Twee. I know, I know. Today, “twee” is often a pejorative term, a dismissal of people and objects that embody a particular mixture of hip nerdiness and self-conscious cuteness. “Adorkability,” if you will. Twee is Zooey Deschanel playing ukelele with Joseph Gordon-Levitt while kittens chase bubbles across her bedroom. It is a polka dot dress with a sweetheart neckline, a hand-knit cardigan, a teacup purchased on Etsy. Twee (or “indie pop”), however, is also a genre of music that deserves our attention. Indie pop began as an exercise in quiet rebellion and became a bonafide musical movement which ultimately, affected much of the music to come after it.
Indie Pop Beginnings
To examine the roots of indie pop, one must consider the musical landscape in the 1970s. On one end of the rock spectrum, arena cock rockers like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple were personifying the industry’s orgiastic bloat. Unlimited recording budgets and unrestrained drug use begot overblown double albums packed with every rock cliche imaginable. Glockenspiels? Twenty-minute drum solos? Fourteen-piece string sections? Operatic backing vocals? Concept albums that provide the soundtrack to a theoretically-existent film about a young boy who is chosen by a mysterious council of elders to embark on an epic journey to eradicate the world of evil, as guided by an elderly mentor named Morpheous? Sure, why the hell not? Cocaine for everyone!
Meanwhile, on the other side of the rock world, Britain’s disaffected, glue-sniffing youths were pushing safety pins through their nostrils and putting on their finest piss-stained bondage pants for nights of speed-taking and gobbing Johnny Rotten. Punk’s first wave crashed over British society with mighty force; newspapers denounced the genre as degenerate and a threat to the very fabric of the United Kingdom (much to the delight of the scene’s adherents). At that time, punk came in two forms: the alienated, angry thrashing of bands like the Damned or the wry, arty music of Television and Patti Smith. Occasionally, those two strains met and produced someone like Richard Hell, but basically, that was it.
For your average British kid, London’s punk scene and the rock world depicted in New Musical Express and Melody Maker were equally distant possibilities. Apart from escapist fantasies, few teens could envision themselves sliding into Mick Jagger’s low-slug, rhinestone pants any more than they could foresee themselves using their mother’s egg whites to coax their hair into a mohawk. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were cocksure caricatures who relied upon a steady rotation of groupies to fulfill their insatiable sexual appetites. Punks were angry and yoked by their own fatalism. (When there’s no future, how can there be sin?/We’re the flowers in the dustbin/We’re the poison in your human machine/We’re the future, your future–Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen)
There were other stumbling blocks as well; punk was symbolic of a youth culture that rejected most of its antecedents but some kids still liked their Beatles records and Top of the Pops. Moreover, few kids possessed the technical chops to deliver baroque guitar solos or the rage necessary to pen a cathartic punk anthem. All things considered, a major label record deal seemed completely out of the question. Most British kids were, well, average. How could a typical middle class adolescent find representation in either scene? Where was their musical voice?
The Indie Underground Emerges
Though many kids found the antagonism of punk off-putting, they embraced the movement’s DIY (“do-it-yourself”) spirit. Punk’s trailblazers proved that a wide vocal range or virtuosic musicianship was no longer necessary to create art. If employed correctly, an expressive voice and idiosyncratic (if rudimentary) playing style could be powerful assets. Punk also proved that the music world was no longer comprised of one global industry, but rather, a collection of smaller scenes. For a lot of people, this was a revelation–the rockstar next door.1
Indie pop began in earnest in the English suburbs and Scotland. Both places were comfortably removed from the punk and the new wave of British metal that dominated London’s music scene and both were full of middle class teenagers.
