The politics of twee

bwhahahahahahahahah

i mean there's the sudden segue from talking about how everyone is richer than you...into the working class/middle class iron divide? they have...not a lot to do with each other especially in the socially fluid meeja clientele which something like viva cake attracts. and then the "oh no, no pakistani kids!"...into specifying the british white working class?

Kids grew up in houses with the wallpaper peeling off and the prospect of a knifing every time they left their house, but they were only ever two buses away from second hand book stores and Chain with No Name record shops and vintage clothing and the radio only ever turned on for Peel.

and this is such a horrid horrid stereotype, you are better than the english version of frank mccourt dom! also you are not a marxist innit.

(fyi: of the people i know the most likely to go to viva cake - i think she has been, though not regularly, but she fits to a tee the clientele - is someone who i assumed was one of the posher of the people in my social group for a while, almost entirely due to the fact that she has the sort of retro-50s image going on, vintage dresses and baking and so on, and she manages her money well. but her dad's a lorry driver and she went to a grammar school! which i didn't realise until ages after i met her. seriously, surface class signifiers = not to be trusted.)

That's like the oft-quoted opinion that punk didn't exist in America because it didn't have the UK's class consciousness. Of couse it did and does, but the original US punks were more about the actual music. To the extent American punks were rebelling, the targets were different: the shallow values of their parents and the truly atrocious state of post-hippie American popular culture.

I don't think American twee is rebelling against anything, except maybe an adulthood most of its followers have already reached. Where there are politics, they mostly involve setting up a self-sustaining lifestyle for your music (see K, Kill Rock Stars, etc.)

So, yeah. If a middle class kid is idealising twee, all he's doing is fetishising the culture he actually belongs to in the first place. If you live in a world where you're never unncessarily harmed hurt or put in danger, celebrating it just seems like bragging.

Well, it may be true that most American twee-popsters didn't live in housing projects. But I think if you go back to our teenage years, most of us had plenty of bullying and provocation - it just happened somewhere else besides '80s Glasgow or East Kilbride. Most of us took shit for our tastes and interests. Why not celebrate the fact that we made it through intact?

Because you're supposed to grow up and listen to James Blunt. (A path which I find troubling.)

Question: how is it *not* fetishizing to only listen to music that reflects "a world where you're ... unncessarily harmed hurt or put in danger?" Go to any American 7-11 parking lot, and you'll see white 'n nerdy American teenagers pretending to be gangsters, fetishizing a lifestyle they learned about thirdhand from rap records.

If I get time I'll write more on why later.

Just a thought for now though; A well-fed rosy-cheeked scarf-wearing Molesworth lookalike class-warrior should really be more careful not to judge people on appearances.

Anyway, twee fits into this because it's essentially middle class, but it's a view of the middle class that's so distanced and mediated that they can embrace it without feeling too self-conscious. It's a view of what the consumer society was like before it became all, you know, plastic.

It bears no relation to any quasi-organic musical movement arising out of working class areas or any of that shit, they like tea-cosies and Hello Kitty. And fair play to them, it's a bit of retro fun.

And Geir has a point, albeit a vague one. The tricky question of lyrical content and its relation to the 'music' raises its head at this point, however, and I'm not the man to solve it.

Yes, I have. But I don't judge the song by its lyrical content anyways.

And, conversely, you've never been repulsed by the stupidity of a song?

No. If the melody is great, everything is great.

it is a true evil (not necessarily twee)

but

you make many fine, fine points. however, if you look at them it makes you anything BUT a marxist (thank god) and more of a disenfranchised citizen of a capitalist society. if you were anything remotely marxist you'd be considering them somewhat credible and just unculpable actors prancing around in fancy clothes with no regard to their actual brain capacity. however, in stating that you do question their ability to be objective considering their insufferably easy lives, i believe you have clearly shown that you do believe in fairness which is what any capitalist society founded upon the basic ideals of independence are all about. in a marxist society there would be no teddy boy night or ebay for these people to buy their fancy clothes off.

i'd be interested in looking at what these people keep in their homes as far as CDs are concerned. i'm sure they probably have a handful of reissued crap LPs on vinyl (no turntable obviously, but perhaps one that doesn't really work) and a huge grab-bag of crap indie rock like modest mouse, bonnie prince billy/smog, and perhaps even something as detestable as the gossip on CD.

oh bollocks lex. class *is* a generalization. of course not everyone fits a sociological model exactly. it's just a model. but you seem to be denying its existence altogether. it would be nice if class were fluid though.

Fundamentally, you are of the opinion that Music is the important thing and the lyrics are the least.

Therefore you are in the same musical opinion area as Frank Zappa, Marissa Marchant, and many 'composers', and why you are not predisposed towards modern R&B, protest/political music, or anything with a message, direct or obtuse.

It's not even an opinion, it's a statement of fact.

