Twee Punk vs. New York

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire
by Will Hermes

Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film
by Marc Spitz

I love many things about New York, but I resent it as well. I've written about these feelings here before. I've written a song about them.

Here, I'm going to write about two otherwise dissimilar books that I kind of liked but rubbed me the wrong way with their New Yorkiness.

"Love Goes to Buildings on Fire" is Rolling Stone senior critic Will Hermes' history of New York music in the 1970s. It's not just the familiar stories about the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Talking Heads (source of Hermes' title), CBGB and hip-hop, although he covers these as well. What makes this book different is that Hermes also covers Celia Cruz, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass and a whole bunch of other musicians in different styles and, often, from different backgrounds and age groups. About the only thing they have in common is that they all spent time in New York City in the 1970s, during which time they created some of their most original work. And, since New York is the only unifying factor, New York sort of becomes the hero of Hermes' story. And so, he writes almost day-by-day history of the city's many different music scenes during the 1970s.

Back in the New York Groove

Hermes' book is a stunning work of research. His writing and analysis are great. At one point, he provides a one-sentence summary of old-school New York punk rock's characteristically negative-but-humorous attitude that's second to none: "At ... CBGB," he writes, "the aesthetic ... seemed less about escaping the nastiness of the city than reveling in it, amping it up to a cinematic scale, drawing a narrative in which artists could wage heroic battle."

Overall though, I had a hard time getting through "Love Goes To Buildings on Fire." Hermes proves with overwhelming evidence that New York was a wonderfully fertile environment for music at the time. But we already knew that, didn't we? And Hermes certainly didn't have to stretch as much as he does to make everything about New York City all the time. Even clearly non-New York artists and trends get appropriated. Jonathan Richman gets some respect as an early proponent of the primitivist aesthetic in rock, even though he lived in New York only very briefly in the 1960s and was very strongly identified with New England. Whole other cities can get sucked into New York through this line of thinking. At one point, Hermes writes, "If the musical birthplace of disco, in its strictest definition, is Philly, its cultural birthplace is unquestionably New York."

Seriously? New York controls our money, our media and much of our politics. Does it have to lay claim to being the spiritual home to the cultural developments of other cities, as well?

Around the same time I picked up Hermes's book, I also got hold of Marc Spitz's book about the twee aesthetic. Earlier this year, Salon ran an article in which Spitz talked about the ascendancy of capital-T Twee in culture, through Wes Anderson movies, Zooey Deschanel, "Portlandia," etc. It ticked me off, because, while those may be related to "twee" things, they are only loosely related to the Twee movement in indie pop (let's capitalize it, to clarify the distinction) which is, I believe, the origin of the current use of the word. (I was thinking about the article when I wrote this post about Kurt Cobain's love of twee indie pop.) I knew I had to order his book about the subject so that I could get even more ticked off.

I have a history of this kind of thing with Marc Spitz. Twice now, I have read a blurb about one of his books and thought, "Oh, I wish I had written that!" And then I read the book and I think, "I would have done this totally differently!"

I only got to page 4 of "Twee" before I slammed it down on a table. The offending passage has Spitz strolling through a street market in Brooklyn and noticing how this formerly rough neighborhood is now home to young people selling just-so-twee artisanal pickles, etc. This inspires him to write:

There are similar marketplaces like the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Flea all over the world. In 2013, one no longer has to be in Brooklyn -- the borough, the county, the former 'hood' -- to be in Brooklyn. Austin is 'Brooklyn.' In fact, some argue that Austin was Brooklyn before Brooklyn was 'Brooklyn' ... Parts of Chicago and L.A. ... are now 'Brooklyn.' Paris is 'Brooklyn.'

Here, the same kind of New York cultural imperialism we see in Hermes' book goes not just to other states, but all over the world and even back in time. Spitz argues that Austin may have been twee before Brooklyn, but it never really had the New York chutzpah to make "Twee" a thing.

When I read this passage, I wrote "F- you, Marc Spitz" on the page and closed the book for a week.

Twee-a culpa 

Mostly I'm just jealous because I didn't write these books before Spitz did..

So, I thought I'd pick it up again and give Spitz another chance. I'm glad I did. I still believe that, if it weren't for Twee indie pop, Americans wouldn't be using the British slang word "twee" in place of "cutesy," "girly" or "overly precious." But Spitz is right: There is a kind of aesthetic in vogue right now that is noticeably more gentle and whimsical than the kind of thing we saw in Hermes' New York or even in the bombastic 1990s. It may or may not have much to do with Sarah Records, and maybe it's not Twee in my sense of the term, but "twee" is as good a way to describe it as any, I guess. It's worth taking a look at how it came to be.

