Interview: Nerd Is the Word as Nerdcore Party Con ’24 Takes Over Raleigh, North Carolina

The Raleigh, NC-based Nerdcore Party Convention, conceived by JT Music and Rockit Music, is an epic bash to let your nerd flag fly.

Stream: NPC 2023 Hype Video

You know the expression… Blondes have more fun.

Well JT Music and Rockit Music, the founders of Nerdcore Party Con, definitely give a reason to coin a new expression… Nerds have more fun. The event, in its 5th year, is an innovative affair sure to unleash the inner geek in us all. Nerdcore music has been around since the early 2000s, breaking boundaries as it takes inspiration from video games, movies, anime, comics and sci-fi. The festival they have created celebrates admired Nerdcore artists and bands and is a great place for fans to link with other like-minded individuals.

JT Music (Christian Ames and John Gelardi) and Rockit Music (Russell McKamey and Vince Newsom) are bold forces in the scene, concocting content and music influenced by video games. Rockit Music, based in Austin Texas, generates work that focuses on indie horror games and JT Music is crafting general video game inspired music. Both their unique styles have captured the attention of numerous fans. That strong bond with their audience has transferred over to this immersive experience. Nerdcore Party Con 2024 is projected to deliver a colossal crowd of over 1,400 in person, 73 million online followers, influential creators and industry professionals.

This two-day extravaganza features more than 25 live performances from prominent titans in that genre. Besides JT Music and Rockit Music some appearances include, Nerdcore pioneer MC Frontalot, Dizzyeight and The Living Tombstone, a gaming band with an impressive 40 billion streams. From the VIP party to the personal meet and greet you can tell just how deeply devoted JT and Rockit are to their community of fans. In speaking with Gelardi and McKamey for this in-depth interview, that love and loyalty is also extremely evident.

A CONVERSATION WITH NERDCORE PARTY CON’S CO-FOUNDERS

Russell McKamey from Rockit Music: Nerdcore is a culmination of nerdy music at its very simplest form. It’s nerdy music and it’s all genre-encompassing. There’s a heavy focus on hip-hop and pop. Now, over the years, it’s expanded into pretty much every genre, rock, alternative, et cetera. But it’s been around for 25 plus years. It’s a form of music that the underdogs of society and the “nerds” started making to have an outlet to share their nerdy side and nerdy culture. Over the years, it’s expanded into pop culture and meme culture and Internet culture and an all-encompassing outlet for the nerds that are now in the cool-kid camp, but used to be at one point, the folks who weren’t popular. It was that outlet for them.

John Gelardi from JT Music: Here’s some historical context for it. Russell says it’s 25 years old. It was originally coined by Damian Hess, who is MC Frontalot. It was originally nerdcore hip-hop. Then it started as any music that was essentially the antithesis of cool. I guess hip-hop then was cool music about cool lifestyles. So Frontalot and a lot of these earlier guys were making songs that were hip hop songs, but the subject matter wasn’t very cool. It was a weird vibe initially in the first years. That changed when YouTube became a platform for creators. That’s when Russell and I, and our groups, came in around 2008, 2010. Then, nerdcore really took a fast track itself into being music about nerdy things as Russell just touched on. Now it’s become cool music. It’s been framed in a cool way. It’s still about nerdy things, but now the music is made to be cool and to sound like awesome anthems and pump people up or make people feel pretty cool and passionate about whatever subject they’re listening to. It’s usually a value add onto whatever someone’s already super passionate about. We get a fusion of elements there with this music connecting to people, but then this music is about something that they really love in particular. It feels like it’s made for them. It speaks to them. It gives them more ways to enjoy Spider-Man or whatever it is. If it’s something that maybe doesn’t have a lot of coverage, then that’s more power to that music.

