Sonic Youth were dicks to him too.

Honestly whenever I’ve watched an interview with a musician I like they’re mostly either matching his energy or just pleasantly surprised.

Whenever I’ve heard of a bad interview it was never an artist I particularly enjoyed… or even heard of.

Name checks out, reference to Kingsgate Mall checks out, are you a spy!?

I dunno your age or background, but FWIW I feel like his shtick made a lot more sense in the context of early 90s Canadian media.

The zeitgeist was unpretentious, goofy, "slack", earnest-but-also-ironically-detached. So Gen X, but also MuchMusic in 1993 was a lot more like MTV in 1983, except as run by terminally uncool Midwesterners - it almost had the low-budget energy of public access. Weird Al (who has a similar shtick, now that I think about it) would take over the channel over the holidays, and they had an annual New Years tradition where they'd chuck a Christmas tree off the roof of their studio. One of their hosts was a foul-mouthed sock puppet. Growing up in Toronto, for a time it felt an awful lot like the biggest song in the world was "If I Had $1000000" by the Barenaked Ladies.

Nardwuar fit right in, in that media environment - not to say he wasn't sui generis, even then! But I can understand that, divorced of that context, he might just seem like a weirdo.

He used to repulse me, but I've gotten used to him and find him endearing now. No, it doesn't make any sense.

He is a genuinely kind person who does some seriously deep research and asks interesting questions.

> While the research of this guy is certainly impressing, the shtick never failed to repulse me.

"Schtick" implies performance, but I don't think it is an act or performance, I think he's genuinely that high energy and enthusiastic. (Which can certainly be annoying as a personality trait.)

His YouTube channel is a fun place to deep dive if you are into music at all. Is schtick can be a little bit grating, but some of the reactions from artists to the amount of research and understanding he has about their origins can be really fun to watch.

Also, he has his very first interview up from when he was a kid which is kind of cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=002S7Bho3jE

I have the same reaction as you - his persona makes me physically uncomfortable and I feel bad for the artists unless they have the common wholesome reaction to well-done research.

But how much of it is a "shtick"? I take it the guy is just weird. If that's the case, it's not forced or over the top.

Well, he's been at it since the 1990s, and I distinctly remember people being way less stuffy and easy to annoy back then

His interview style is kind of like Sean Evans from Hot Ones crossed with the manic energy of Richard Simmons. It's mentioned in this article, but he tries to ask the questions that nobody else is asking, which can make for great interviews.

But, yeah, his schtick can be incredibly annoying. Part of the fun is watching the interview subject react to it.

If you’re ever interested in going down an interesting rabbit hole, you can read a lot of Nardwuar’s interviews transcribed on his website.

Here is one with Drake in 2013:

https://nardwuar.com/nardwuar-vs-drake/

If you read the transcripts, you can cut through the schtick. All that’s left is a very good interviewer with excellent research skills.

If you’re interested in an even deeper rabbit hole, compare some of his interviews to more mainstream interviews with the same artists. Nardwuar has a certain gift for breaking artists out of their perfectly crafted PR messages. I think his interviews tend to be a little more authentic (for good and for bad).

If you think about it, he pioneered the style of completely annoying, insufferable yet somehow entertaining content that you see all over TikTok…

But he had to commit to a full interview and release it on classic media, then later on, internet, then finally platforms.