Filed under: Music | Tags: dungeons and dragons, guitars, linkin park, muse, thrice, weezer
There’s something irresistible about a boy in a rock band. The trouble is, it’s quite a technical job – understanding all that soundboard stuff, knowing which foot pedal to push, balancing vocals and so on. And music consumers won’t put up with all that raw 70s static any more. Which is why some of the best musicians in rock are among the highest profile geeks.
4. Chester Bennington, Linkin Park.
Maybe the first emo kid of the 90s, he and Mike Shinoda are solely responsible for the popularisation of nu-metal. Most successful geek posturing to be seen in In The End, where he occupies a suspiciously Civilisation-esque landscape looking dark and moody and capturing the hearts of an entire generation of female MySpacers. Geek credential: confessing to be one. Not that we could tell by looking at him or anything.
3. Matt Bellamy, Muse
Similarly weaselly features to Bennington mark him out as the high school oddity, to say the least. And no one gets that good at Liszt without spending an awful lot of time locked up alone. And just listen to the insane prog rock, Mellotron throwbacks on Origin of Symmetry. Still, groundbreaking performances at Leeds/Reading 2005 indicated that Muse’s careful attention to sound tech richly paid off. Detractors might say that the sheer scale of nerdish indulgence in Knights of Cydonia might be a little excessive…
2. Teppei Teranishi, Thrice
Still tragically underexposed, Teranishi is one of the most talented guitarists on the punk scene. The guy makes his own pedals! Dude! Like Muse, the band diligently think through their live sound, and describe themselves as gear dorks. We are not talking crappy college rock here, but crazy time signatures which even the makers of Guitar Hero steer clear of. I can only urge you to listen to the layers of complexity for yourself, since they’re beyond description.
1. Rivers Cuomo, Weezer
And topping our algorhythmic chart is everyone’s favourite bespectacled rocker. When taking a break from collating every popular YouTube star for their music videos, Weezer members spend their spare time playing D&D on their tour wagon. Incidentally, Cuomo favours a split class elf fighter-thief when dicing on the table tops, proving that the coolness of your D&D character increases exponentially with your RL geekiness. Pwnz.
