Twee : The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion and Film (9780062213051)

by Spitz, Marc

  N.M.E. and Melody Maker, the only two big print music weeklies around, went batty for everything about this sound, and soon a generation of British bands, the Libertines the most talented among them, were adopting the druggy downtown style themselves. Punk was back, and then, within eighteen months, it was over again, brought down just as it had been before by hype, drugs, power struggles, and burnout. Just as had happened with Punk heroes in the late ’70s, there were thousands of kids worldwide who liked the Strokes fine but could never dress like them and were intimidated by their seemingly effortless urban cool. The Strokes’ white belts would soon join the safety pin in the museum, and a gentler, more sensitive strain of Twee Tribe–friendly rock would become even more commercially valuable, and a major cultural force. Many of these bands—the Shins, the Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie and its offshoot the Postal Service, Rilo Kiley, Sufjan Stevens, and Beirut—predated the Strokes or were their contemporaries. The problem was that these bands were hopelessly unhip. Then, when uncool became cool and white belt hipster fatigue set in, as it inevitably would, they seized their chance. They were post-hip superstars. There was a book released in the UK in 1986 called Like Punk Never Happened that described the shift from Punk—lean, mean, three-chord rock and roll—to cuddly, marketable stars like Boy George and George Michael. By 2004 it seemed that the same thing was happening. It was as if the Strokes never existed.

  After two stellar albums (Room on Fire and Is This It), this fab five decided, like their ’90s heroes in Pearl Jam did, to retreat some, exhausted and over it. Some got married and had kids. Others went down drug holes and came out the other side, but they would never be the same band again. Meanwhile Jack White became more or less his own man, following his unshakable vision and the occasional band. Into the rock void came the Twee soundtrack and a series of bedroom-geek-approved, Pitchfork-endorsed bands that were, almost uniformly, more gentle, thoughtful, and cuddly. They wore no leather, but rather neat sweaters (Vampire Weekend). They played old-timey instruments like the French horn, the cornet, and the accordion (Beirut). Some were almost inevitably Canadian (Arcade Fire), but most came, or at least migrated to, Brooklyn, rehearsing in an old pencil factory by the river in Williamsburg and releasing music directly to the fans who prized them as their imaginary friends.

  Almost none of these bands were inferior to the Strokes. Many of them, Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire certainly, proved even more consistently great. It’s just that if you ran into them in a dark alley, you would not feel a chill up your spine and reach into your pocket to protect your wallet. It was, frankly, disorienting for those who covered the scene, as I did at the time. One minute I was up all night, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon with the Strokes, and the next I was in the basement of an old social club somewhere in Brooklyn, discussing stamp collecting and bird-watching with a clean-cut, dead-sober Sufjan Stevens. “I’ve got a Peterson Guide [for bird-watching] and all that stuff,” Stevens told me excitedly. When I ventured into Brooklyn to find Zach Condon, who traveled Old Europe collecting sounds and instruments and then recorded his first albums in his New Mexico bedroom under the moniker Beirut, I could barely find his walk-up, in the middle of what was then a Hasidic Jewish enclave far off the Bedford Avenue strip. It felt like being in Poland or Prague. “It’s a different city,” Condon said of Brooklyn in 2006. “You can only see the rooftops of Manhattan, and that’s about it. I actually get frustrated there. It’s too much like Disneyland. I’m really affected by the space I’m around. I’m super sensitive to aesthetics.” Brooklyn was proving a blank slate where musicians like Condon could build their own universe as they envisioned it, a kind of new “Old New York” that suited their romantic notions and didn’t have the peer pressure and the coked-up pace of Manhattan. Much of the music shared the tempo.

  “So much of it does not rock. Not in any sense,” says Simon Reynolds. “One of its hallmarks is other instrumentation. The guitar does not function as the dominant instrument anymore. It’s what depresses me slightly about it, that it’s so tightly linked to class now. College-type people listen to it. The fact that it’s covered by NPR basically seems to indicate that it’s become a sort of class marker.”