Dylan once sang "Don't criticise what you can't understand". But he sang that, so I guess it cuts no water, right?

xp

That does not sound like the Glasgow indie scene as I experienced it! Certainly not that "twee" Pastels/Bellshill sorta scene. You know you do get middle class people in Glasgow too, quite a lot of them.

-- Geir Hongro (geirhon...), October 17th, 2006.

hence "i would describe her as middle-class"

(Also - much more likely to get knifed nowadays I'd have thought)

The thing is though - I love this kind of thing. I'd bracket them in with Bikers, Civil war re-enactment people, model railway enthusiasts, those people who do up their houses entirely in leopard skin prints. People whose eccentricities manifest themselves in creating some kind of escapist retro lifestyle for themselves.
It's a rejection of the wonderful exciting forward thinking NOW! which is probably why it gets up some peoples noses but which I think is wonderful. Fuck you people who think this is somehow wrong.

Glasgow

I don't quite see why you bring modern R&B into the picture here, considering the only message of modern R&B is "Look at me, I got bling and bitches, I am one lucky mothafucka".

Yes, I may do, as a separate thing. But I am not willing to write off good music as bad just because the lyrics don't make sense. Most of Mozart's operas had really, really sucky stories, but they are still considered great art today because of music and music alone.

it [oxbridge] really isn't all 'rich white folk', although I agree that there's a disproportionate bias towards that stratum. this argument is only going to wind up with certain people airing their social grievances, however, which wasn't the point of the original question. My answer to that is that whilst I didn't find it particularly stressful (and in fact I'd have been just as happy with my second-choice university), there were those for whom it was the be-all and end-all. This is a harmful attitude to take IMO.
-- You've Got Scourage On Your Breath (papiermachealamphibia...), October 12th, 2006.

the argument that oxbridge is mysteriously full of rich folk 'is only going to wind up' with chippy oiks complaining about it and spoiling the fun.

which takes us onto this thread. :-/

OTM.

But, inversely, you are willing to write off 'bad' music if the lyrics are more 'important'?

xpost

But if the escape = music, why TWEE? Surely in the 40 or so years kids have grown up in exactly the environment you describe and escaped into metal, mod, pop, DIY electronica, punk, Northern Soul, funk etc etc.

I don't know about the class thing - most twee-ers I've met seemed to be middle-class or pseudo middle-class at least. Sort of bookish and shy, liking the idea of being in a band without really engaging with any of the outward-looking aspects of it.

Sounds like punk rock to me

And also to separate Twee from the 50s revival night mentioned in the original post.

There was a 50s revival in the 80s as well - rockabillies!

Yes, the music was utterly dreadful. Not the place here to get into details of just how bad, but I can't think of anything that redeems the likes of Tallulah Gosh, The Pastels, Sarah Records etc. Normally I can see good things in just about everything (except Bobby Gillespie) but twee just doesn't have ANYTHING that makes music.....good. No drama, passion, communication, lunacy, innovation, great *sound*....nothing. It's like a husk of music made by people who don't like or care about music enough to be bothered.

they are the same as whatever distinguishes B&S or all those 'Stweedish' bands from indie music of Yore (inc. Pulp) no?

It possibly wasn't that overt but I think most of the participants were yes.

xpost - I think there were a lot of great records on Sarah and aesthetically it was great. Great artwork, the inserts were always funny, e.t.c.

I also loved the way they bowed out. That great big advert was fantastic.

a day for destroying things...

because when you were nineteen
didn't YOU ever want to create something beautiful and pure
just so one day you could set it on fire
and then watch the city light up as it burned?
Didn't you want to do that every day of your life?
Nothing should be forever.
Bands should do one single and then split up,
fanzines finish after one flawless issue,
lovers leave in the rain at 5am and never be seen again -

Habit and fear of change are the worst reasons for doing ANYTHING
Stopping a label after 100 perfect releases
is the most gorgeous pop art-statement ever
and says more about pop-music than any two-part digipak
limited edition coloured vinyl 7"
grimly authentic lo-fi ten-track EP
(or any other marketing gimmick)
ever will.

Sarah Records is owned by no-one but us,
so it's OURS to create and destroy how we want
and we don't do encores.
We want to burn in bright colours and go pop,
to be giddy, impulsive and silly,
to kiss people in new places -
EXQUISITELY
- and dare to tear things apart.

The first act of revolution is destruction
and the first thing to destroy is the past.
scary
like falling in love
it reminds us we're alive

Sarah Records 1987 - 1995

... no

I really hope he tried this stuff out at observational comedy open mic night.

key thing i've never seen IRL is this "indie kids are all doing the sex" bit. urban legend?

**Great artwork, the inserts were always funny, e.t.c.**

That's okay then. Hurray for inserts!

-- Dr. C (petethane...), October 18th, 2006.