Aesthetically, indie pop was punk’s polar opposite; venom and masculinity were eschewed in favor of saccharine preciousness, softness and most importantly, femininity (or a stereotypical notion of it anyway). As a nod to their clean-cut middle class backgrounds, the movement’s adherents adopted a wardrobe consisting of cardigan sweaters, school uniforms and raincoats (“anorak” would become a synonym for the genre as a nod to this sartorial preference.) There was no pretense of coolness and that was part of the charm. This clean-cut image was a direct response to the gritty destruction glamorized by punk culture. How do you rebel against a culture in which complete anarchy reigns? You become as non-threatening as possible. After all, when everyone is sneering, what could be more confrontational than a smile?
Often, this sweetness was a crafty cover for darker lyrical content. Kurt Cobain’s beloved Vaselines, for example, would write songs with shockingly adult content (e.g. “Rory Rides Me Raw”) or scathing religious criticism (“Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam”) and obscure their acid with sweet melodies and girlish vocals. The snark, of course, lay in the disconnect between the material’s sound and its subject matter. Other groups, like Dan Treacy’s Television Personalities used that same dissonance to address difficult topics, such as domestic discord. Lyrics from the opening track of Television Personalities’ first full-length album, And Don’t the Kids Just Love It, “This Angry Silence” serves as a great example of this technique:
I hear my father shouting at my mother/In the room next door/He’s always threatening to pack his bags/’Cause he can’t take it anymore/And my brother’s anorexic/But no one seems to care about the state he’s in/And my sister’s in a club, she’s a barmaid in a pub/And my mother’s full of gin/Can you hear this angry silence?2
The music was meant to be accessible and a reflection of the people who created it, rather than a launch pad for international stardom. In their smallness, the records produced by the early indie pop movement bear a striking resemblance to teenagers’ diaries; they were a documentation of the adolescent experience with small hearts drawn above the “i”s. Small record labels, such as Sarah Records, released material produced by artists with no prior experience and eventually, the work gained a following–all by word of mouth. Entities like NME caught wind of the sound and released mixtapes (like the now iconic NME compilation called C86), which exposed indie pop artists to a wider audience. Artists with crossover appeal, like the Smiths, borrowed heavily from indie pop in their early work and inevitably, the genre went mainstream, where it promptly died. Art scene favorites, like My Bloody Valentine and Jesus and Mary Chain paid homage to twee music by embracing its simple melodies and ethereal, childlike vocals and then dragging those elements through a heavy coating of fuzz and distortion until it became something new: Shoegaze. The late eighties birthed Britpop and Creation Records thought it would be funny to unleash the Gallagher brothers on an unsuspecting public. For the time being, twee pop was on the decline in the UK.
Bands from this time period that are worth checking out include: The Pastels, Talulah Gosh, the Wedding Present, Television Personalities, The Marine Girls, Young Marble Giants, the Vaselines
Coming to America
If the UK music scene of the 1970s and early 1980s seemed male-dominated, the American independent community of the mid to late 1980s was pure, distilled testosterone. On the West Coast, SST Records’ roster of hardcore acts was tearing across the country with a new genre they called “hardcore” and their peers in East Coast cities like Washington, DC and New York, were fusing hardcore with reggae and political activism (Minor Threat, Bad Brains) or art scene experimentalism (Swans, Sonic Youth, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks3). In the Midwest, hedonistic, alcohol-soaked back-to-basics rock was ascendent (Minnesota) and the seeds of industrial and noise rock were sewn in Chicago by the so-called “Pigfuck” groups.4
The Pacific Northwest had always had a local garage rock scene but until the late 1980s, it was largely removed from the national stage. With the exception of the odd gig in Seattle, few bands even bothered to tour through the region, which made the area’s college campuses the perfect setting for a music movement that never had global ambitions. Olympia, Washington–home of the notoriously free-form Evergreen State College–bears a striking resemblance to Scotland and northern England (home of the first twee movement). The weather is damp and cold; it is removed from the cultural hubs of major international cities and there were a lot of young students with little to do with their time.