  Danger was being phased out in stand-up comedy as well, in favor of a Twee boyishness—or, in the case of Kristen Schaal and Sarah Silverman, acid-tongued girlishness. Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin—no longer Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, John Belushi, George Carlin, or Sam Kinison (all druggy, edgy, and doomed to rides either short or extremely bumpy)—seemed to be the new heroes. Kaufman, an oddball from an upper-middle-class Long Island family, debuted in the autumn of ’75 on the inaugural season of NBC’s late-night sketch comedy Saturday Night Live and became yet another eventual Twee hero.

  His breakthrough act, the one that made him nationally famous, was honed in the comedy clubs of New York and Hollywood. It found him standing nervously alongside a mounted turntable as it played the theme to Mighty Mouse. He’d twitch and wait for the chorus—“Here I come to save the day!”—lip-synching with an almost camp fervor for a few brief moments before falling back into his timid stance. And thus was introduced an “Is this real or a put-on?” sense of enjoyable paranoia to popular culture. Kaufman only enhanced this with powder-keg appearances on The Tonight Show and, most famously, Late Night with David Letterman. Kaufman, like Richman, could push and push, singing “Old MacDonald” (“With a moo, moo, here and a moo, moo, there . . .”) until he broke the crowd and had them. “There are no punch lines to anything I do,” he once said. Anyone waiting for the wink would wait forever.

  In Girls, Ray (actor Alex Karpovsky) owns almost nothing of value but a signed cutout of the late comedian. Kaufman and very early Steve Martin made stand-up comedy safe for the young at heart. In order to be a popular stand-up during this period, once Woody Allen vacated the art form for film, you had to be raunchy and manly: Richard Pryor, George Carlin. The only other alternatives were the buttoned-down, classy observers with their bow ties and dry, radio-announcer deliveries. Kaufman and early Martin (iconic prop arrow through his head) were deeply in touch with their childhoods. Martin’s “Happy Feet” routine was as much a whimsical notion as Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse bit. He’d stop a serious monologue with the warning, “Uh-oh, I’m getting . . . happy feet,” then break into a goofball soft-shoe, his hands flailing wildly, before returning to the staid banter. These were boys in men’s suits doing humor that was not too far from the schoolyard, whereas someone like Richard Pryor was a grown man, courting and wrestling with darkness.

  “If you showed one hundred people a clip of Andy Kaufman doing a character or doing the bit with the phonograph, the last thing that any person you showed it to would say was, ‘That’s a man!’” says veteran stand-up comedy manager Barry Katz today. “If you saw Steve Martin doing ‘Happy Feet’ in an era he was in, or bunny ears, if you showed a hundred people that clip, they would not say, ‘That’s a man!’” Kaufman and Martin would both adapt their popular stand-up acts to television and became even more famous as the masses somehow accepted their inherent strangeness and precociousness, their lack of the conventional setup-and-punch-line structure. They were dangerous and unpredictable, of a piece with Punk and post-Punk but with a boyish sweetness and cleverness they wore very much on their sleeves.

  Kaufman seemed to pour all of his residual darkness into a character named Tony Clifton, a vulgar lounge singer in the Vegas-Sinatra mode. Clifton, who drank, smoked, whored, and burned bridges, seemed to exist so that the painfully awkward Andy Kaufman could remain and take his audience out for milk and cookies after a performance at New York’s revered Carnegie Hall. Martin became a movie star, and in underrated films like Pennies from Heaven and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid backed away from his stand-up persona. Even his goofball comedies would have small grace moments, as in The Jerk, which briefly suspends the broad comedy to find Martin strolling seaside, plucking a ukulele, and harmonizing on “Tonight You Belong to Me” with paramour Berna
dette Peters. It’s a serious and highly romantic moment, until Peters produces a cornet from nowhere and takes a solo.

  Still, for all their shunning of reality, without both Twee comedy pioneers, there would be no Indie strain of the comedy sect today. Bill Hicks and Mitch Hedberg, perhaps the last of the progeny of Carlin and Pryor, ceded the stage to the likes of doughy, nonthreatening stars like Mike Birbiglia, who, in his oxford shirt, is more of a child of monologist Spalding Gray. Demetri Martin, Kristen Schaal, and even the relative veteran Sarah Silverman can be boyish or girlish and powerful in part because of the context we can now place them in. They will never fill arenas like Dane Cook or Kevin Hart, and may always play the best friend or the weird neighbor on TV shows (whereas Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman were leads), but they are free to be their occasionally and sometimes gleefully stunted selves and prosper.

