to make, if the other person's face shows signals of boredom or distress. There are web sites (such as the aptly named wrongplanet.net) where alienated "Aspies" commiserate about their feelings of "pretending" to be human.
As for me, I am a nerd, not an Aspie. I've had this checked and confirmed by qualified medical practitioners, and my diagnosis is "nerd." :)
Nevertheless, I perceive a clear difference between the way I communicate and the way others do. I don't hold myself back from saying certain things that pop into my head, even when I know that nobody wants to hear them. Specifically, I am drawn to analogies, drawn to puns, drawn to making a connection between one thing and another seemingly unrelated thing. That moment of light-bulb inspiration, when unrelated things connect, gives me a rewarding rush of stimulation.
I'm drawn to obscure references that others probably don't get, and yet I find them so compelling that I speak them, in hopes that someone will feel the same resonance that I feel.
In this song, from the Loud Family album Interbabe Concern, Scott held a mirror up to that compulsion to say things others won't understand. But far more painfully, he perfectly captured my self-image at the lowest points of my college years, in my nerdiest and most socially inept moments:
Maybe I say the dull things I say
Maybe they reach her through the air
Maybe I'm thinking of it as a task
Maybe it really is a task, and I'm not up to the task
Maybe the answer is don't ask
Don't respond, she can tell
Don't respond, she can tell
Don't respond, she can tell
Don't respond, she can tell ...
Maybe I see the things I look at (maybe I should know)
Maybe I look right past what's wrong (maybe I don't know)
Maybe she thinks in terms of sets of boys
Maybe she knows the set of boys, and I'm not in the set of boys
Maybe the signal is the noise
I became attached to the song, and to my own interpretation of the lyrics, years before I came across the official music video:
The video (directed by Sondra Russell) is interesting and amusing, and it doesn't contradict my interpretation at all, but the video moves the focus elsewhere, and makes it harder to find one's own meaning among the possibilities that are offered by the lyrics. My interpretation turns on this:
For an electrical engineer/computer science major, like Scott, the last line is weighty.
The signal/noise metaphor can be understood by most people on a surface level, but it is even more compelling to those who share his engineering background, and appreciate the signal/noise metaphor at a deeper level. I know that Scott took courses, just as I did, concerning the problem of distinguishing an information-bearing electrical signal from background noise.
So there he is, the narrator of the song (not necessarily Scott himself) — a man trying to understand signals from a woman. That's a totally commonplace situation.
Why can't he read her signals? He's had math and engineering coursework in digital signal processing. He knows algorithms that he can apply to the waveforms, he can visualize all the zigzags on the screen of the oscilloscope. He knows how to filter out the noise — because that's what electrical engineers do.
In case of doubt, here's support from the official video:
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Maybe the signal is the noise.
Impossible. An electrical engineer knows better, and cannot believe that to be true. It's an oxymoron coming from his lips — the signal is not the noise.
But maybe. Maybe it is a social truth. There's another line in this song: "Respect the weight of the sounds in the room."
The "noise" is background. It is context. It's "the sounds in the room." It's all the stuff he should see, but doesn't see. It's right in front of him. Just like me, he somehow looks right past it, and it doesn't even register.
He knows he's smart, and that he should be able to figure this social stuff out. He wants so desperately to have it all fall into place, to have that light-bulb moment of clarity when previously unrelated things connect.
He knows he's missing something important. I can hear the pain in his voice. He knows, he knows so much, but he just doesn't get it.
The narrator of the song may or may not have been a proxy for Scott's self-image... but that was me. I recognized myself, the kid who used to overthink everything. Unable to communicate normally. Drawn to nerdy math/engineering analogies, and compelled to share them. Hopelessly paralyzed by uncertainty, by too many maybes.
In my previous post, I wrote that there were three things that caused Scott Miller's music to become locked into its place within my head. The first was the pure musical experience, different from any other, and tuned to cut through my defenses.
The second piece of the puzzle was Scott's seeming understanding of me — the mutual experiences reflected in some of his songs. That cemented my personal bond with him.
The third might be the most addictive. As I wrote above, "That moment of light-bulb inspiration, when unrelated things connect, gives me a rewarding rush of stimulation." "I'm drawn to obscure references that others probably don't get..." Scott's lyrics are full of those.
That language of mutually-understood obscure references, the frisson of shared secrets known only to an inner circle — engineers, literati, philosophers, music nerds, whatever — continues to hook me on these songs. There's still a little dopamine rush, each time a hidden meaning clicks and my light bulb goes on.
And it's not only the obscure references embedded within the songs, but also the songs themselves, which became a secret that I shared with the too-small group of Scott Miller's devoted fans. It's no accident that the phrase "cult following" is commonly used to describe fandom of this sort, with its cultish mysteries (i.e., trivia) known only to True Gamesters.
Musical complexity, mutual personal experiences, and obscure shared references.
That's why I listened to one CD in 2000, and within weeks, rushed to buy everything he'd recorded in the 80s and 90s. The magnetic power of that combination yielded an effect that no other artist has ever had on me.
But I guess I'm weird that way.
Interbabe Concern was my first exposure to Scott Miller too. And had exactly the same impact.
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