All nerdy music instruments have turned out to be kinda cool

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Growing up on a steady diet of cartoons and sitcoms I soon learned some musical instruments were considered nerdy at best.

Accordions, Ukuleles, Banjos, and Bagpipes were the ones usually attacked (does the kazoo and it's ilk count as instruments?).

As I grew older though I realized this was nothing but baloney.

The Accordion after all is associated with Cajans, Italy, and France all of which will be forever romanticized.

The Ukulele as the defacto interment of Hawaii will forever be cool.

The Banjo while never exactly cool is very lovable.

And the Bagpipe possibly the loudest, most shrill and obnoxious musical instrument ever created seems almost to have been meant to be part of rock n roll.

KoRn makes good use of bagpipes in some of their early songs, so you could say they've already been reclaimed somewhat.

Dropkick Murphys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropkick_Murphys and Flatfoot 56 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatfoot_56 use bagpipes famously.

The Klezmatics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Klezmatics use a klezmer and an accordian. That is pretty nerdy.

Is the bodhrán https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhr%C3%A1n not nerdy enough?

My personal favorite is the hurdy-gurdy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurdy_gurdy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypuaJLHK_LQ

Does the piano count as nerdy? That's what I grew up playing. It seems like everyone else plays the guitar instead.

Trent Reznor is an exceptional pianist, and a good number of Nine Inch Nails songs make use of his somber compositions, most notably "Something I Can Never Have". Cliff Burton, Metallica's former bass player also started out as a classically-trained pianist.

The banjo is cool as Hell. The clarinet will never be.

You see accordions, ukuleles and banjos popping up more and more nowadays in hipster indie folk bands, but I still don't think it makes them inherently cool...it all depends on the kind of music you're playing. Sure, when Mumford & Sons bust out a banjo, all the kids go wild, but when I bust out the banjo and play some KISS songs, suddenly I'm forcibly removed from the premises.

I fully embrace the nerdiness of the instruments I love. I still remember that accordions are also associated with polka, Lawrence Welk, Weird Al and millions of chubby white guys at Oktoberfest, and that makes them all the more cooler to me, if not to the general public.

I believe American culture sees accordions above any other instrument as inherently nerdy, at least since the '60s. People like Lawrence Welk and Myron Floren pretty much used them to personify the type of "old" and "boring" music that the rock and roll youth culture was actively rebelling against. By the time the '70s rolled around, accordions were nothing more than a relic of a past generation, almost exclusively being associated with polkas and easy-listening. Such was their reputation that Weird Al's entire early schtick hinged on his humorous juxtaposition of playing popular rock songs on the accordion. It was such a characteristically unhip instrument.

Of course, accordions still had life in Cajun, zydeco, country-western, Tejano, etc. and the occasional jazz or classical band, but for the most part, I think their use in popular music is still largely a novelty.