Russell McKamey: Nerdcore Party-Con was originally an idea discussed over by Rockit Music and JT Music. We’ve known each other for 10 plus years, and so we’d play a lot of games online together. At some point over the years, we said how cool it would be to foster a big concert with all of our favorite artists and our idols and the people that we looked up to that came before us, et cetera. At the time, we didn’t necessarily have the platform to do so. But at a certain point, and our brands grew bigger and our community involvement grew bigger, we said, “Hey, let’s try this.” In 2018, we had the first Nerdcore Party-Con in Austin, Texas. Really, all it was, was a branded event for our own community members. I don’t know how many of us were there, maybe 13 nerdcore artists from all over the world. We had people come from Europe. We had people come from the United States, all over. We all met up in Austin just to pretty much meet for the first time. We had all been doing business together for years, and we’ve collaborated on songs together, and we’ve watched each other’s channels grow. It was a first stepping stone to test the waters to see if we even liked each other, really, because it’s such a community event that if we thought, “Oh, that didn’t work out,” then we probably wouldn’t be here today. But it did, and we had a great time, and we love everybody in the community.

John Gelardi: I can speak to the growth it’s had. The first one was essentially just a handful of artists. We did do a little bit of a meet and greet at some pizza parlor off of I-35 in Austin, and about, I’d say, 15–20 fans showed up as well. There’s that little added flavor, and I only bring it up for the contrast of where the show is this year and where we plan to be in 2025.

Then the next year in 2019, we rented out what’s like a photography studio with a backyard. Essentially, that was what it was. We had a 100-person show. The idea was to have people come out, and we could do a meet and greet. Everyone would mix and mingle. These 100 people with the 20 artists that we had there, which was an insane ratio. We would do the show after. That was a great success. We planned Chicago the next year. That was a 400-person show in a purpose-built music venue, Lincoln Hall in Chicago. Then that was an amazing success. That became a two-day event where one day was a meet and greet, the other day was a show. Then last year, we did Raleigh. We sold out, 1,200 people in three-day event now. It was just a great success. It just keeps growing and growing. We went from 20 people to 100 to 400 to 1,200. Then this year we’re keeping it the same at around 1400, but we’re improving the stage production and enhancing that side of things. A lot of this comes down to us not being event showrunners. I guess we are now, but it’s not a skill or a trade that we had. The whole goal was to really just scale super slowly and just have a proof of concept and just test each new thing we added. It’s just been an interesting experience and we’ve learned a lot. That’s been our mantra. We don’t know what we’re doing, so we’re going to take this very carefully. We’re not going to mess up on this. It’s been successful. I think that’s been a big part is us being cautious about how we grow, but also being aggressive, in terms of how it does scale up each year.

Russell McKamey: Speaking for myself, not my other half in Rockit, my favorite part of the event, first and foremost, I’m also a performer, so being on stage in front of 1,200 people plus is a thrilling experience. It’s our only show of the year, so that’s a pretty wild and crazy experience, but also the chance to meet people that you see online and on Twitter and Discord and actually get to interact with them and give them a hug and take a picture with them and talk to them for a few minutes is a pretty humbling experience as well.

John Gelardi: To echo that, everything we do is online, and it’s easy to lose track of who your fans are. Maybe you start to track metrics or why you make certain music is to chase numbers and make sure you keep success in that momentum, or you’re trying to go for the algorithm and those numbers are a means to an end of hitting your goals, but when you go to these events, our event in particular, but any event, and we meet our fans, it’s immediately grounding. It reminds you that every number is a person. It’s so cliché and corny, but when you work online, and you’re constantly looking for wins and the ups and downs and all these different things, it’s good to be reminded what you’re doing has a real tangible effect on people and that these people are people and not just metrics. That’s my favorite part. Providing that platform for artists and the fans included and to have those moments to share is really just cool.

Russell McKamey: We wanted to make sure that we scale the event and bring a better experience in the ways that we know how and not just make it more people for the sake of it being more people this year. We wanted to take what we did since it was the biggest event we’ve ever put on and harness the things that were good and make the things that we felt were lacking based on feedback that we get post-event and try to just enhance the show that way. This year, we are putting a lot of investment and our time into making the actual stage presence and the show itself look and feel much more like AAA. We’ve got, I don’t know the exact dimensions offhand, but we’ve got this really awesome LED wall that we were bringing in to make this feel like a pretty massive experience versus just the in-house projection that was there. One of the things we looked back last year and thought, the stage didn’t look like it felt. We want to give the experience and the visual candy to the people attending there. That’s a really cool thing. The video wall is huge. We are also optimizing and making the meet and greet aspect of our show a better overall-tailored experience because we didn’t really understand last year what it would turn into with 1,200 people mobbing to the 20 artists that were there and forming lines. It hadn’t ever been like that before. We learned some lessons, and we’re going to do our best to make sure that those things are tweaked and optimized before we grow in any other way.

