unpopular

Dusty Tunes

 So what’s in your iTunes Library? There is something so terribly geeky and predominantly male about showing off one’s collections of course. Maybe that’s why I am seduced by Dusty Tunes; a website that takes the contents of your Library (or just selected playlists if you prefer) and displays them as a series of web-page lists. It’s all very rudimentary at the moment, but it’s quite a cool idea. My library is here if you fancy a peek. All my guilty musical pleasures are there to be discovered… as well as a whole bunch of stuff I had/have no idea that existed.

It’s all Punk Rock to me.

I remember my first awareness of the whole ‘twee’ phenomenon. It was on the Indiepop list. My first week of being online, sometime back in, when would it have been? 1996? There was a thread about ‘twee cars’. I waded right in. I probably made at least as many enemies as friends in those first few posts. C’est la vie.

I’ve always hated the notion of ‘Twee’. It’s not empowering. It’s not political. It’s not oppositional to rock. It’s not some badge of Pure Pop honour. It’s just demeaning and pathetic.

Of course ‘Twee’ is a conscious construct created by those striving to define themselves within the cultural milieu. I’ve got no problem with that idea at all. In fact I applaud it. To define oneself is the Pop imperative, after all. I just have a problem with the retrospective labeling of artifacts as ‘Twee’ that really are not.

Now there are undoubtedly a multitude of historical artefacts that could be called ‘twee’, but I would argue that their original contexts preclude them from being called ‘Twee’, regardless of whether they are seen as inspirational reference points for anyone who would willingly declare themselves thus.

For example, a large element in the self-definition of the Twee genre seems to be that of naiveté. But it is not natural naiveté. It is contrived. Forced. And intensely irritating as a result.

Jonathan Richman is the king of naiveté. With songs about abominable snowmen in markets and ice-cream men, he has often consciously embraced childhood themes and styles, but that doesn’t make him Twee. His exploration of the child-like impulse is instead more like that of Picasso; an energy that includes wonder and anger, frustration and enlightenment. And just as Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole, so he never was Twee. At least not in New York…

Similarly, Marine Girls made a perfect sound of naiveté, but were never Twee. ‘50s Pop princesses like Connie Stevens and Linda Scott were glorious examples of calculated teen-pop, but likewise were never Twee. The Shangri-Las and other girl groups were never Twee. Nor were Twinkle or Sandie Shaw, though her bare-foot shenanigans were cute as hell. But Twee? Non. And non aussi to the Gallic sounds of any French songstresses. Just because Belle & Sebastian covered a France Gall song doesn’t make it Twee.

And no, Belle & Sebastian were never Twee either. Nor were their adored Glaswegian predecessors Orange Juice. Fey and Camp, perhaps, but that was never Twee. In the context of the times that was about as Punk Rock as it was possible to be.

Now was Phil Wilson of The June Brides not recently described as ‘The Golden God of Twee’? I have never heard anything so ridiculous. The June Brides were a million miles from being Twee. The June Brides were Punk Rock.

And if Phil has been described as ‘The Golden God Of Twee’ then I am sure that Amelia Fetcher must have been called ‘The Golden Goddess of Twee’ or something similarly nonsensical. For Talulah Gosh are often touted as being some kind of key Twee touchstone. But Talulah Gosh were never Twee. Talulah Gosh too were Punk Rock. That’s fundamental. If you do not understand that then you understand nothing.

Neither were The Pastels ever Twee. Twee is not leather trousers. The Pastels are in the ‘rock’ genre in iTunes by default, which is as it should be. In your face Twee-pop losers.

So was the ‘Twee’ thing kick-started by Tweenet in the mid ‘90s? Did I read that they were using the term with irony because it had been used as a derogatory term in the ‘80s? The thing is, I do not recall anyone talking about Twee in the mid ‘80s. Hell, no one even used the term ‘C86’ until many years later. And that is a whole other can of worms of course.

But like I said, no one called June Brides, Talulah Gosh or The Pastels or the like ‘Twee’ at the time. Perhaps some of the mainstream music press used the term, but I do not remember. Who read the mainstream music press anyway? I certainly do not remember anyone using the word in fanzines. The Subway label, for example, was a Punk Rock label, and even rather dreadful groups like Bubblegum Splash were thought of as Punk. No one called Sarah records ‘Twee’ at the time as far as I recall. Actually there were few record labels that were more Punk Rock than Sarah.

Okay, maybe we also used the term ‘cutie’ for a short time, but that was fair enough. People were revolting against the dominant culture, which was all about commerce and polish and a desperate rush into adulthood and responsibility. It was a time when there were still relatively few youth culture tribes. Mods and Rockers were less of a distant cultural memory than the mid ‘80s Independent scene is to contemporary commentators now. Punk was effectively the recent past. There was still a sense of one thing versus another, rather than a fluid mass of multiple identities. It’s an important point to try and grasp.

