I thought I'd bring your attention to a great blog post on twee.
It's over here.
This shit matters, least to me - because it's all about codification, and imitation, and stripping music of its power, and false categorisation. I've written similar somewhere in Plan B Magazine (and I'll try and find it) but for now, I'd be fascinated if someone could argue back against Alistair and myself. I do wonder if it's because we're turning into Grumpy Old Men that we don't like the use of twee as a description, if it's a simple matter of semantics.
Comments on my Facebook page. (Phil was in The June Brides. Andy was in Action Painting! Gina was in Marine Girls.)
ReplyDeletePhil Wilson at 9:52am June 8
I HATE TWEE!!! Kittens and lollipops and hair bands and cup cakes and pretending to be 12....as you can see, it makes me quite cross (which is a twee comment, but what the heck?!).
Lawrence Beghtol at 9:58am June 8
kill them ALL
Andrew Hitchcock at 10:11am June 8
I've still got my Anorak:-) But i Fking hate twee as its been owned by Americans and redefined exactly as already specified. It has a different resonance in America Im sure but the original anorak'twee' scene was a fight back against the new adulthood as promoted by the neo lib thatcherites-adult=phil Collins, shit clothes, stabbing everyone in the back, boredom,totally limited horizons ok some of those are universal but all I saw sold to me was Thatcher saying you were a failure if you didnt own a car,success was being the biggest bully, being a jock, fancying big haired gold diggers and then there was the threat of all out nuclear armaggedon. In america it seems abit of a cop out a way of attempting to being a hipster and being true to the american puritan tradition
Zakia Rima Uddin at 10:28am June 8
Why do all twee girls look like Maxine Carr? Actually, I kind of love the aesthetic, but there's also something very cold and reactionary about it. Plus all that shopping, and baking, and kitsch domesticky stuff and cardigans and twinsets - it's a bit backwards...
Gina Davidson at 10:40am June 8
twee now is not like twee then..and andrew you have a good point re anorak wearing etc..i did it as a revolt agianst the expected,anoraks being in the domain of children and birdwatchers,not 17/18 yr olds
Hopefully my point about the 'anorak' / 'cutie' thing being a political statement comes across in the article. I know i've written about that aspect before. But yes, what Andy & Gina say is entirely my recollection of it as well. And Zakia's point about contemporary twee being cold and reactionary is spot on, i think. It feels so carefully measured, so cold and devoid of emotion.
ReplyDeleteMore comments on Facebook. I have quite a bit of sympathy with what Andy says below, as well...
ReplyDeleteAndy Hart at 5:58pm June 8
I put on Hotpants Romance and The Lovely Eggs on this weekend in a venue above a pub and me and a friend nearly came to blows with some bloke from downstairs who'd been in for the England game in the afternoon as he'd branded us both 'paedophiles' because... of the way the bands were dressed and that The Lovely Eggs were selling dolls on the Merch Table... I don't think me and my friend would've fared too well but we stood our ground... do Twee'ers get this a lot? I like Twee precisely because it pisses off boring old Hippies who like to drone on about how it mean't something when they were kids but it's all diluted now- it annoys people... to be fair it annoys me too but I'll defend it... even from scary nutters in city pubs
Alistair Fitchett at 6:07pm June 8
Actually i don't mind so much the fact that there are contemporary people doing the kinds of things Andy mentions. I mean, don't expect me to buy into it or to LIKE any of it, but I do applaud the impulse to piss off us grumpy old bastards. What i DO take umbrage with however is the retrospective re-branding of things from the past to fit with those contemporary stances.
Andy Hart at 6:46pm June 8
Oh, I agree with that too... I've read some appalling stuff about what Twee/C86 was apparently all about recently from people who should either know better/don't know any better but print it anyway... I agree with the article (I'm sorry) but I'd like to know if it's the contemporary so-called Twee bands that offend or just lazy journos... and if it's the bands now, exactly which ones? There may be as much rebranding going on about today's bands as there are ones of the past
'The Golden God of Twee'? That was John Robb, surely?
More Facebook comments...
ReplyDeleteAlistair Fitchett at 7:17pm June 8
Lazy journos are always a pain. As for contemporary groups? Well I'm just not going to dig any group who dress like they are 12 (or dress like they think someone who was 12 in 1940 might have dressed, to more precise), act coy and shake a tambourine, make out like they are so sensitive that they might burst into tears if the girl playing the tambourine refuses to play marbles with them (and no, they don't even mean that as a double entendre)... YOU know the kinds of groups I mean :) I mean, basically, chance are that if a group consciously aligns themselves with any notion of 'Twee', i'm gonna hate them. End of story.