  TV too backed off the darkness of Twin Peaks in favor of a new gentleness that seemed to speak to the new generation directly, if not to the masses. MTV, after the alternative revolution, continued to phase out music videos in favor of event programming geared toward the new Internet-savvy audience. It picked up the soon-to-be-canceled My So-Called Life from ABC in 1995 and reran nineteen episodes, introducing the low-rated series to a wide audience. Angela Chase, played by a teenaged Clare Danes, is on the cusp of adulthood (as represented by her neurotic parents) and at a social crossroads at her high school. (Her goony-sweet next-door neighbor Brian Krakow is going nowhere socially but is dependable. The handsome-but-vacant Jordan Catalano is sexy but unaccountable.) She’s not a popular kid, but not a loser either. It’s a sophisticated portrayal of an identity crisis set to the new platinum Indie rock. She spends much of the groundbreaking show frowning furrows in her forehead, aghast at the enormity of it all. Will she ever get to college, or will the Buffalo Tom concert have to suffice? Here were the first teenagers ever portrayed in pop culture, to deliver the message: “We know this system is insane.”

  “I think it was the first TV show to deal with adolescence in a realistic and respectful way,” says Devon Gummersall, who plays the hapless, kinky-haired Brian Krakow, a kind of teenage saint of unrequited love. “It’s really difficult for writers who are in their thirties or forties to do justice to the teenage years—we all have a natural selective memory.” MTV got it and played My So-Called Life constantly. “MTV established it in a lot of ways,” says Gummersall. “They played it for five years. They overplayed those nineteen episodes incessantly. It was great; that was where we became a cult show—that’s where it started to become a lasting thing in the public consciousness.”

  The animated Daria, which premiered in 1997, featured a protagonist like Clare Dane’s Angela Chase, another questioning loser hero. Her sister, Quinn, is a golden girl. Her mother is a distracted businesswoman. Daria is mortified by them both: “I don’t have low self-esteem,” she says, “I have low esteem for everyone else.” In 1999, Freaks and Geeks offered a portrait of high school in the early 1980s that sated the desire for all things Reagan-era with even more satisfying detail, as it was staffed by people who were actually in high school in the early 1980s: creator Paul Feig, executive producer Judd Apatow, and writers like Mike White. The story of Lindsay Weir, her little brother Sam, and their high school experience mines some of the terrain covered in My So-Called Life. Lindsay is a mathlete and a geek, but she’s also a secret rebel, drawn to the freaks, who smoke pot and listen to Rush and Styx in the parking lot. Her parents are nuts (SCTV’s Joe Flaherty and Becky Ann Baker, who would go on to play Hannah Horvath’s mother on Girls). Her teachers are worse.

  The show combines elements of My So-Called Life’s drama and sensitivity with a healthy sense of classic ’70s and ’80s stand-up humor. When both elements came together, as they did on the classic late-season episode “The Little Things”—when Seth Rogen’s Ken learns that his new girlfriend, Amy, was born with both male and female reproductive organs and was made female by her doctors—it set a template for the kind of gross-out comedies with hearts of gold that would be the new Apatow blockbusters of the twenty-first century: The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Bridesmaids.

  Freaks and Geeks lasted only one season, and, like the earlier show, amassed a cult, quote-spewing following. It was an expensive show to produce, jam-packed with costly retro pop and New Wave (its theme is Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ “Bad Reputation”), and the authenticity that did it in was part of its appeal.

  Stars Hollow, the fictional town in Connecticut that is the setting for Gilmore Girls, is a kind of snowy Narnia where there’s no violent crime—another sweet universe, not unlike the burgeoning Kind Brooklyn. The only nuisances there are trolling troubadours like Grant Lee Phillips. Stars Hollow was a safe little corner of the world for Gen Twee.

  Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and first aired in 2000, Gilmore Girls is Twee fantasy. It asks, “What if my daughter really was my best friend?” The rift between parents and children, endemic to all youth-oriented popular entertainment, is finally erased. We know it’s fantasy because mother Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and daughter Rory (Alexis Bleidel) consume nothing but pizza, hamburgers, and black coffee but remain perfectly trim. And yet the fantasy is almost never questioned because reality, increasingly harsh on the outside, has no place in Stars Hollow. When it does intrude, everyone learns from it.

