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"

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.