Just saying y'know. It was nice when there was a place for writing and other things to enjoy about a release other than the bitrate.

In a chalet at Camber Sands Pontins, April '99! I thought of this immediately when I clicked on this thread.

A friend of mine christened them the 24-Minute Party People! Of course, they were all shagging one another.

I suspect I was going to the wrong parties if this was the case. Or in the wrong room at said parties.

90 percent of Sarah Records releases should have come with just the record sleeve and insert.

Also, Dom's more a Milhouse than a Molesworth. I know this for FACT.

it doens't have to do w/ the agruement at hand but i can find a lot of people who disagree with this. the high points on sarah were very high, though the majority of releases very *meh*. also it was more sonically diverse than it's given credit. shoe-gazer (secretshine), aggro-pop punk (boyracer), pastoral (st. christopher), NO-ish dancey pop (field mice). people who made the music obv. cared about music.

Sarah was very much about the music.

but then i'm american and will never understand the nuances of british class consciousness

I think what's a little dangerous is to imagine that as a capital-P Politics, as opposed to more of a personal/cultural politics: it's a fairly simple trick, and one that's not (I don't think) meant to have any implications beyond just itself.

Or perhaps we're talking about different things - I get the sense we're discussing fashion and accoutrements here as much as music itself. I may have worn striped T-shirts every day for years, but I'd like to think the music was ultimately more important to me than Hello Kitty supplies.

And while I don't imagine the way I'm talking about twee applies to everyone who likes twee (or even most people who like twee), I do think it's a pretty significant strain of how twee works.

[We could maybe compare with the way a lot of things that are coded as defiantly not middle-class are now kind of adored to the point of having really large pop-cultural and "cool" power despite still not having concrete/economic power (e.g. urban "blackness"), and how that works, and what it means to be pop-culturally impressed and approving of experiences we technically think are unfortunate in real life (e.g. poverty) -- I actually think that sort of thing has something to do with the impulse behind twee in the sense that I'm talking about it.]

growing up real poor i kinda saw twee/preppy stuff as an aspirational thing

*that these signifiers *are* or *should be* apolitical obscures their status as class signifiers, if you follow. One could certainly buttress the argument by transplanting the 'not a single Pakistani kid in the room' line from the original post to American shores, however off-base it may be in re: the U.K. but I'll let someone else open that can of worms.

But what are we even talking about here, music-wise, in the U.S.? The K Records aesthetic? Not sure what that has to do with preppiness. I don't associate "preppy" with buying clothes in thrift shops - seems the opposite, in fact.

(1) stylistic stuff doesn't inherently correlate to class and social status; however (2) we think it does, and act as if it does, and therefore (3) at some point it really actually starts to

I wonder, though, n, if you're taking your perspective as a universal. Like Mike, I've never really associated U.S. indie with either middle or working class in particular.

Naturally, it would be particularly silly (and inaccurate), as far as the tradition of U.S. college radio music/indie rock to say that scum-rock is working class and twee is middle class. Jon Spencer went to Brown, etc., etc.

poor people dont rock thrift store polos theyre in girbaud & af1s

P.S.: Twee as working-class aspiration is a definite thing, though I'm not sure I have much sense of it working right now. Weirdly the big moment where I see this is that a lot of the elements of what we'd now call twee were big in the mid/early 80s as working-class aspirational stuff. (The early 80s seem in retrospect to have had a tidal wave of working and lower-middle class aspiration toward a polite/"refined" glamour, as played out through music, whether it's New Romantics or Detroit techno or Smiths fans.) (These days obviously American working-class aspiration isn't refined social glamour but just pure economic big-gun power.)

Yeah, I thought this line was funny because a significant number of Pakistanis I've known have been the kids of wealthy doctors in Oak Brook, Ill., or Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

Poor people aspiring to be twee:
http://www.glasgowsurvival.co.uk/pictures/nedgal78.jpg

So it's pretty clear that twee depends, on some level at least, on working class aspiration, so what's the difference between WC aspiration of the twee lifestyle and WC aspiration of the gangsta lifestyle? Is it simply a matter of what city you grew up in or are the two fundamentally different desires?

Hardly clear to me. A lot of "twee" things in music seem to have more to do w/ bohemianism.

for the sake of argument, I'd like to offer that yr typical twee fan is probably at least more over-educated and possibly from a more comfortable background than yr typical Mayer/Jones/Blunt fan. high-brow vs. middlebrow &c.

Sometimes, sometimes not. Polos more so than t-shirts. The significant thing to me seems not that "Oh, you're wearing a polo or a cardigan; you're aspirational!" so much as retro aesthetics and indeed junk (thrift store) aesthetics.

I should learn to think more than one line at a time.

You got no class...

http://www.octobergallery.com/paintmagazine/images/news_fat-albert.jpg

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/images/oliver-twist.jpg

Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception

musical content IS political.