  Lorelai was pregnant at sixteen, “the scandal girl.” Her life upended, to the chagrin of her wealthy and standing-conscious parents, she didn’t go off to college and instead left home and pledged her life to raising the child (also named Lorelai but known to all as Rory) the right way. Lorelai has character. She’s a flake, but her sacrifice gives her grace. Lorelai is also, crucially, raising her daughter idealistically. She is the parent all Brooklandians want to be. Gilmore Girls is all about references: Dawn Powell, Sid Vicious, Ruth Gordon, Judy Blume, Slint, Steely Dan, Artie Shaw, Black Sabbath—you have to be quick to process them all, and Sherman-Palladino doesn’t wait for you.

  “There’s a preponderance of secret language,” says Chris Eigeman, who played Lorelai’s love interest, Digger Stiles. When the show was released on DVD, it came with a glossary. It’s the first great show of the search-engine age.

  And then there was Charlie, the hero of Steven Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Released in ’99 on the MTV Books imprint, the novel would sell over a million copies. Charlie is a lonely kid whose best friend recently committed suicide. He’s haunted by the death of his aunt Helen, and upon transferring to a new school isn’t expecting more than the usual pain and tension. But he makes friends with a crew of like-minded misfits who are proud of their outsider status, even revel in it. It defines them, and suddenly he feels warm and “infinite.” Perks is a leap forward, part of the next step beyond Nirvana’s alterative revolution. “When you can buy flannel shirts at the Gap, they stop being the flannel shirts that we fell in love with in 1990,” says Chbosky. “Style, substance, music, art, movies, and television never stand still. Invariably what happens is those kids that need to be iconoclast and need to be a step away, they’re going to find the next thing because they’re the trendsetters and they’re the trailblazers and it’s never been different.”

  Instead of moving forward into a new world of technology, many teens of this generation simply went backward, Jack White–like, and invested in things of permanence. The era of vinyl records being sold in Urban Outfitters begins here.

  “An LP is not going to be updated,” Chbosky says. “It’s physically healthy. It feels grounded and trustworthy. You can’t put it on a phone. You can’t delete it. In a modern world where everything is portable, there’s something lovely about having something that’s grounded.”

  The notion of books and records as friends is treated reverently in 2004’s Garden State, written and directed by Zach Braff. Braff was, at the time, the star of a fairly mainstream sitcom, Scrubs. The show had its own devoted following and a madcap sense of humor, but few could have pr
edicted the notes Braff would hit with his debut film, or how it would alter the lives and careers of once comfortably small Indie rockers. Mainstream Hollywood came to them, as the East Coast advertising world and MTV had already done. It took a bit longer, but the conflicts were eternal.

  Twee’s biggest overground moment, however, was not concocted in MTV’s Times Square conference rooms. It seemed to come out of nowhere, a long-circulated, potential vanity project from a TV actor. Braff had been slowly circulating a script set in his hometown of Orange, New Jersey, for years. The film was about a troubled young man who returns home for his mother’s funeral. It was a charming enough script to attract major movie stars, like Natalie Portman, then appearing in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, as well as respected, young independent film actors like Peter Sarsgaard. Produced by Danny DeVito, it was still an under-the-radar affair.

  “We’d meet up at Thirty-third Street,” says Armando Riesco, who appears in the film as Jessie, an improbable overnight millionaire thanks to his invention of “silent Velcro.” “And a van would take us out to New Jersey. I got the sense that people believed in this film strongly. You don’t get Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard on board because they’re your friends.”

  Like The Graduate, its most obvious predecessor, the film opens on an airplane and is driven from start to finish by its evocative soundtrack (also featuring Simon and Garfunkel). The film’s most iconic scene takes place in a doctor’s office. Andrew Largeman, played by Braff, is back in his New Jersey hometown from Los Angeles, where he’s a struggling actor and waiter. His mother, who drowned in the bath, had been crippled in an accident that Largeman blames himself for. Complaining of headaches, he goes to a doctor recommended by his aloof shrink father, played by Ian Holm. Waiting in the office, he encounters Natalie Portman’s Sam, in jeans and a sweater with big retro-style headphones encircling her head. They chat and he casually asks what she’s listening to.