Well, here goes; my pet-research into ‘TWEE’, in explanation of Roger Moore’s complaint against ‘The Future’. For those of my age bracket twee should already stand as a generic nucleus of recognisable elements manifest in film, fashion and music (by the osmosis of media-saturation, which tends to be more and more age-specific). I thought I’d have difficulty finding academic articles relating to the topic, that the most I’d find would be sardonic articles crucifying those whose identification with twee and similar sub-cultural phenomena are laughably transparent. However, semi-concerned articles emerged after a thorough googling, most of these chronicling the life and death (apparently) of twee, indie and hipster, the latter being inevitably related as the reigning sub-cultural identities of recent teen and tween generations. In fact, twee and indie are brethren under the umbrella of contemporary hipster, of which they are both off-shoots.
Firstly, there is indie; Jude Rogers of ‘The Observer’ and Mark Grief of ‘New York’ (2007, 2010) both agree that indie began in the mid to late eighties and carried on into the nineties as a collection of independently funded bands, making music external to the necessarily restricting standards of mass media. The most popular forms of first-wave indie were acoustic, genres like garage-rock and the legendary bloom of nineties grunge, preceding contemporary indie sub-categories of sunny-folk which, when screened through indie, is in essence twee. There was initially no singular encapsulating aesthetic or definition of indie, so diverse was indie’s first wave, unified only retroactively on the grounds of their purposive anti-commercial marginality. It was these anti-commercial notions which the music channelled that virally leavened ‘indie’ into a full-blown sub-culture, capturing a common leftist ache. In fact Grief (2010) cites the varying shades of hipster, the contemporary manifestation of the indie (between which there is a colourful history of shifting influences and micro-ideologies), as conglomerate hybrids of the Lefts most popular, and now empty signifiers (like feminism, black civil rights, the gay and lesbian community etc).
He furthermore states that contemporary indies/hipsters have exchanged the revolutionary core of these counter-cultures for their veneers in a will to social dominance. Thus in arbitrarily deriving its form from a loose history of counter-cultures, Grief concludes hipsterdom’s aims are to undermine an imagined majority or Other (the Other of social realities which participants do not themselves inhabit), and also that hipsterdom does this by assuming knowledge ‘a priori’ over the majority.
To explain, the ideological positioning of real minority groups actively combating the Other necessitates a reflexive presumption of superiority, that the isolation of the minority world-view from the wider cultural script is a detriment to the mainstream; or more simply, the minority knows something the majority doesn’t (hipster esotericism!). This then, is why within hipster circles fore-knowledge of new-bands and the increasing obscurity of these bands, is crucial to maintaining the hipster image.
It is not difficult to imagine just how indie and twee matured into hipsterdom, both having constructed an evil commercial Other against which to do battle and rabble-rouse.
But back to twee. Next to the evolution of the hipster twee seems to pale in significance. However, Greif also paints a picture of the ‘green indie’, a more peace-loving nature- oriented indie (modern hippy?) that in so closely resembling the twee aesthetic, we can safely assume is synonymous. Characteristics of the twee then include a predilection for folk music, and canvas apparel screen-printed with trees and furry critters, as well as tribal-wears such as feathered Native American Indian headpieces, coinciding with the hipster's facile appropriation of Leftist iconography (Grief, 2010). It is a valuation of the ‘child-like’, a preference for whimsy. It has also been described as ‘precious’. Returning to Grief (2010), exemplars of precious-indie and therefore twee film-making include nearly all the films of Wes Anderson, each oozing twee-quirk in its own right. These are The Royal Tenenbaums (a veritable ark of style-sense for twee-indies), The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox (‘twee’, and then some), and lesser known debuts Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. All considered, if Moore finds July’s twee aesthetic unpalatable, it could be stated his reason for which is a sense of alienation, an exclusivity of her style as accessible only to twee initiates.
He’s obviously not indie.
References
Mark, G. (2010). What was the hipster? Retrieved September 19, 2011 from
Rogers, J. (2007, July 8). Smells like indie spirit. The Observer, n/a, 10-11. Retrieved from
No comments:
Post a Comment