I do remember when it all seemed to go downhill. Something happened in the late ‘80s, and there seemed to be a load of groups, records and fanzines that just seemed to be desperately building on a myth. The revolution into innocence was misinterpreted by people apparently too stupid to understand the original impulses. Either that or we got too old too quickly and got cross at a new generation grabbing ownership and taking it in a new direction…

Whatever. Everything seemed to suddenly be all about sweeties, lemonade, kittens and cuddles. It was truly horrible.

It continues to be so. How many times have I heard and seen groups who think they are picking up the spirit of some of those old groups from the mid ‘80s? How many times is it obvious that they really do not have a clue?

‘Twee as Fuck’? ‘Fuck Twee’ more like.

'Notes On Twee'

A few weeks back my friend Evan from the very excellent group The Pathways sent this email about an essay he's been formulating for a while. It's something I've also been meaning to write about for a while, and hopefully I will post my piece later today. Meanwhile, if you have something you want to contribute to Evan's project I'm sure he'd like to hear from you. evankindley at gmail is the address you can reach him on.

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So, I'm finally beginning to write an article I've been thinking about doing for a year or two, called "Notes on Twee" — a response to Susan Sontag's famous "Notes on Camp" essay, published in 1964.  And I would like your help!

What I'd like from you all are ideas of cultural phenomena — anything: books, films, fashion, art, music, social mores, etc. — which you think belong under the general heading of "twee."  (I'm going to refrain from defining the term for you from the outset, but I'm guessing you all have at least some vague sense of what it means.  In fact, people's different senses of what it means is part of what interests me about it, so if you want to include a provisional definition along with your examples, I'd be grateful for that as well.)   

Contemporary manifestations are welcome, as is old stuff, though my focus will be on objects and events dating from after Sontag's essay, i.e. mid-60s onward.  I'm particularly interested in websites, since I think I'll be devoting a fair amount of space to the resurgence of a twee aesthetic on the internet.  I'm less interested in hearing about music (bands, etc.) because I feel like I already have a good handle on what "twee" means in music, but feel free to make suggestions anyway.  And, finally, I'd like to hear from people in both pro- and anti-twee camps: that is, if you hate the word and everything associated with it, I'd still like to know what you think those things are.

Thanks in advance for your help with this!  (And of course you don't have to write back much, just whatever pops into your head.  I won't even be mad if you don't write back at all.)

Best,
Evan

P.S. Sontag's essay is here, in case you feel like perusing it: http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/prose/Susan_Sontag_-_Notes_on_Camp.html

She Always Cries On Sunday

Part two of the possibly on-going series that is the Unpopular Sunday Connection belongs to The Pastels. I have had a strange relationship with The Pastels for a long time. Back in the mid ‘80s I was briefly besotted with them. Or rather, I was besotted with the idea of them. I didn’t really listen to their records and I didn’t go and see them play. I just kept looking through Juniper Beri Beri and thinking that oooh, wouldn’t it be rather fine to be like Stephen Pastel or Brian Superstar? I even made a Brian Superstar windmill, using the cut-out plans in the aforementioned Juniper Beri Beri. The idea was that the windmill would make Brian play his guitar, but my engineering skills were rudimentary at best, so it never really worked.

Well, I did get to hear those early Pastels records of course and I loved them dearly. For some reason though I lost touch with them after Up For A Bit (I never did buy it – the vinyl copy on the shelves is actually C’s) and ‘Comin’ Through’. Didn’t they start to become quite trendy at that time? That probably did it for me. That and the fact that I was moving into different sounds, and there were lines to be drawn and stood behind. Gosh, those things seemed so important at the time…

Of course the early Pastels records were collected on the Suck On retrospective in 1988 (or retrogressive, as the sleeve proclaimed). I am shocked that it is unavailable these days, either as a download or a repackaged CD. There are no doubt rips of the CD available on the Interweb somewhere, but I couldn’t be arsed looking, so ripped my vinyl copy last night. It was the first time I had played the record in ages. It sounded terrific. If you don’t already have it, you can grab it from the link below. My Sunday gift to you.

Suck On The Pastels

Sunday Strut

So here’s part one of the Sunday connection. Small Crew sent me this song (and the equally excellent ‘Rambling’) ages ago, and for some reason I neglected to properly investigate. Sounds great this morning though. Small Crew are essentially husband and wife team Annie and Richard Adderley (formerly of gloriously moody indie rockers Jack), and Dan Edwards (ex-The Lucas Group). Apparently they are not from Armenia. Which is fair enough. Catch them at their space, or just download ‘Sunday Strut’ below. Dig it.

Small Crew: 'Sunday Strut'