Enter: Calvin Johnson and K Records. As a teenager, Johnson worked as a volunteer at Olympia’s local radio station, KAOS-FM. KAOS-FM was well-known for its support of the musical underground and for those living in Olympia, it served as their principle introduction to independent music. For Johnson, KAOS-FM’s iconoclastic playlists provided a much-needed reprieve from the onslaught of hair metal and synthpop that had monopolized the airwaves. Around this time, Calvin Johnson began writing for a number of regional fanzines, including Sub/Pop (which would later become SubPop Records) and working as an event organizer for local shows.
In 1982, K Records and Beat Happening were born. Beat Happening, Calvin’s band with fellow Evergreen students Heather Lewis and Bret Lunsford, drew inspiration from Britain’s twee scene and quickly became a local darling. Beat Happening’s earliest EPs are extremely primitive and sounded a great deal like three children who banded together to create music on a lark–which is precisely what they were, in a sense. Over the course of their twenty year recording career, Beat Happening would undergo an impressive musical maturation, growing from rock Luddites into a sophisticated pop outfit. This progress would be most clearly illustrated by their 1992 release You Turn Me On, which featured multitrack recording, a nine-minute elegy, and more texture than their early work could have ever hinted was possible.
Much like their British predecessors, the members of Beat Happening we much too savvy and intelligent to create uni-dimensional (read: nice) music. To scratch the surface of Beat Happening’s songs is to discover a whole world of darkness, complexity and frustration. In an article for Pitchfork entitled, “Twee as Fuck,” writer Nitsuh Abebe described Beat Happening’s music thusly: “Most of what’s written about this band is all about that sweet pop and those childish affectations, but that misses the substance at the core: Their music was dark, damaged, full of fright and sex and death and vulnerability– just like any real childhood.”
Initially, K Records distributed material on tapes exclusively because it was practical. Few bands in Olympia could count on selling one thousand copies of a single and it was cost prohibitive to print vinyl EPs for any quantity of units lower than that threshold. A cassette tape, on the other hand, was cheap, easily traded and copied among friends and immediate. A band could record a demo or a cut a single and have a few copies to hand out at a gig the same night. It was probably a happy accident that cassette tapes possessed a technological roughness that complimented the sonically amateur twee pop of K and other indie labels. Slowly but surely, this culture of tape trading blossomed into a bona fide movement. Bands sprung up all around Washington and Oregon, eventually finding their way to San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
As Beat Happening and K records developed a larger fan base, Johnson became one of the region’s de facto figureheads and he used his stature within the indie community to champion new artists. Future riot grrrls, like Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail, Miranda July, Allison Wolfe, Molly Neuman and Corin Tucker counted Johnson among their mentors and benefited immensely from his early support. Indeed, K Records’ creation of the International Pop Underground Convention–an indie pop festival curated by Johnson–provided an impressive roster of young artists with the exposure of a wider, well-connected audience5.
The indie pop scene of the Northwest was not without its detractors. Among K’s biggest fans was Kurt Cobain, who even had a “K” tattooed on his ribs to pledge his allegiance to the label. But Cobain eventually tired of the hierarchical nature of Olympia’s music scene and the unyielding orthodoxy of Johnson’s world. Echoing Cobain’s complaints, Courtney Love expressed her displeasure with Olympia’s scenesters when she wrote the (scathing) song, “Rock Star” (sometimes known as “Olympia”) for Hole’s album, Live Through This. At a 1984 show, Beat Happening opened for Black Flag6–much to the chagrin of Greg Ginn and Henry Rollins. As Calvin Johnson pranced on stage and threw candy into the audience, Rollins grew increasingly agitated and began heckling the band, which culminated in him sexually assaulting Johnson7.
Ethical hand-wringing aside, a number of people simply disliked indie pop’s aesthetics. The childlike vocals and preciousness of bands such as Tiger Trap, Talulah Gosh, the Softies and Beat Happening could be grating. More troubling was that many women found the association between femininity and adolescence infantilizing. Indeed, one could spend a great deal of time debating whether embracing childishness is, in essence, more damaging to women’s advancement than liberating (See: Deschanel, Zooey). Ultimately, the progress of music is one of ebbs and flows, cycles, and fits and starts. That which seems radical or fresh initially can become stale and suffocating shortly thereafter. Shortly after Olympia gave rise to riot grrrl, the Northwest (and the indie scene at large) moved away from twee in favor of grunge and other variations on punk, exemplified by the Gits and foxcore bands.