Not, it isn't. It is a musical act. It is adding politics to music that is a political act. Music in itself is just about the way it sounds, it is pure art and nothing but art. Brahms, Mendelssohn and the other German composers at the middle of the 19th century were the ones who were right when they aimed at "Absolut Musik" with no other meaning than music in itself as a value in itself.

this is about as otm as it gets.

Marcello OTM as stence and others say.

What NOBODY has managed to point out is that a big part of twee is/was the desire for cuteness and the sublimation of desire itself; also please to remember all those guitarists wearing their instruments 'round their ears - starting with Postcarders - so as to avoid sending 'cock rock' signals.

You could only even begin to think this about American twee if you were one of those people who forget that middle-class east Asians aren't white.

Do you not accept that music moves people? Emotionally, mentally or otherwise is music not affecting people in some way? And doesn't different music affect different people in different ways? How is this not political?

Two related things:

(a) The thing that might have made twee necessary was the original emergence of rock, really, as a way for kids to dream of and act out some kind of displaced wilder world than their own -- starting with like the Stones displacing all that stuff onto the black American south. Give it enough years and the "displaced" and "acting out" get forgotten, and a weird tension emerges; twee makes hay of that conflict. Same certainly goes for the grimness, toughness, and cynicism of punk, which kind of promises Anyone Can Speak but is rather unfriendly about what the speakers should be like -- I think that's the main impetus for UK twee.

(b) It's strange to get older and think about twee, because a lot of the things twee wants to celebrate -- innocence and simplicity and pure motives and a kind of Utopian friendliness -- are of course exactly the things that get chipped away at as you age, and replaced with something ... well, something richer and more complex, but something that inevitably means being sullied and compromised, in certain ways. I'm not sure what this means, for most people, about listening back to twee: it can be a sad reminder of innocent enthusiasm and purity you've lost, or it can be a happy reminder of really pure well-meaning feelings you need to have brought out of you again before you get incurably bitter. It's certainly interesting to me, though, to have a kind of music that fills this role, and stands in for that stuff.

This isn't an invention of this thread, or anything: even dictionary definitions will acknowledge broad-ass sub-defs like "the often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society" or "social relations involving authority or power" (as opposed to social relations that don't involve authority or power, as extant maybe in the twee Utopia).

Personal taste has nothing to do with politics, no. It may have to do with culture, but culture isn't neccessarily politics.

The idea of music as having no other function than pleasing and soothing the listener (which is very much what twee is about) appeals just as much to working class people, wanting something happy and soothing in a difficult everyday, as it does to upper class people, so giving twee a right wing political edge is just plain wrong.

Sure, it may be that an aggressive and emotionally desperate song may change the world, but that doesn't mean a pretty, happy and soothing song will be changing the world in the opposite way.

as i am sure a working class expert such as yourself already knows, there is more than one sort of working class person. some of them aspire to middle classness via twee, some via other means, and some don't give a shit.

twee is rubbish and no one should want to do twee but i have yet to be convinced that it has much to do with class. (nb i neither know nor care what connotations twee has in america)

Sadly this threadbare theory falls apart when I recall that 100% of eighties fanzines were done on dole and/or student grant money...

This is great but why does it then sound the way it does?

Why were these good and twee is shite? Maybe they understood the need to communicate, to take a stance, to argue....rather than hiding away from everything.

Dr C:"Why were these (cool post-punk types) good and twee is shite? Maybe they understood the need to communicate, to take a stance, to argue....rather than hiding away from everything"

Phil Wilson (June Brides) "No-one is listening, but let's shout out loud to prove that we're alive."

I think that's what it was about. Having something to say, be it "My red dream is everything" or "In love or in despair, you know I'll still be there", and needing to say it.

xpost

Well yes, it's understood that they/you had a need to communicate and a desire to do it without any of the trad-rock political and style baggage. But what's the reason for choosing the dominant aesthetic of a really, really watered-down Byrdsy jangle or a timid fuzzy punky sulk or a half-hearted not *too* noisy shoegaze? All VERY badly recorded, played and sung, of course.

Still I suppose lots of people liked it, so maybe it was effective.

first two st et singles were covers - neil young's "only love can break your heart" and a field mice song. so, yes. also, ian catt was instrumental in the sound of both st et and fm.

> i always got the impression they were very specifically besotted with factory records

and spacemen 3 in the case of the field mice.

a lot of the morr output is very twee. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2Ld0PkgQTU

Loop, surely. (Thus "Burning World.")

he didn't name his dog after a member of loop 8)

That's a "when did you stop beating your wife?" question, obv.

The records I like from back then don't sound watered down or timid* (though some do sound badly recorded). The reason for choosing a sixties song-based aesthetic with an unmacho punk unrock attitude? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

*Actually some do sound timid but it's a good kind of timidity. Plainly timidity is one of the things which makes guitar music good.

