Twees're Good (except they're not)

S

sgn

Well-known member
Slothrop said:
Can we actually have a roll-call of twee here? I feel like the concept is pole-vaulting ahead of the reality...

To date, I'm allowing in:
That John Lewis ad
That match.com ad
Cath Kidston
Belle and Sebastian
Juno
Pomplamoose (does anyone else think she looks weirdly like Beck?)
That mobile phone ad with Just Another Diamond Day on it
What else?
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Baths - The LA beat artist, not the act of washing oneself. I like a couple of his tunes, but - http://www.lemellotron.com/wp-content/uploads/baths-heart_daedelus_snorelaxed_remix.jpg
Garfunkel and Oates - If you haven't heard of them, good for you. They're basically an excessively twee and unfunny version of the Flight Of The Conchords.
Ukelele covers of popular songs (yes, this is a thing)
Ukeleles
The word "ukelele"
Zooey Deschanel
Vampire Weekend?
Sufjan Stevens?
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Oh that's just rubbish. Truck Train Tracktor could have been a Doctor Feelgood song. It's great if you like that sort of thing. It's definitely a rock song. I don't care - at all - if it's the only one in their cannon, but it's certainly 2 bar boogie or whatever. I blame the Field Mice.

It isn't about the internet, there's always been people like that around, it's the dominance of them that's the problem, and it goes with the end of civilisation and mortgages and right wing ideals and getting married and all of that fucking stupid consumer conformist shit that's fucking dead. They're just trying to preserve it. It's no coincidence that they're singing about marriage in that fucking awful cover. Beyonce is horribly reactionary. All of it is just right wing Christian propaganda. There's a pseudo-survivalist edge to all of it that makes me sick.

It's fucking horrible and I don't care, and yeah yeah unnamed, yeah this is for you, I took that personally, if you think that me eating wicked food and wearing wicked clothes makes me somehow unconscionable or unable to comment about shit like this, really fuck off. I've done my time and I like yuppie food. I'm fucking super fly. Fucking sue me. I can hate an aesthetic without being a hypocrite. What the fuck? I'm everything that's wrong with the world; that hasn't ever stopped me hating fuckwits. Leave me alone, unless you felt my last rant was directed at you, in which case, eat it. If I read what you wrote wrong, then ignore that bit. Mate.

It's definitely not just girls and no, Kate Nash isn't in there, sorry Ollie. She was just making a buck.

Baboon was right to say that it starts with 'I'm sticking with you' though.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Hm, I had Nash down as 'twee' because of her horrible affectedly-earnest mockney schtick, but maybe that's a slightly different thing. I still see it as part of this whole 'cynically honest' continuum though, which I hate.

How did we get onto food in this thread? Is there 'twee' food?
 
O

Ory

warp drive
mistersloane said:
and it goes with the end of civilisation and mortgages and right wing ideals and getting married and all of that fucking stupid consumer conformist shit that's fucking dead
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hmm seems more like these types are affiliated with leftie egalitarian cuntery

that pomplamoose bint looks like a feminist

yes, i'm going there

again
 
hucks

hucks

Your Message Here
Ory said:
hmm seems more like these types are affiliated with leftie egalitarian cuntery

that pomplamoose bint looks like a feminist

yes, i'm going there

again
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That's quite low quality trolling.

[Wiley] I know troll, troll says he don't know you [/Wiley]
 
computer_rock

computer_rock

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Hm, I had Nash down as 'twee' because of her horrible affectedly-earnest mockney schtick, but maybe that's a slightly different thing. I still see it as part of this whole 'cynically honest' continuum though, which I hate.

How did we get onto food in this thread? Is there 'twee' food?
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Because twee is the defining aesthetic of bourgeois liberalism. It's the cultural logic of what Terry Eagleton describes here:

That things are very bad, by the way, is the kind of simple-minded claim that distinguishes radicals from liberal reformers, though not as it happens from some conservatives. Astonishingly, in a form of social life that is unable to live up even to its own very partial ideals, liberals, pragmatists and modernisers cling to their extraordinarily utopian delusion that there is nothing fundamentally wrong. Conservatives, by contrast, are quite right to see that there is something fundamentally wrong; it is just that they tend to be mistaken about what it is. The most blatantly naïve form of idealism is not socialism, but the belief that, given enough time, capitalism will feed the world. Just how long do you let such a view run before judging it discredited?
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In other words: safe, inoffensive, naively idealistic.
 
T

Trillhouse

Well-known member
Can nu-twee actually be political in itself? I thought It's about living in a delusional bubble, and there no room for harsh realities in the twee bubble.

That's part of why it's so appealing to advertisers. Who I think should take a lot of the blame for this shit. Here's a post from the Creative Review blog from 2007 chronicling the rise of twee in advertising http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2007/july/the-rise-of-the-twee and further discussion in 2009 http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/january/change-the-record in which it's claimed that twee has "died a death", shame it didn't turn out to be true. (the second one goes on to discuss music in advertising in general and is well worth reading)
 
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Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
sgn said:
Ukeleles
The word "ukelele"
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No, I'll give you hipster deployment of ukeleles sometimes (and sometimes it's just annoying but not actually twee), but you can't have George Formby or, er, Hawaii.

Vampire Weekend?
Sufjan Stevens?
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Don't know enough Sufjan Stevens to comment properly, but Vampire Weekend definitely aren't twee.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Slothrop said:
Hummingbird Bakery
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I just googled that, and got this:

hummingbird-bakery-millionth-cupcake.jpg


:eek:
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Sufjan's definitely not twee. Way too much darkness, genuine weirdness and genius in there - same as Belle and Sebastian. Twee has to be wilfully naive, surely, to be meaningful in any sense beyond anyone who's ever played an acoustic guitar delicately?

I kind of go with computerock's definition via Terry Eagleton (what book/article is that quote from, btw?), but then I also think 'twee' has too many connections with C86 etc, and we need a new word to define this awfulness.
 
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Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
baboon2004 said:
Sufjan's definitely not twee. Way too much darkness, genuine weirdness and genius in there - same as Belle and Sebastian. Twee has to be wilfully naive, surely, to be meaningful in any sense beyond anyone who's ever played an acoustic guitar delicately?
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B&S are almost definitively twee. Clever and occasionally dark as well, but certainly twee. If what we're talking about doesn't include Belle and Sebastian then "twee" is the wrong word for it.

Again, if we're going with the computer_rock / Eagleton definition then we need a new word because that's got bugger all to do with twee in any existing sense.
 
S

SecondLine

Well-known member
Trillhouse said:
Can nu-twee actually be political in itself? I thought It's about living in a delusional bubble, and there no room for harsh realities in the twee bubble.
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But stepping into the bubble is a political act because it involves denying that any bad stuff exists. That's a luxury that only people with a reasonable amount of privilege can afford. And by constructing a world full of pretty birdsong, social harmony etc. you are implicitly saying that any dissent is kind of invalid - it's an intrusion on a perfect world rather than a valid response to an imperfect one.

you could argue.

but obviously that's much broader than twee
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Yes, twee is definitely an escapist aesthetic.

Although arguably any form of art is escapist, insofar as it brings you up against a limitable, controllable representation of Bad Shit, rather than the Bad Shit itself and lets you feel better about yourself for having 'confronted' it without actually having to get too close to it...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
SecondLine said:
But stepping into the bubble is a political act because it involves denying that any bad stuff exists. That's a luxury that only people with a reasonable amount of privilege can afford.
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Is this worse than people who lead basically safe, comfortable lives getting a vicarious thrill out of listening to gritty urban music full of gun boasts and death threats?
 
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