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.

Comments

[Trev]

Good post. Agree with lots of it, of course.

[Jerry]

Great post, Alistair - and there was me, almost having given up the battle...

[Tim Footman]

'Grandad' by Clive Dunn is twee as fucking fuck.

[david nichols]

Aside from Clive Dunn then (assuming we all agree on that), what WAS twee? If anything?

[Tim B.]

Good one Alistair. Just for kicks I looked it up on dictionary.com and this is what it says:

–adjective Chiefly British.
affectedly dainty or quaint: twee writing about furry little creatures.

[Kevin P]

Wasn't grandad co-written by the creation's kenny pickett? in which case that's more pop-art punk rock which is where the tv personalities came in and all this seemed to start ...

[masonic boom]

You know, I hate twee as much as the next Dirty Dronerock Girl, but, erm... isn't this article just an exercise in moving goalposts and defining "not-twee" = 'stuff I like' and "twee" = 'stuff I don't like' and then picking some labels (political or otherwise) for those reasons why you like or dislike something?

But then again, all attempts to address bifurcation of sub-genres is really like painting on the head of matchsticks, I suppose.

[ylwa]

yay for this! (crayola (http://xpqwrtz.blogspot.com/) should be here to applaud it as well, i think. i miss his rants in the same spirit.)
lemonade and kittens are just gross. kind of sticky.

[alistair]

Maybe it comes across as an excercise in moving goalposts; that's obviously for others to decide (as indeed you have Ms Boom!), and I've got no problem at all with that of course. Personally I don't think it is - my core objection, regardless of whether I dislike Twee sounds or ideas, is the retrospective branding of artefacts from previous generations to fit with a contemporary viewpoint. I know this is how history has been generally been revised/reinterpreted over time, but it just feels wrong to re-contextualise something without a secure grounding in the events of the time. Maybe this is how people have always felt when they get to their forties and see new generations re-interpret their own eras... maybe we're just overly sensitive about it. Maybe it really doesn't matter a good goddamn. But it's fun to argue about. It's fun to be grumpy. It's fun to paint on the head of a matchstick :)

[masonic boom]

Well, that comes back to the good old question of whether a piece of artwork's message is dependent on its original context, or whether it can be reinterpreted afresh by each new group of viewers/hearers/consumers/whatever.

(I was reading a passage in a very interesting book called Godel Escher Bach which was talking about sending pieces of music to alien civilisations - that perhaps a Bach piece would be recognisable totally out of human context as being some pattern - but that a John Cage piece would be almost meaningless stripped of its context of 20th Century music and what had gone before.)

I do think that a lot of older folk think "you're missing the point!" as the artforms of their youth are stripped of their context and reexamined. I spend a lot of time myself, shouting "YOU DOING IT WRONG!" at Nu-Gaze kiddies - but then again, are they? I think they missed the point, but perhaps they have simply picked up another point.

Because to me, as an outsider, that whole wilful infantalising thing always seemed the *point* of twee-pop or cutie or whatever we should call it. Maybe it was a reaction against something in the dominant culture, but I never liked that particular culture. So to me, kittens and lemonade seems a refinement of the idea, rather than a perversion, but I admit I could have it wrong.

Maybe I should write a blog post of mine own about this, instead of painting on your matchstick, as fun as it is. ;-)

[Chris]

A bit late to comment perhaps. But. Doesn't the retrospective application of the word 'Twee' to slightly hyper slightly shy '80s indie pop fit into that noble category of reclaiming derogatory words? Like, say, 'Pop', which would originally have signified things like: 'not serious' and 'for kids'. By the time it came to mean 'all that is totally immediately unstoppably great to me now and nothing that isn't' (it is a while since I read 'Young and Foolish', but that is the gist, isn't it?), it had became obvious too that 'not serious' and 'for kids' were actually good things, done right.

The 'Twee' label works in a similar way (the values are different, but totally defensible - excitability, acceptance of emotional frailty), but has spectacularly failed to lose its irritant value. Which would make it the more punk rock of the two labels, no?

[Christie Malry]

At the time, the terms used by the press were 'shambling', 'C86' (by the NME, of course) or, as AF says, 'cutie'.

As a teenager, I found the whole 'scene' (ahem) entirely invigorating, and, as has been said, punk as fuck.

For me, the last band from that era/movement/whatever were Huggy Bear. The 'twee' lollipops and hairslides thing may well have begun with bis, but it's mostly American bands waving that particular flag and its attendant label.

[alistair]

Indeed, i was often referred to as 'Shambles Al' by my colleagues at Art School. I THINK it was meant affectionately...