There's no obvious answer to that question, or at least no concise one. Also, just as everyone keeps saying, no-one's being very clear about who "they" were in any of these cases: different people had different touchstones, unsurprisingly enough.

The model of pop (and 'perfect pop' was the phrase we all chucked about like it was going out of fashion, which it was, and Tom has rightly made me rather ashamed of the idea) was British invasion beat stuff, I suppose, and the poppier end of folk rock. All filtered through Postcard - Buzzcocks tinted specs.

(Pete Baby Honey (!!) maintained in '87 that the contemporary crop of indie poppers were not directly using 60s materials but were using them only as understood in the late '70s / early '80s, so they weren't playing the Byrds, but playing Orange Juice playign the Byrds etc. This accompanied by "probably never heard the Chocolate Watchband in their fckn lives", which became something of a staple phrase for me.)

"All VERY badly recorded, played and sung, of course"
Well, that was copped from the Desperate Bicycles, of course.

Why were these good and twee is shite? Maybe they understood the need to communicate, to take a stance, to argue....rather than hiding away from everything.

It's simpler than that, they were just more talented (musically)

Except even less people had heard the Desperate Bicycles than the Chocolate Watchband, i.e about 12 people in the whole of the UK

Nonsense. Those records sold thousands.

Harvey - The Creation rocked pretty damned hard, in a way that I would have assumed was antithesis to twee-ers. Choc Watchband - for me that name first cropped up when the Paisley Underground bands were getting attention here in around 1984. I remember there used to be a chart in Sounds (I think) which had the Paisley bands like Rain Parade, Three O'Clock (twee!), Green On Red (not twee!) mixed in with Nuggets type stuff like CW, Standells etc.

I suspect that these (the ones Harvey said) were second hand sources, otherwise why wouldn't you notice that actually some of this stuff required a bit of effort and skill to emulate. So what were the sources?

How do the Smiths fit in to this? Did Twee people like the Smiths?

As Harvey said, that's wrong. I lived in bloody Yorkshire, but I knew at least 12 people who had New Cross, New Cross!

I think they perhaps felt they were still carrying the torch (long after everyone else had felt the hair on their arms burning) for some peculiar (it seems now) notion of the purity of the two-song 7" single.

(I don't think of later Orchids records as being badly played or badly recorded; the voice is an acquired taste, I suppose).

The Smiths were one of the few "mainstream" bands that many c86-ers admired. Obviously they were fairly 60s-besotted, so their musical influences filtered through (the kitchen-sink-iness too, and also up to a point their design aesthetics). I was gonna mention that earlier but thought it was too obvious (!!).

OJ/Chic comparison: choppy guitars. I can hear it.

Creation: it was mainly their use of tambourines and their snotty faux-art-school attitude.

re Desperate Bicycles: Matt Haynes (from Sarah) certainly quoted the Desps in his fanzines.

except a lot of them were 3 or 4 song eps 8)

(after sarah 1 the next 2 track 7" was #18)

And I was a kid, if I knew about it, plenty of others did. ]

(xpost POO OTM, that stuff was more important than the bedroom diy for sure)

Well, yes, so did I but I've never had a conversation about the Desperate Bicycles with anyone in my entire life... until now... so I'm struggling to see how they could have been important to the indie music scene of the mid-to-late 80s/ early 90s, and, let's face it, we spoke about little else but music and bands and shit!

The other guy who takes shots at Morrissey on that comp is Stephen Pastel isn't it?

Wow, I was actually going to post a dig at E. True and S. Pastel saying that they probably would slag off the Smiths, being the standard bearers of the thou-shalt-listen-to-none-but-Jonathan-Richman no-sex-drugs-alcohol-fun school of puritan indie that I used to loathed so much... then I thought, well I don't know if Stevie P. has slagged off Morrissey before...

The Smiths were mainstream by my standards. I loved them, then I went off them when they started making records I didn't like.

Requiescant Inpacce writes:

An (admittedly fantastic) new compilation CD from Rough Trade records called 'Rough Trade Shops: Indiepop 1' has rather annoyingly taken three pot-shots at Morrissey within it's accompanying booklet.

The booklet features essays by Sean (no surname given) who compiled the CD; The Legend!(a.k.a. Everett True, former NME jounalist and indiepop fanatic); and Matt Hayes, co-founder of Indie label 'Sarah Records'.

In Sean's essay he says, completely apropos of nothing; "Also why do we let Morrissey away with spouting potentially inflamatory comments about immigration. Dont give this man column inches.He is a bigot. The world is, of course, for everyone. No borders". This comes out of the blue in an interesting article about his love of 80s Indie records. There's no connection with anything else in his essay.

In Everett True's piece he claims; "I never liked it when Indie became codified into a description. In the mid-80s Indie grew to mean 'white middle-class boys playing jangling guitars who own every Smiths album and a couple of early Creation singles'.