John Gelardi: We grew up down the street from each other. The main way we hung out was creating things, building Legos, drawing, making short films, little music videos, stuff like that. Christian would always make the music, and then I would make the videos. Then eventually, we were in high school at the time, and my dad’s company had relocated to North Carolina. Obviously, I had no choice but to move as a kid. This is 2008. The Internet was still around. It had been around for a while, but the idea of collaboration on the Internet was still a new thing, or at least new to us. We used the Internet as a tool to keep creating. At that point, we were playing a lot of video games, particularly Halo, the game for Microsoft, Halo 3. We were playing that, and we thought, “We can do this. We can still make music videos. I told them to make something with the Halo, remix the Halo 3, and I’ll make a music video for it. We did that and it went viral. Then I’ll just do another one. We did Call of Duty and that went viral. We had no plan. We were just high school kids making something and having fun People were seeing it and we realized people want to see this stuff. We keep making content. It’s really just evolved from that and has grown. In terms of the musical style, that all falls on Christian. He’s the musician in the group. I’ll try to speak for him a little bit as representing JT, but it’s a very eclectic inspiration. It’s a lot of weird out, like boom boppy hip-hop. Jedi Mind Tricks, very orchestra stuff. Christian was in Wind Ensemble, which where we were, was the super high-tier, gifted and talented band group. He was an extremely talented musician playing the trombone. That probably had a lot to do with how he approaches music and his mind, and that general orchestra a lot of our songs tend to have.

Russell McKamey: So indie horror has been something we fell into early on in our YouTube careers. We were always, before we even knew how to have a YouTube career, we were fortunate enough to have a couple of hits spark off from some indie horror games, Five Nights at Freddy’s being the one I’m referring to. It actually spawned a whole culture and music, a genre in itself, almost. But indie horror exploded online after that game came out, and our brand also gravitated to that. We were gaining all these subscribers based off of Five Nights at Freddy’s. We, over the years, started to realize, “Well, our fans all love this.” Instead of having this massive array of different styles or, I guess, types of games we were doing content about, let’s try to narrow our vision a little bit. We all, Vince and I, both really love horror stuff. It’s just the sound of our music started to transform into fitting the mold of what a horror alternative pop rock band might sound like. Our genre and our music style has evolved and, I’m not going to say, pioneered that for nerdcore, but our genre really sticks with an indie horror vibe in tandem with our music genre of alternative pop. It’s taken a long time to get there also. We’ve got genres span all over the place, and games, and movies. We have refined that over the years, and that’s where we’ve landed as of today.

John Gelardi: There’s so much ownership and why we feel so connected to these people is because they’re us. We’re all nerds, and the joy at the core of what we’re doing here is sharing a love of music and video games, each as their own things and then combined. It’s a place where everyone feels safe, and they belong, which is what we all want to foster. Just being good people to each other and making sure that that’s the environment we cater to. We automatically feel connected to these people. We’ve done these events, and we’ve engaged with our communities, but it’s not anything that we’ve had to force. It just happened because there’s the fit and there’s the love for music and games.

Russell McKamey: To piggyback off of what John said, it’s we are these people. We are at our core who we are saying our brand is catering to. I think that’s probably where so much of the passion and love comes from, is that we’re not corporate suits pretending to cater to a market that we feel is profitable. It’s like we were a part of the profitability growth of where it is today.

We’ve been here from the beginning, and now we’re helping foster that community of attendees and artists alike. Seasoned artists, up-and-coming artists, we’re giving them something to come and join together in a physical space. It’s something that I can’t say I ever thought we would end up really doing in this capacity, but here we are, and it’s a really beautiful thing at the end of the day, and we can be proud to stand amongst everybody together. Like I said, attendees and artists together.

John Gelardi: If you want to get really geeky in particular, I like painting Warhammer miniatures.

