Don’t Call Them Twee Bro!

… But don’t call them Indie Sleaze or Hyperclash or Electroclash Revival or Indietronica or Bloghouse either …

Jesse Carpenter has some words for the taxonomical sleazebags …

At the concert you see a guy wearing a D&G shirt: standing for Deleuze and Guattari, or maybe Drain and Gang? You can’t see the stage, not that it matters, because a stupid twink in a different stupid shirt that was ironic but now is actually sincere — he/they really does want to “milk Reagan ‘till it trickles down” –– is standing in front of you, and you notice the patchwork tattoos through the once-long sleeve t-shirt in desperate need of patching, and it looks like that deftones shirt from Reels, with the Ecco ‘e’ and the Dean Blunt ‘s’ or whatever, and you think, Ha, Indie Sleeves.

While waiting for a drop that won’t come, you multiply the number of leg warmers you can see in a 10m radius with the visual estimate of the median BMI at the DIY venue you calculated, and you end up at a square number, which may’ve concerned you, had you not been interrupted by someone asking for a cig and then for a lighter and then not talking to you at all. You think that your leopard print #ug-g boots are out of fashion, and wonder how we all got here; why everyone, including Ear, wants to sound like Ear, and how there are at least 6 names for a genre that only maybe exists?

I’m not sure what’s twee about a laptop really, but maybe I just organise my desktop poorly. I think if I had to be in charge I would call it tweedm because I like the way that tweedm sounds and looks, and it doesn’t seem like naming a genre needs to make sense or be accurate in any way … it’s about how you abUse it or whatever Wittgenstein said. Anyway, my twitter drafts are clogged with expletives addressed to Pitchfork for that Hyperclash article that I don’t dare send, for my sensitive ass is scared of blogosphere-bloghouse-blogcourse. I like the music though. I like it a lot. A name for a genre can be good, I think, especially as it blows up and up and up, but the splintering can be a bit of a pain. I’ve had several almost-conversations about music where I or they say “You know, people who kind of sound like Bassvictim but mostly ‘Forever’ and only a little bit like ‘Basspunk’; like Worldpeace DMT but not Femcels but maybe Femcels too”, and someone chimes in ohhh you like electroclash revival and I or they say sure and someone else says actually thats bloghouse and sometimes a brief thought of blowing my brains out all over their archive Shein and maybe changing the trajectory of their life, but more likely just doing damage to their depop/vinted/grailed resell sidehustle, crosses my mind. 

someone chimes in, “ohhh you like electroclash revival” and I, or they, say “sure” and someone else says, “actually thats bloghouse”, and a brief thought of blowing my brains out all over their archive Shein and maybe changing the trajectory of their life (but more likely just doing damage to their depop/vinted/grailed resell sidehustle) crosses my mind. 

Still, it doesn’t feel like we are talking past each other. Some things might not need names, especially because lots of people like this music now. Every night I say Thank You Internet, the more the merrier, and even though I got here the old fashioned way –– dating someone cooler than me –– the internet’s always a good back up, and maybe more accessible, as while love takes miles it doesn’t travel too well over fibre optics. It seems that digital technologies have increased class mobility, at least in music listening, and maybe even saved the prole-chud sonic under class, as the spectre of niche haunts the fyp. But what is this music? What is the New Sound, whatever you want to call it?

There are some problems with current taxonomies. For one, I don’t know if the EDM revival stuff really fits. I wouldn’t call whatever Ninajirachi wants to do to her computer “twee”, but maybe I’m just closeminded. But everything is interlinked: Nina and Frost Children remix each other, and Frost features on a Babymorocco song with The Femcels, who are often produced by Ike Clateman of Bassvictim, and Ike just remixed Daine’s PQC, who features on Ninajirachi’s It’s You –– you could probably make lovely snakeskin boots from this ouroboros. There isn’t really a way to draw a hard line, and the (for lack of a better word) twee side of things is constantly in dialogue with the EDM side. My original plan was to draw a big mind map, like a high schooler trying to write an essay, with everyone whom I feel is adjacent to this and draw the little lines between them, but I’m worried it would end up looking less like a mind map and more like a graph of Kn or a clump of spaghetti. 

you could probably make lovely snakeskins boots from this [edm revival] ouroboros.