Later he says; "Us cutie kids, as we sickeningly became known, considered Morrissey a fraud. We knew there was no way he could get up there and sing those words, if he really felt like that".

Everett True is a brilliant writer, and tireless champion of alternative music, so it's rather disappointing that he should single out Morrissey for such an attack.

Sean, on the other hand,later shoots himself in the self-righteous foot when he writes; "['I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee Quite Well' by The Pooh Sticks] still makes me laugh out loud to this day, but, then again, so does 'Mind Your Language'". For the uninitiated, 'Mind Your Language' was an excruciatingly racist British sitcom from the late 1970s in which VERY stereotypical foreigners try to learn English, with 'hilarious' results.

Anyway, the CD is well worth buying, even if the booklet does make the blood boil.

http://www.morrissey-solo.com/article.pl?sid=04/10/03/0614237

A brilliant writer? Saints preserve us! Substitute "tiresome" for "tireless?

FIXED.

Read: I never liked it when Indie became popular with the proles and rough boys who drink too much beer

In the mid-80s Indie grew to mean 'white middle-class boys playing jangling guitars who own every Smiths album and a couple of early Creation singles'.

He preferred it when it when it meant white middle-class boys playing jangling guitars who own every Pastels single and a couple of early Creation (the band not the label) singles

Read: I never liked it when Indie became popular with the proles and rough boys who drink too much beer

Lexverett True!

Answer to Tom's question re synths: There are and have been plenty of twee electronic groups -- or synth-pop really, in a style not so far from the aforementioned Depeche Mode stuff. (I'd kind of like to note that "twee," on this board, seems to be underground the same kind of transformation that's happened to, like, "goth" and "emo," where it gets attached to a quality even as we continue to pretend it's some sort of genre: when you're saying Boards of Canada are kinda "twee," the word's lost a lot of its more useful, specific meanings.) So no, not Morr (which just like aspires to be "nice" and "gentle" -- that's not twee, that's half of all music ever): actual twee-scene-affiliated electronics would come more from like Figurine or Barcelona, or early Magnetic Fields, or these days Au Revoir Simone. Which is to say, peppy rock-like "synth-pop" more so than just "electronic music," if that distinction makes sense.

Addendum to this question: Tom, I think UK twee was a bit more stodgy about sticking to the whole 60s-guitar-band formula than American twee has been -- though I suppose we should give credit for a lot of c-86 types getting interested in dance and shoegazing and post-rock around the end of the 80s. (And some acts that actually made that transition without going and starting new bands -- I mean, the Field Mice made plenty of sugary dance music and acid-house dabblers and shoegazing stuff, and could be a proto-Saint-Etienne in more ways than just that cover.) I think the American twee scene has contained a lot more acts whose sounds go in interesting directions, and not just electronically, or in terms of synth-pop: it's been just generally more scattered, like Beat Happening and Rocketship and Magnetic Fields in the same pile. Which is somewhat structually varied, really.

Are those two disastrously wrongheaded as representative twee tracks? I'm not sure what either has to do with people wearing pearls and eating cake. And neither sounds like the Smiths.

It's possible that I lost the thread somewhere, but if we're trying to trace a "60s aesthetic" in contemporary twee, I might suggest that the un-urgent vocal treatment of my proposed representative twee tracks sounds a lot like a laid-back Donovan or Cat Stevens or possibly even Leonard Cohen vocal.

Or was the question about whether there was a 60s aesthetic in 80s twee? I'm so confused.

Belle & Sebastian are far too adult and sophisticated to have fitted in to that scene, too musical as well

Those touchstones are decent ones, but not entirely representative, mostly for the reasons I was talking about above: neither of those tracks are particularly pointedly twee. I dunno, my take on these things is getting pretty antiquated at this point, but I'd say my center is still:

UK twee = Heavenly, Field Mice, Pastels
US twee = Beat Happening, Tiger Trap, Rocketship

Could/did Heavenly, etc., rock?

West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - 1st Album (1966)
Velvet Underground and Nico - s/t (1967)
Jonathan Richman - "Back In Your Life" (1979)
Television Personalities - "Mummy Your Not Watching Me"(1982)

...and something by the Ramones.

There is nothing even remotely twee about the Ramones.

Signed,

Everyone Else.

Leonard Nimoy's "Bilbo Baggins"? Now THAT'S twee.

ihttp://fusionanomaly.net/leonardnimoyballadofbilbo.jpg

Stephen Pastel has claimed the Ramones as an influence. The Shop Assistants lifted their whole sound from them, Helen Love, possibly the tweeest person alive today can't stop writing songs about them. The Ramones lifted huge chunks of Herman's Hermits twee-as-fuck schtick ('Enery VII=Rockaway Beach, "second verse same as the first", Graham Gouldman connection etc).