I don’t even play the game. I just like painting the miniatures and then also D&D. But in terms of things related to the video games that we’re doing, just being a diehard fan of video games and the art of creating them. So much so that we’re making our own. Also, the funny thing is Russell has one with his company independently as well. I guess it’s just a super fixation on game creation, design and then tabletop miniatures.

Russell McKamey: I’ve gone through all phases of geekiness. I’ve painted Warhammer. I used to really get into model airplanes. Then over the years, I’ve got two kids and I’ve got four businesses. My time, unfortunately, does not allow me to have my favorite geeky things anymore. But as John mentioned, I’m also developing a video game. We’re both doing that in tandem separately, and that is this major outlet. I would say obsession and fixation is a good way to describe that. My wife would argue I never stop thinking or talking about it, which would probably be frustrating, but luckily, I’m not the one on the other end. That’s where my outlet is today. It’s trying to create a whole world from scratch and bring that world to life in a medium that people can actually play. It’s pretty cool.

John Gelardi: It’s John from JT here. Our main company goal is to make all the right moves and do everything. It’s super vague sounding, but to set ourselves up so that we can keep this job and keep this channel going. In terms of what’s next, in terms of JT, it’s really just keeping that, be on top of what we’re making, sitting on top of the trends, making sure that we balance passion projects with the crowd-pleasers in terms of topics and what we cover. Then the video game, as we mentioned, is a big part. To be able to really resonate with the community of video game gamers in the indie horror scene is important because this is a game we’re making as an indie horror game. There is just such a lot of cross-sections. The crossover is huge there. We have our huge audience that loves all these indie horror games and then the content that we can make around it and just how we can get that community going is super exciting. That’s a big focus. Then just keeping NPC going and growing that, scaling it smarter. Then also, at JT Music, we’re producing a documentary on nerdcore. That’s in postproduction right now, and soon we’ll be shopping it out. That’s something we’ve been working on for almost three years now. Telling the story of nerdcore through our lens and catching every creator from the space, including MC Frontalot and the creator of the name or the genre to all the new people. It’s about telling that story and what’s been going on in the last 25 years with nerdcore.

Russell McKamey: The video game, it’s not really the Rockit brand necessarily doing that, but that’s a big thing for me. As far as the brand, though, we, like John said, we’re dedicated to continuing to make this channel thrive and grow. It’s really hard to do long-term and keep things fresh and keep creativity going. How do you build something that you’ve been doing for 10 years and still maintain that growth? So that’s a big focus. Ensuring we’re at the top of our game, and we have the best people creating videos and keeping everything fresh and current and the sound current is always huge. A focus for us as well is we’ve always strived to break out a little bit of our Internet shell. We’ve really tried to continue to cross over our nerdcore with “mainstream.” That’s a big focus of mine.

I would love to produce music and write music for mainstream pop artists. Also in doing so, I’ve had 500, 600 songs of experience on how to do that. Got some really cool things in the works with a couple of really cool artists right now. It’s cross-pollinating what we do. I think what’s really cool about the crossover between mainstream and nerdcore is that all of mainstream artists have kids, mostly in their mid-30s and whatever age group. Many people have kids, and all of their kids know our music. To be able to go to them and say, “Hey, guys, wouldn’t you like to make something that your kids actually like and your kids want to listen to?” Because they don’t know who their parents are. They don’t actually care that it’s so and so from this really famous band. They want their dad or mom to do a song with the nerdcore people that they listen to and love.

John Gelardi: It’s such a bad thing to say. We’re so far deep into it, and we make new songs every other week that I’m not actually consuming too much musical content on a day-to-day basis.

Russell McKamey: I’m on the producing side. For someone who makes 40 songs a year, I actually don’t listen to a lot of music anymore, unfortunately. It’s weird. You spend so much time listening to it, then you start to do it, then you don’t have enough time to listen to it. I really get inspiration from listening to playlists in my genre. It’s also bad to say, but I don’t fixate on new artists as a whole. I fixate on genres because typically when I’m creating a piece of music, it’s not because it’s specific to a genre and a vibe. I’ll go into that playlist and just start to listen to new inspiration. It’s actually helpful I don’t know who it is because I can just choose 10 different songs I heard in the last hour and try to do my own spin on that. I guess if your listeners are reading this, JT Music and Rockit Music, I’d have to recommend.

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