[Eclectic Picks Vol.3] Cold Underwear & Innocent Fantasies : Twee Pop's Corny History

哈特費爾德

June 5th, 2023

I was sprawled out on floor tiles staring at the ceiling surrounded by a squad of fans doing their left-right-left-right dance. The temperature was feverish in summer, the thought of death came to mind once again. The footsteps and EDM music blaring from a speaker outside rapidly crescendo as they burst into the room, ‘All you have to do is stay! All you have to do is stay!’

‘Get off the floor, come play football!’ I heard as I felt the cold steel of a Y2K necklace on my face.
‘Sorry bro , I’m coming I’m coming.’
I walked out into the corridor dribbling a ball, my hand covering my neck, the smell of sweat overwhelming the smell of blood.

‘Oh, get me away, I'm dying
Get me away, I'm dying
Oh, I'm dying
Oh, I'm dying
Oh, I'm dying, yeah’

‘What are you mumbling about? A nursery rhyme?’
I felt the silver chain on my foot.
‘I want to die’, I replied as I kicked him the ball.
‘Good to hear, thanks for volunteering to play goalie!’
The sound of laughter, running, the jingle of chainlinks.

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Translated by: Jonathan Chan

The girl-next-door librarian ‘twee girl’: Tiktok & Vogue Empire Built by Twee Zoomers

In January of 2022, Vogue declared the revival of 2014’s ‘Tumblr aesthetic’. The 2010s saw the rise of the Tumblr style - black eyeliner, torn up skinny jeans, Dr Martens and emo selfies. This Tumblr emo, mysterious soft-rock girl ‘everyday romanticist’ style gave way to a new, highly feminine, hipster female aesthetic that favoured the bangs, large collars, flowery leggings and long dresses, flat shoes and cardigans that modelled Zooey Deschanel’s look in 500 Days of Summer - the girl-next-door librarian ‘twee girl’. The twee girl likes art class, dresses simply and was popularised with the rise of Tiktok. Artsy zoomers modelled their signature twee look after the clothing in the song ‘Why Do You Let Me Stay Here’ by Deschanel’s band She & Him, as well taking cues from indie music culture and Wes Anderson films.

The twee revival was criticised for being too reliant on one’s appearance and body shape, ‘too many white and skinny girls that conform to traditionally appealing girls’, ‘this isn’t Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward!’, ‘this is racist and fat-shaming’, ‘phoney gentleness’ and so on. But the twee revival has encouraged zoomers to dust off the roller blades and guitars in their closets.

‘Twee’ became a derogatory term: staged, perfectionistic, maybe a little bit too ‘manic pixie dream girl’. Similar to the emo, twee has also become an insult in music circles and twee fashion has followed developments in music closely, a mere wet dream of those who look up to the bohemian countercultural movements of emo, punk and rock.

The Rise Of 80s Twee Culture: Dispensing Of The ‘Cool’, A Subcultural Obsession For The Nerds, Freaks, Dumb And Virgins

If you’re not obsessed with music, naivety, constant fantacisation, unrequited love, not consciously being juvenile, you won’t care about twee pop.

Twee pop is an 80s indie pop offshoot based on aesthetic. It originated from a mixtape by NME in 1986 called C86, which included bands like McCarthy, The Wedding Present, Primal Scream (that’s right), The Pastels, The Bodines, The Soup Dragons and Mighty Mighty. C86 was later described by British media as ‘Anorak pop’ and ‘shambling’, evoking images of nerds and slow walking youth. These bands were influenced by the noise rock of The Smiths and the minimal chord progressions of The Ramones, but with a crucial difference: they dropped the harsh sounds, looseness and masculine style and incorporated a simple, sincere and soft musical aesthetic that carried happy-sad undertones delivered by male-female duets singing corny lyrics. The songs typically revolved around romance, favouring heterosexual relationships and ambiguous sexualities. Boys weren’t very masculine and girls didn’t intentionally feminise themselves unless it was of their own volition. Though they were influenced by the happy-sad lyrics of The Smiths, they dropped the homophobic, macho rock, female averse and racist undertones and adopted the ‘wimpiness’ that Morrissey and other British indie rock males felt superior to. Twee pop articulates one-way love but avoids drowning in sadness by injecting a healthy dose of youthful innocence and imagining a world where ‘it was better back then’, ‘love is pure and uncomplicated’ and a state where the only thing that one can shed tears over is sentimentality.

Not long after, this new style enveloped labels like Sarah Records, K Records, Slumberland Record and Kindercore. Seattle, Olympia, Glasgow and Melbourne became the heartland of twee pop.

Twee pop maintains a DIY ethos but oddly enough has an antagonistic relationship to punk. It carries an air of naivete and vulnerability that has not been seen in rock and punk. Some (especially fans of punk, rock and grunge) would say that twee is too girly, childish or wimpy, as exemplified in the album provocatively titled ‘Kill Twee Pop!’ by British indie rock band Sarandon. This album is a call to arms for those tired of paint-by-the-numbers twee culture. If the punk spirit is all about radical authenticity, twees find no issue in being girly, cute and crying out for love. There are exceptions, like Kurt Cobain who is a ‘wimp male’ who likes twee pop like Daniel Johnston, The Vaselines and Marine Girls. In practice, twee and the DIY culture of punk share a lot of similarities: zines, independently produced records, bands that barely know how to play their instruments, interactions between audience and stage. The rebellious spirit of punk, rock and grunge are taken and morphed in twee pop like how Amelia Fletcher - frontwoman of Talulah Gosh and Heavenly - stated, ‘Before C86, women could only be eye-candy in a band, the scene (twee pop) was very very open to women’. The production methods of twee pop’s now-closed flagship label Sarah Records was also very punk in practice - after releasing their hundredth single, they announced through NME and Melody Maker ‘A Day For Destroying Things’, stating ‘when you were nineteen ,didnt you ever want to create something beautiful and pure just so one day you could set it on fire then watch the city light up as it burned?’

Twee kids listen to the neutered form of rock. Twees don’t care about sex, drugs and rock & roll. Rather they much prefer the feelings of first love, fantasy, one-sided affection, unfearful sex, they prefer japanese candy rather than beer and hotpot, parents and lovers rather than smoking with activist friends, reading postcards more than hanging around dark alleys, thick rimmed glasses and striped polos rather than studded leather chokers. Their album covers look like postcards from the 1920s, childish doodles, cute cats and dogs, crooked handwriting, the stickers their parents gave them as a reward as a kid. From the Hong Kong twee representatives AMK and The Pancakes, don’t their album covers, lyrics, stories and style look familiar?

(Translated by : Jonathan Chan)

I got smashed by the ball. Whatever, kicking him back the ball.

“Why is there blood on the ball dude?”

“Oh, not a big deal. I had a nosebleed. PS 沒有介懷from The Pancakes is so similar to I love you from Beat Happening.”

“:>”

Twee Pop List

《What a way to die》by Shop Assistants

《I love you》 by Beat Happening

《You’re sleeping》 by Tiger Trap

《Hey hey hey 我愛你》by AMK

《Gigi Leung is dead》by My Little Airport

《沒有介懷》by The Pancakes