Andy Hart at 7:32pm June 8
fair do's... they seem such a tiny group to be overly concerned with though? I appreciate that if you hold 'what went before' with any depth of passion and heartfelt conviction to see your youth plundered and appropriated all wrongly must be very vexing but it seems to me like shooting the guinea pig when your house is being burgled by some brute horde...
Broadly speaking, I'm in complete agreement w/ Alistair's original post.
ReplyDeleteWhat bugs me the most about contemporary usage of 'twee' is that it immediately makes me think of the word's original, pre-music scene definition - as a derogatory descriptor for tasteless, sentimental, retrogressive art.
The word still carries that impression, and trying to use it in a positive context without 100% irony is absurd, and does a great disservice many of the bands who end up getting associated with it; it's like proudly declaring yourself and/or the music you like to be ‘boring’ or ‘irrelevant’, and expecting anyone to take an interest.
Speaking of which, I’ve blathered at length elsewhere re: the urgent reclassification of indie-pop’s ‘80s antecedents as punk, so it’s good to know other folks are pushing the same idea. I know when I started listening to Beat Happening, The Shop Assistants, Vaselines et al a few years back, I had very little inkling of the existence of a current ‘indie pop scene’, and saw those bands as the music of people – nerds, girls, wimps, whoever - who were inspired by punk rock but alienated by it’s macho, conformist tendencies, instead using its DIY basis to make music that reflected their own lives. As such, I aligned them with my other faves such as Swell Maps, Raincoats, YMG etc., and that, as opposed to the dreaded T-word and all its associations, is definitely the continuum I see the current bands I love on the indie-pop/whatever circuit, and indeed my own band, fitting into.
Another Facebook comment
ReplyDeleteAndrew Hitchcock at 9:49pm June 8
I will wear my anorak cos its great, Im an outsider anyway. It doesn't matter whether I aligned myself wth a scene or not.Andy where are you based? I'm a bit down on American twee as I just hear so many bands from that scene promoting themselves like some kind of breakfast cereal 'wholesome goodness' etc.However I can imagine it has far more resonance to affect this kind of stance in a jock culture. The irony of these guys calling your crew peodos is he probably thinks its ok to download russian porn, read page 3 that regularly uses infantilising language besides the tits and grins.BTW calling someone a boring old hippy is a bit of an unoriginal insult, whats worse are the boring young hippies who supported Tenniscoats last night.Tenniscoats were excellent
Might I be allowed to say a few words in defense of twee?
ReplyDeleteI know the trappings that come with it are tiresome, the fetishization of hair barrettes and so on, but so are the trappings of anything else. And there's always, yes ALWAYS, been something a bit brownshirty about rock and roll, a bit thuggish, a bit mean, a bit MALE, shall I say? I know it's fun to call things "political", but left politics that reek of testosterone and the implied threat of violence aren't much nicer than the other kind; in fact I'd say they're sometimes the same thing.
Finding a clever way out of the "indie rock is serious business for serious men" trap isn't always easy, but I don't think girls proving they can be just as hard as boys is a way forward. One of the sources of Orange Juice's magic was Edwyn feeding off the shouts of "pouf! pouf!"; and if some bands who came later but wanted some of that same energy were clumsy about it, that doesn't mean that the idea is bad.
Twee when done right WAS "oppositional to rock". In the US, mind you, we're not talking about competing views of political theory, we're talking about keeping your feet while amped up thugs who thought that punk rock was all about hurting people in the mosh pit. Sometimes that meant obsessing over whether you had the right kind of buttons on your cardigan, rather than the much more powerful tactic of BEING FABULOUS, but not everybody is a Titan of the Revolution.
Sometimes it's just about letting the girls have a turn, and if the girls want to be girls, maybe the boys ought to put down their manifestos for a minute and have a listen. Because, you know, as Andy points out, "boring old hippie" as an insult is well past thirty years old; and the hegemonic oppression of rock orthodoxy isn't found in hippies anymore, it's found in ruthlessly correct indie rock. The tiresome grandpas are the Gang of Four now, or Pearl Jam, or maybe even The Killers, not Bill Haley and the Comets; basically, whatever gets the jocks out and punching their fists in the air.
And if you think "twee" was all about marketing and shopping, erm, have you looked at Pitchfork lately? There's nothing more about shopping than today's indie rock. It's fun to rag on Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, but I think in twenty years' time we'll find that, as ever, the little girls knew better. Those Partridge Family records sound pretty good today. A bit twee.....