A month or so ago I saw 300Skullsandcounting, and halfway through his set he went chatting on the mic, “People keep saying my music is twee. Is this fucking twee to you?,” before launching into full screamo vocals, I mean real Orchid or Febuary style, just with EDM and gabber kicks and synths you get by doing twisted and mysterious things to Serum, to a pit of writhing 3mmc’d-2steppers. No, decidedly not twee. But he’s lumped with this sound, and sometimes maybe falls into it (see the start/end of ‘Not My Bedroom*’), and others are for sure twee. Rowan and Gabrielle of Femcel fame dress like Jess if New Girl was filmed in a black mould Annandale terrace (Shout out PUFF). Fcukers are also often grouped in with this, but their new album was just straight house music, and also was super underwhelming (perhaps a causal relation?), but the lesson learned is that the oft discussed boy/girl electronic duo of woman singing and man djing is not necessarily twee.

I think Pitchfork writers and co. should pick up Naming and Necessity, because if you want to try and fit, say, Frost Children and the sound chalk makes in the same box, this has gotta be a water is h2o sitch where some sort of empirical investigation is necessary in determining the truth (no, not The Truth). They actually asked me to do it, but I was busy with the grant proposal for my forthcoming non-fiction work, A Genealogy of Sleaze. It was denied, of course, by whichever private equity firm runs Perfectly Imperfect. They claimed I “overlooked significant contributions to the field” i.e., dorks like The Dare, but really I think they took offence to my objections to Snow Strippers, who should maybe stop performing their song Genocide at Boiler Rooms. I guess the issue is that the genre naming is flattening, and that the sounds are too different even if everyone is rocking the same glassy post covid post xandemic thousand yard sale stare.

whichever private equity firm runs perfectly imperfect claimed “I overlooked significant contributions to the field,” i.e., dorks like The Dare, but really I think they took offence to my objections to Snow Strippers, who should maybe stop performing their song Genocide at Boiler Rooms.

That’s not to say that I don’t love this kind of music, because I really do. It’s great in my bedroom or at a gig, and there is something really special about how halfway it is between electric and acoustic. Something that could maybe be considered characteristic is a play between lightness and heaviness, where the vocals and snares are really breathy to let the bass and synths take up space to screech and scream. This comes through in the structure as well, where phrases and even songs end and begin at points you wouldn’t expect, especially for dance music which can be quite firm on its 16 or 32 bar patterns of intro, build up, drop, repeat. It’s also pretty rare to hear a full beat based on a sample; rather it’s either used a little bit like it is in dariacore but just way more lowkey, or you get crazy long interpolations that basically end up as remixes, like The Cyclone with ‘Die Young and Jeans’, or Suzy Sheer’s Adrienne Lenker cover in ‘Chain’. The songs are usually short too: Sacred Holes’ EP Genuine Uppers Life is the best eight minutes of music I’ve heard in a long time, and it’s so good I often queue it five times to make it into a full 40 minute-long album, not that I would really recommend that, because as an album it becomes a little bloated and repetitive.

in the special [space] halfway between electric and acoustic, the vocals and snares are really breathy to let the bass and synths take up space to screech and scream.

What is clear to me is that I think this sound is going to get bigger and bigger, and eventually change into something new and fresh when the Crystal Castles well has truly run dry and we get tired of the polishedly unpolished vertical video made to be cut up into screenshots for fakemink moodboards. For now I think maybe it’s better not to name genres like this, because I don’t know who it really serves other than journalists and suits in the industry –– we all sort of know what music that sounds like this is; we can talk about it; we don’t need the autogenerated Spotify playlist with a name like foidtronica or chatgptwee. For now, we have really beautiful and tender music, that you can dance fuck cook sing read shower walk to. Maybe only pick one or two of those at a time, but make sure to try all at least once.