"Beat Happening could rock": yeah, they have more conventional rock signifiers than anyone else in the area, sure. Asking whether other bands in the scene could rock is an interesting question: part of what I've been trying to say, up above, is that part of the point of twee is to play with what exactly you mean when you say "rock." Part of the change in the use of the word "twee" is that people seem to use it now to mean slow and sappy -- but the original core of indie-pop here was fast and bouncy, really, and packed with a good amount of energy. Take Heavenly here (or the aforementioned "Break Your Face"): a song like "Tool" doesn't rock in a lot of conventional senses, but it has plenty of the same excitement and bounce and kind of even fire. It's just sweeter about it. So part of the challenge, with the best of this stuff, is to replace the energy of "rocking" with an energy of, like, indiepopping.

53rd & 3rd and Subway Organisation is where the good stuff is. Also the first 3 Soup Dragons singles, early Wedding Present and a handful of others (Felt, TVPs, some Creation stuff). Much of that stuff is well recorded, well performed and well written, contrary to what others have said upthread.

Talulah Gosh is closer to the Ramones (sonically) than most 'punk' bands.

Soup Dragons - Hang 10
My Bloody Valentine - Sunny Sundae Smile/Kiss the Eclipse/Paint A Rainbow etc
Tallulah Gosh - the songs mentioned above and the whole of their final Peel session.
Shop Assistants/Rosehips/Flatmates - Plenty- take your pick.
Primitives - Really Stupid
Pastels - Truck Train Tractor
"Now For A Feast" era PWEI (yes, there were so fucking twee)

The people Dom is talking about are sort of just a certain fashion in Britain that shares some aesthetic similarities with nabisco Twee but has culturally different values to Twee. People I know who are into indiepop Twee seem a lot less bothered about the clothing side.

Anyway, when I listen to the Ramones, I'm always blown away by how strong they sound. Even on songs like "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" that yes, are basic three chord pop songs, but coming from the Ramones there's a sense of strength and power. Maybe it's a production thing. When I listened to TG just now, the songs sounded fragile and wispy, like they would fall apart at any second.

I guess this is the point where I should just shut the fuck up, because I really really really hate Tiger Trap.

i dunno the 50s thing doesn't bother me, kids been rocking that since the 70s (hello Showaddywaddy!) it's the whole WW2 chic thing that seems odd to me.

I always thought that fanzines were more Marxist than Thatcherite - taking control of the media to give exposure to views/bands the mainstream rarely covered. This opinion comes to you courtesy of the letter R and an essay I wrote at midnight three years ago.

I used to be on the B&S list and found that unfathomably twee - posts about lost balloons, kittens and cake recipies. I always thought it was a way for indie fans to boast about their record collections to each other over e-mail, then have sex. Courtesy of the National Express coachway system. Which is quite twee. Oh, and I like vintage clothes, but mainly because I'm a cheapskate peacock.

And it ought to be a pastiche of a Just Seventeen quiz for maxo-tweeness.

i think the politics of vintage dresses, knitting and so on are v much after the fact - no one sets out to do these things in order to make some sort of point, the v nebulous "reclaiming feminine activities for feminism" political point is a consequence of doing & enjoying those activities in the first place.

Lads' magazine icon James Brown has resigned as editor of GQ magazine after a row over a feature which is said to have glorified the Nazis.

The 33-year-old fell out with publishers Conde Nast over a list of the 200 most stylish men of the 20th century, which included the Nazis and Field Marshal Rommel alongside Humphrey Bogart and John F Kennedy.

The article praised Rommel for being "stylish in the face of adversity", showing him in a uniform personally chosen for him by Hitler.

It drew protests from Jewish leaders, in the week that Britain's first war crimes trial began.

not come across it! i did read love in a cold climate by nancy mitford when i was in school and i quite enjoyed it though. i haven't come across anyone since who's read it let alone fetishised that lifestyle though.

prospective flyer for the next Viva Cake.

So who is going to start the lost balloon thread on ILE?

I was twenty-three.

this is not quite that point you must admit

It's *part* of the point, that symbols have power extending beyond their original intent ("but the Swastika is actually a Hindu sign of PEACE!")

also mitford sisters not the only women to wear vintage dresses. maybe the girls who do are just emulating, i dunno, their grandmothers?

Cupcake, anyone?

-- The Lex (alex.macpherso...) (webmail), December 17th, 2005 11:29 AM. (The Lex) (link)

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
I've let this go in the past because I really thought it was not worth dignifying with a response but I find it difficult to sit here and read people calling me racist.

What am I supposed to do here?

Anyone?

-- Peter Robinson (mai...) (webmail), December 19th, 2005 9:00 PM. (link)

Perhaps he could explain how he told the difference?