Bands from this time period that are worth checking out include: The Softies, Beat Happening, Honeybunch, Glo Worm, Rocketship, Velocity Girl, Halobenders, Tullycraft and Cub.
Legacy
Given that early indie pop was shaped and (in many ways) defined by its cosseted exclusivity, it is somewhat difficult to assess its value and quality. The genre was meant to be a mode of self-expression shared between friends, so it stands to reason that the work’s value is corollary to the listener’s proximity to it. Put differently, a listener is liable to care more about the music and find more to treasure if they were its intended audience. As an outsider, the subtleties of the music can be lost, the way the humor of an inside joke can never be fully conveyed to a third party.
There is also the matter of objective quality. In its infancy, indie pop was primarily a product of extremely primitive recording methods. Young musicians with little–if any–formal training used tape recorders to capture their pop songs and distributed the cassettes to their friends. On occasion, low production value can have little effect on how one assesses the quality of the music. (Nirvana’s first album Bleach, for example, sounds like a $600 album, which is exactly what it was. Regardless, songs like “About a Girl” hinted that the band was capable of greater feats.) More frequently, lousy recording highlights the music’s shortcomings; poor song structure seems poorer and amateurish lyrics seem weaker.
At its core, twee music is inseparable from its self-created trappings and for many listeners, this will always present an insurmountable obstacle to enjoying the music. In other words, if you find a trip to an Anthropologie store intolerable, this is music is probably not for you, which is unfortunate because the genre has produced some pop gems. I would strongly urge anyone reading this to pick up a copy of Enter the Vaselines, And Don’t the Kids Just Love it, Jamboree and You Turn Me On, as well as any number of singles and LPs by the above-mentioned groups. Twee pop has continued to have a vast influence on contemporary groups such as Camera Obscura, Belle and Sebastian, Los Campesinos! and other indie pop spin-off bands, such as the Magnetic Fields, My Bloody Valentine, the Smiths, Jesus and Mary Chain, Blake Babies, the Lemonheads and others. Twee is all the annoying stereotypes we have come to associate with it but it is also so much more.
- This pattern has more or less continued since the 1980s. While major labels and entities like MTV have continued to monopolize music’s mainstream, the music world as a whole has become evermore fractured (much to the dismay of said old guard behemoths) and this process has been accelerated by the advent of file sharing and the internet.
- I tried to include this song in the article, as it is an important product of twee music but unfortunately, it is very difficult to track down online.
- Hardcore did have a New York scene with bands like Cro-Mags, Reagan Youth and Agnostic Front but for my money, the true heart of East Coast hardcore was Washington, D.C. New York’s biggest innovation in the late 1970s-early-1980s was the development of No Wave, a genre closely tied to the city’s vital contemporary art scene. The title was a play on words and a reference to the then-popular New Wave movement. Generally, No Wave favored sonic texture, a-tonal guitar drones and experimentalism over melody. Jim Jarmusch and Richard Kern were leading figures of the movement’s cinematic and photographic branch. The above-mentioned groups, Sonic Youth, Swans and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were notable figures of No Wave and their work would have enormous influence on the emergent industrial scene in Chicago/the Midwest in the later half of the 1980s.
- “Pigfuck” was a term coined by Robert Christgau to describe groups including Big Black, The Jesus Lizard, Scratch Acid, Pussy Galore, etc.
- Among the festival’s performers were: The Pastels, L7, Fugazi, Courtney Love, The Melvins, Bratmobile, Nation of Ulysses, Mecca Normal, Modest Mouse, and Girl Trouble.
- This has to be among the oddest pairings in the history of indie music.
- My feelings on Henry Rollins are… complicated, to put it mildly.
