A recent spate of controversies within a variety of online fan communities erupted throughout this summer. Unsurprisingly, it has led many to rethink how these communities and the people within them go about their lives, and how the mentalities that they hold toward something as simple as a music genre can negatively affect others within their communities. Two specific instances that were the driving point of the discussion involved the Vocaloid and Deltarune communities.
Pennsylvania underground rapper Slayr released Keep Me Going, a new single that sampled a Vocaloid song using Kasane Teto, a popular SynthesizerV voicebank. The reception to the song was divided, with people either loving it or hating it. Unfortunately, the song also attracted a significant portion of the Vocaloid fans, who bombarded Slayr with racist comments generalizing all rap music, or backhandedly complimenting the song, with many saying that it was the first and only rap song that they found bearable.
In the Deltarune community, which is the sequel game to the popular 2015 indie RPG game Undertale, a hack to the creator’s Apple Music and Spotify left a rap song uploaded to the channel. What then resulted was an unfortunate spike in racist comments, angry that a rap song would ever be associated with the game, even if it was from a hack and not from the creator himself.
Nerd culture, especially online, has had an interesting history with popular music. Music incorporating video games, movies, and even TV shows has been popular since the Internet rose in popularity. While nerdcore is mainly hip-hop mixed with video game and anime elements, since the 2000s it’s evolved to be a broader term encompassing a variety of different subgenres of music, like electronic, rock, and more.
It is rather ironic that a genre of music like nerdcore, which originated amongst black american artists and ultimately gained mainstream popularity, would still be largely hated by a significant portion of nerds. Ultimately, the reason can simply be that a majority of online nerd spaces, particularly within the indie scene, are largely non-Black, hold unconscious racist biases, and tend to stick within their own communities.