-- Bidfurd (Bidfurd8...), October 23rd, 2006. (Bidfurd) (later)

Because the entire style is called "Mitford chic", it's a fashion genre based on the Girls Aloud of the Blackshirts. Fashion genres tend to be based on people whom there's, you know, widescale pictorial reference to rather than the great forgotten. "How do you know she got that haircut idea from watching Amelie rather than the thousands of other women with pixie hair?"

I can imagine your delight when you heard it!!!

i can see how there might be political oddness if you stretch a point very very far, but i don't believe that the surface signifiers are enough to go on to be able to assume/accuse people of it. (and bear in mind once again that i hate twee and am nowhere near part of this scene!)

i mean people calling ciara "lower class chav music" and "those people shouldn't be in the charts" is perhaps more obvious prejudice than wearing vintage dresses?

http://myspace-837.vo.llnwd.net/00447/73/87/447007837_l.jpg

http://myspace-853.vo.llnwd.net/00446/35/87/446947853_l.jpg

http://myspace-623.vo.llnwd.net/00246/32/60/246450623_l.jpg

Nazis or Not?

http://www.comandosupremo.com/duce1.jpg

http://www.therosehips.com/Yo2.JPG

try as i might i can't find any sympathy for them. if the entire premise of your scene is to wallow in being bulliable, then being bullied should be expected & is kind of the point. i really don't know why people do it.

do you think "those people" refers to people making rnb or a more sinister agenda?

the phrase "those people" has long had racial connotations!

(Also couldn't have been a Creation band from the mid-to-late 80s because there's an actual real GURL in the band.)

That makes it all right then, does it, Nazi?

have you ever met anyone into this kind of stuff? if you had you'd realize that was quite a silly thing to say. sure some of the music is mopey but wearing eyeliner or whatever is not an invitation to be punched. the "why the they do it" i guess is just kids with similar interests clumping together like ilx or something.

They may not have been part of the twee genre, but their early material was still twee for sure. And remarkably even more so on the first couple of singles after Vince left. I mean, is there anything tweer than the chicken-posing video to "See You", or that "Meaning Of Love" 12 inch single cover?

I have always enjoyed Nabisco on the politics.

oh come on these people wear their wimpy ineffectualness like a badge of honour - i was discussing a while back that anything which revels in its wimpiness is the worst turn-off ever, having crap social skills is nothing to be proud of!

erm and falling flat on their face in a steaming pile of my chemical romance bullshit?

everyone knows goths are lovely

goths are mental. mental != lovely

wait a minute how did we get here?

it's called EMO!!!!

i don't really believe in this

that's AWESOME!!!

As they say, you can never take the public school out of the man.

You knew that this thread would end this way.

Actually the shit part of the Lex schtick is that he flops around basically making up whatever argument for certain tastes he thinks will suit him at the moment -- whatever feeds the schtick, really -- but he never ever bothers thinking through the implications of the arguments; I would totally forgive him the schtick if he bothered thinking about (for instance) whether music should only be about people's good qualities, or whether lots and lots of music doesn't succeed via talking about people's failings and bad qualities. (With twee I think there's an added element of questioning exactly when and how "wimpyness" is a bad quality and when it's a good one, and if you ask me I think a lot of twee up through the mid-90s was, sonically, an attack on wimpyness.)

HOW EUROPEAN

i think this means they win

"Chelsea Dagger" is basically 100% proof that, far from being a reaction to current laddish indie attitudes, neo-burlesque/"the vintage lifestyle" is just cheap titilation for dudes in Paul Smith shirts, yes? qf The Pipettes' horrendous "Haha, I should get me tits out right guyz?" stage banter.

i'm so out of touch. i thought current indie attitudes split down the line between manhood-destroying trews (wtf do these people listen to? hot chip amirite) yer fucking arcade fire... who are the lad bands?

http://www.last.fm/music/The+View/+similar

The Dykeenies

^^^these dudes have spent the majority of their advertising budget on having their photo inside the doors of all Burtons changing rooms.

Nu Indie is Lad as fuck.

I was going to say, you can't fucking move for lad bands in the UK these days.

That said even setting foot in one of those North London twee nights is enough to have me foaming at the mouth in a Stelfoxian "all these people must be destroyed" style so I am kind of biased.

i am happy in my ignorance. my sister is a n london tweester, far as i can make out : /

"Let's tweest again, like we did last summer..."

I listen to so much indie pop these days, on LastFM - 'Shop Assistants Radio' and the like. I'm finding more and more of what comes on to be good, which is surprising cos a lot of recent indiepop, and indeed a lot of older indiepop, is actually terrible. Orchids, Field Mice, spare us.

Now that people are very self-conscious about being a neo-C86 scene, much more than they were 20 years ago I think, they all have some kind of ideas about it being a political act. I think this is largely self-kidology. It's only political in the sense that contemporary 'craft', etsy or whatever is political, ie just by virtue of being something of a subculture.

Etsy people are just as likely to be into jazz or metal as twee, in my experience.