Spitz did a lot of research -- an almost Hermes-like amount of research. He starts by  going back to the World War II generation, finding the origins of Twee as a resistance to the savagery of war and the blandness of postwar life. This can get to be a stretch, but he pulls it off pretty well.

There is a long passage that may have you wondering why Spitz is spending valuable space in a book about Zooey Deschanel, Wes Anderson and Belle and Sebastian with a summary of the plot to Munro Leaf's 1936 children's classic "The Story of Ferdinand," until he trots out the fact that Elliott Smith had a picture of Ferdinand the Bull tattooed on his bicep. Spitz also has a good chunk on J.D. Salinger (Why? Oh yeah: Zooey) and Charlie Brown. Even he seems to recognize that he's going too far by dragging poor Anne Frank into this analysis at another point. He almost salvages it by pointing out that modern Twee touchstone album "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel is largely inspired by Frank. Almost.

I think Spitz is going too far here, and not just with the Anne Frank stuff. Tracing a twee lineage that goes back to the 1930s is like writing a book about punk that traces John Lydon back to medieval heretic John of Leyden. ... Oh wait, that's been done. Never mind.

My point is that I think of twee as the indie pop movement that grew out of the punk movement in the '80s and '90s. It was very much a reaction to the amped-up aggression and negativity of punk rock -- the same thing that Hermes talks about in the quote above. It was meant to be a space within the punk rock world that was welcoming to women, gays, lesbians and bisexuals, and all kinds of people who couldn't -- or didn't want to -- adopt that hard punk stance. Go watch that Kathleen Hanna documentary: Riot Grrl was totally Twee and totally punk at the same time. 

And something else, too: As the corporate ogre co-opted the more aggressive strains of the indie world (both in music's alt-rock boom and, as Spitz aptly points out, in the way Hollywood responded to the violent Tarantinos and Coens of the indie film world) Twee became increasingly important as an outpost outside the mainstream -- both as a nurturing environment for sensitive souls in a harsh world and as a fierce stance against the corporatization of everything.

Twee, Inc.

So, what does it mean to that world when TV/movie/singing star Zooey Deschanel is the new face of Twee? What does it mean when Belle and Sebastian plays stadiums? When "Juno" and "Garden State" are big enough to create their own backlashes? When (irritating) arena-filling bands like Mumford and Sons are, themselves, kind of twee?

Some of the more interesting parts of Spitz's book come when he starts asking these questions. There's a good part at the beginning where he talks about the appeal of the handmade, folksier approach as a reaction to modern capitalism. There's a part near the end where Simon Reynolds pops up to talk about how indie rock now seems dominated by individuals from privileged backgrounds, who are making this supposedly "alternative" music a home for the aesthetics of the upper classes. (Cough! Cough! Vampire Weekend! Cough!)

I wish Spitz had gone into this more deeply. I also think he gives short shrift to the implications of the fact that "twee" tends to be applied to things that are considered "girly" or "gay." It's also important to point out that Spitz is really talking about a small section of the public, one that likes indie music and indie films. Every night of the week, you can go to see a horror or action movie or listen to some bombastic hip-hop, EDM, Nashville country or nu-metal and see that our culture hasn't necessarily grown any more gentle or welcoming in the past 20 years.

So, I kept thinking, if you want a New York-centric view of Twee, why not look at it this way: The version of Brooklyn Spitz is talking about is very much a feature of post-Rudy Giulani New York. Young, college-educated, mostly white people are moving in droves to formerly crime-ridden neighborhoods in cities, instead of in the suburbs. It's not like the days of CBGB that Hermes talks about, when people were taking their lives in their hands when they went out to see a band, so of course they're not going to be amplifying that danger into a cinematic landscape in which artists can wage heroic battle. It makes sense that their aesthetics should be gentler. Of course New York movies are going to be more like "The Squid and the Whale" and less like "Taxi Driver." Of course New York rock bands are going to look and sound more like Vampire Weekend and less like Ramones.

And another thing about New York: If you take the crime and danger out of Brooklyn, of course it's going to look a little more like a smaller city. So, yeah, Marc Spitz, Austin was there first. Glasgow was there first. Olympia, Washington, was there first. Every freakin' college town in the world was there first.

So, Brooklyn may be twee these days, but no, Twee is not Brooklyn.