Opening Riff

Please kill twee.

by Steven Wells

Belle and Sebastian have gone from being a freakish cancer on the pop body politic to its major influence. The default mode. They’re what all white American boys and girls want to be when they don’t grow up.

Twee—the vile abomination that started in the 1990s with overly precious and super-punchable British bands like the Pastels, Talulah Gosh and the Field Mice and reached its apogee with everything ever released on the execrable Sarah Records—has conquered everything.

Twee is everything pop music shouldn’t be—tuneless, sexless, self-satisfied, clever without being remotely witty, totally up its own ass, influenced by the Smiths, made by self-loving middle-class white people who think they’re being incredibly radical because they a) aren’t macho and b) dress like 7-year-olds in a way that manages to be creepy without ever being fun.

True to its ghostly white roots, the new wave of twee is surfed by smug underachieving pop-hating no-talents celebrating their own inadequacy with music so white it’s translucent. Take the Decemberists and Los Campesinos. And gut them with a rusty garden fork, please.

Pitchfork’s Nitsuh Abebe poked a finger through the soggy phenomenon with the following description of how twee took punk’s empowering DIY message and basically skullfucked it: “Undramatic kids saw an opportunity to make music as themselves, for themselves: regular middle-class white kids in plain clothes, not especially sexy, not exactly musically brilliant, and more often sad than angry.”

In short twee is a way to make dull, uninteresting and suburban people feel good about themselves. Just like the American electoral system.

Alternative music has been taken over wholesale by simpering bedwetters who think being safe and unremarkable is the stuff of dreams. And there’s no alternative to the alternative. The inadequates have taken the asylum.