Nardwuar: The Interviewer Nobody Can Really Prepare For

There are a lot of ways to interview a famous person.

You can sit across from them in a studio. You can send questions over email. You can ask about the new album, the tour, the single, the same five stories they've already told fifty times.

Or you can be Nardwuar.

The Vancouver broadcaster, musician and self-described Human Serviette has spent decades turning the celebrity interview into something completely different. His interviews are loud, strange, deeply researched and almost impossible to predict. And somehow, the world's biggest artists keep agreeing to do them.

That's the secret.

Nardwuar doesn't interview celebrities like celebrities.

He interviews them like people.

“Who Are You?”

It starts with the question.

“Who are you?”

It's become one of Nardwuar's trademarks, usually delivered with the same intense enthusiasm that makes it feel like he's interviewing someone he's never heard of—even when he's clearly spent days researching them.

Because he has.

Nardwuar has explained that he generally spends about a week researching his interview subjects. He digs through old interviews, records, obscure facts, auction listings and anything else that might reveal a piece of someone's history.

That's what separates him from almost every other interviewer.

He doesn't just know the famous stuff.

He knows the weird stuff.

The record your dad owned.

The local band you liked in high school.

The obscure event you attended years before anyone knew your name.

The person you collaborated with once in 2006 and haven't mentioned since.

And then Nardwuar somehow shows up holding a physical copy of it.

The Gifts Are the Point

The gifts might be the most recognizable part of a Nardwuar interview.

A record.

A toy.

An old magazine.

Something bizarre that somehow connects directly to the person sitting across from him.

But the gifts aren't really about the gifts.

They're conversation starters.

Nardwuar has explained that the idea originally came from his time at Vancouver's CiTR radio station. When interviewing musicians, he could pull records from the station's library and use them to get people talking. Eventually, when interviews moved outside the station, he started bringing the records with him.

It's a simple idea that became one of the most effective interviewing techniques in music.

Give someone something they haven't seen in years and suddenly they're not giving you a prepared answer.

They're remembering.

And that's when the good stuff happens.

The Reactions Are Half the Fun

Nardwuar's interviews have produced some genuinely unforgettable reactions.

Artists have laughed.

Artists have stared at him in disbelief.

Some have walked away.

Others have practically begged him to explain how he knows what he knows.

That's because the interview can suddenly become a test of the artist's own memory.

Even someone who has spent years doing press can't necessarily prepare for a question about something they did when they were seventeen.

That's what happened repeatedly throughout Nardwuar's career, from conversations with hip-hop legends to some of the biggest artists of the internet era. His interviews with Drake, Snoop Dogg, Pharrell, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Migos and countless others helped turn his unusual approach into an internet institution.

Pharrell Changed Everything

One of the most famous chapters of Nardwuar's rise came through his interviews with Pharrell.

Nardwuar's knowledge of Pharrell's history was so deep that the producer and rapper was visibly stunned by what he knew. That connection helped Nardwuar reach even bigger artists, including Jay-Z.

It's difficult to imagine a better advertisement for his entire philosophy.

You don't need the biggest studio.

You don't need the biggest publication.

You need to know your subject better than anybody else in the room.

He Makes Research Entertaining

That's ultimately what makes Nardwuar so good.

Research can be boring.

An interview can be boring.

Celebrity press can be painfully boring.

Nardwuar turns all three into entertainment.

The preparation becomes part of the performance. The questions become surprises. The gifts become clues. The artist's reaction becomes the payoff.

And because the interviews are so unpredictable, they actually feel worth watching.

You don't click a Nardwuar interview just because you like the artist.

You click because you want to know what Nardwuar found.

That's a powerful position for an interviewer to have.

The Internet Was Made for Nardwuar

It makes sense that Nardwuar became such a huge online figure.

Traditional television has limited time.

A newspaper interview has limited space.

The internet doesn't care.

A bizarre 20-minute conversation with an artist can live online forever. A reaction can become a meme. An obscure fact can become the most memorable part of the entire interview.

Nardwuar understood that before most media companies did.

His personality was already unique enough to stand out.

The internet simply gave everyone access to it.

The Human Serviette

Nardwuar isn't polished in the traditional sense.

That's why it works.

He's loud when everyone else is calm. He's dressed like nobody else in the room. He asks questions that no publicist would write. He gives gifts that seem completely random until you realize they're incredibly specific.

And underneath all of it is an obsessive respect for music history.

That's the part that sometimes gets overlooked.

The joke is Nardwuar.

The research is serious.

The interviews work because he genuinely cares about the people and music he's talking about. His entire career is essentially a demonstration of what happens when curiosity becomes a craft.

After decades behind the microphone, he's still doing the same thing:

Finding something nobody else found.

Walking into the room.

Holding up the gift.

And asking the question everyone knows is coming.

“Who are you?”

Then he waits for the answer.