Taking Sides: Twee vs. Bubblegum

twee = dishonest

(haha i wrote 12-inch lizards first...)

Similarities: emphasis on melody, child-like outlook

Differences: Bubblegum also emphasises a danceable if basic beat, usually, and its lyrics tend to be more general (eg. broadly about love with no specifics) or silly. Twee tends to have more attention to detail in its lyrics - often tiny or whimsical details the audience might appreciate or identify with.

twee is almost always contrived in some way or heavy handed though the basic sentiment behind the lyrics may be true.

Bubblegum = CLASSIC

Twee = wanna be bubblegum with the SUCK turned all the way up

bubblegum is "hipper", ironic love 101. bubblegum is also a producer oriented product, perhaps pop in its purest uncut form, the band irrelevant or perhaps no more relevant than the speaker or the microphones or whatever knobs need turning to produce the candy for consumption. even the bubblegum acts that were "real", many times weren't like Ohio Express, the actual band forced to tour while the session musicians got to work.

both bubblegum and twee or self consciously trying to seek some sort of naivete. one simplely has the pretense of "art", while the other does not.

(jonathan king is a more complex semi-pathological example, because i think the layers of self-loathing actually did manifest as a kind of deliberately jarring manifest cynicism: you sometimes wonder if he wasn't trying to make records so shamelessly "manufactured" that EVERYONE hated them, and then when they charted, proving to himself how worthless everything was, especially himself... the weird thing is, king doesn't seem to attract "ironic"-style support...)

(unless you mean joe meek is another jonathan king, in which case, no i don't think so... )

i don't think meek's self-hatred — if he did hate himself, which i guess he maybe did, seeing as he shot himself — feeds into his records at ALL

It's one of those things that I *know* what the difference is, but I have an incredibly hard time articulating it. (Even when I don't have 5 or 6 white russians in me)

Many of the things that I accuse "twee" bands of, I'm guilty of myself: shameless retro-homage, deliberately simple or "childlike" approach to melody and subject, etc. These are all Bubblegum elements. Yet what offends me in indie-pop time and time again is the willful incompetence. Bands who play with punk indifference to their craft because they *want* to, not because they *have* to, and that offends me.

Reminds me of dichotomy I read once a long time ago:

Pete Townsend, sitting in a plush hotel room, writing "My Generation" and trying to make it sound like it was written in a garage.

Debbie Gibson writing (god, what was DG's hit? can't remember...) in a garage, and trying to make it sound like it belonged in a plush, four star hotel.

In this analogy, the former is Twee, the latter is Bubblegum.

I wz thinking of including the Dolls in my list, but like you maybe bridle at filing the Shangri-Las under "bubblegum", at least w/o caveat. On the sleevenotes to my copy of the Shangri-Las grst hits — a mid-70s compilation — it says that Pete Townshend says that "Past Present Future" is the greatest record ever made, so maybe by the apparent consensus defn of twee on this thread (supposedly self-conscious rockworld recreation of supposedly un-self-conscious pop-manufacture of an earlier era) Kate ist k-korrekt!

Also I hate when people bring "honesty/dishonesty" into it. It seems about as stupid as "cred."

twee avoids the stigma of musicianship by depending on legions of bedroom pop bands writing one or two utterly classic songs apiece through sheer luck and numbers. bubblegum is completely the opposite. it uses legions of musicians and channels them into a small number of bands because it's more profitable.

bubblegum is outside the dimensions of rock and twee because the instigators of bubblegum are anonymous and have no interest in sincerity. it doesn't matter at all... bubblegum is songs about girls in het love written by old gay men who only cared about money. you can like it but if it moves you it's an accident, like a sunset with clouds that look like jesus.

twee is the highest form of modern rebellion because it rejects irony, leaving it defenseless. rock always embraces irony, because it is not able to think and needs a defense that can be employed without having to think (i was just kidding, i didn't mean it). this is the epitome of wimpiness. bubblegum only cares about rebellion or irony if it can sell more product.

you can not ever discern between twee and bubblegum based on sound. if not being able to play instruments is profitable, bubblegum will do it. sometimes a twee band has members who can play instruments.

haha, simon says.

(I think I also said on the other thread that indiepop is very much "lifestyle music," which I think is an aspect that's worth dealing with: it almost immediately developed its own social world whose values rejected and combined those of rock vs. pop in basically the same way as the music. Both musically and aesthetically, it found this back-end connection point: sort of like how mid-period Cure took gloom and desperation to this point where it became desperately giddy pop again, like that connection between positive and negative infinity on a number line, indiepop took punk and pop back around until the dichotomies collapsed and it became this bizzare and really striking everything-and-nothing endpoint.)

Also Jack: the Field Mice are a very poor example of something that lacks "sophisticated sheen" -- in fact the whole thing about Sarah and UK indiepop in general was that a lot of the records were actually meant to sound somewhat slick. ("Let's Kiss and Make Up" versus "Indian Summer.")

And when it was self-conscious, on some level this stuff came across as a big dare and a big fuck-you. I like this in music, conceptually speaking: I like that after the attitudinal posturing of punk people could play cute little pop songs that look you in the eye and say "yeah, we know what you think," and in doing so just sort of revel in the glory of bashing out everything basically pleasant about pop songwriting that we're all trained by the time we're 12 is supposed to be the pinnacle of lameness to enjoy.

(NB I will probably take this all back tomorrow.)

i like the idea of beat happening as a conceptual gesture. i'd rather have my skin stripped by beavers before i ever had to listen to them. and i think their fallout is deadly.

This is the funniest thing I have read on ILM for a long time.

Personally, it was never the flowers/kittens aspect of "twee" that grabbed me as much as the catchy melodies and DIY-style playing and production. I still have a very high tolerance for this stuff, even though most people I know have gone back to hating it again...

twee - cute

I take twee any day.