Compare the Market
The pinnacle of insurance comparison advertising, they have amusing, well-produced adverts featuring a meerkat upset by people confusing the words "market" and "meerkat" and accidentally alighting on his dating site "compare the meerkat.com". These adverts are copied from American commercials for GEICO, an insurance company, which for 10 years have featured a gecko in a similar case of confusion. Despite this lack of originality, the quality of the meerkat adverts is striking, particularly a recent recreation of the "Battle of Fearlessness" in which the meerkats were driven out of their homeland. The animals have become cult favourites, with rumours of lead meerkat Aleksandr Orlov releasing a single and a range of merchandise on sale.
Ad quality 9/10 (gorgeous production values, humour, cute fake animals)
Ad memorability 9/10 (see above)
Useful information about product 2/10 (they compare something?)
Spin-off potential 9/10 (only docked a point for the failure of Orlov's pop career)
Total 29/40
Go Compare
One of the best ways to get a new business's name in the costomers' mind is to be as annoying as possible. This is certainly the case of the Go Compare jingle, which features Welsh tenor Wynne Evans playing faux-Italian opera singer Gio Compario, who pops up in strange situations with his enormous fake moustache to sing his "Go Compare" song extolling the virtues of the insurance company. In some way, this recalls woman-only insurance company Sheila's Wheels which hit the scene a few years ago with a memorable song performed by three 60s-style singers in pink dresses. It is uncertain whether Evans will follow the Sheilas into a failed pop career with Pete Waterman. He has played Alfredo in La Boheme for ENO and many other roles for different companies, while frequently singing before Welsh rugby games (much as Russell Watson has done for England), so unless there is a severe reaction against his ad appearances, his career seems assured.
Ad quality 5/10 (well-made, just intensely annoying)
Ad memorability 10/10 (Go compare! Go Compare!)
Useful information about product 3/10 (They do put the words of the song on-screen so you can read about the cheaper insurance)
Spin-off potential 4/10 (good for Evans, but unlikely to see the character go on)
Total 22/40
Money Supermarket
The other most striking advertiser in the past year is moneysupermarket.com. They have enlisted Anglo-Iranian comedian Omid Djalili, a rising star of British television, to give an ethnically stereotyped performance of a middle-easterner skilled at haggling. In the adverts he berates members of the public for accepting overpriced insurance quotes and tells them if they're not prepared to bargain the price down, they should get to his website. The ads are cheaper and less impressive than Compare the Market or Go Compare but have a more coherent message.
Ad quality 3/10 (a certain cheapness, dependence on stereotypes, Djalili confuses shouting a lot for being funny)
Ad memorability 4/10 (fat bloke shouting is not original and the product name isn't really integrated)
Useful information about product 3/10 (they save you money, right?)
Spin-off potential 7/10 (possibly some kind of consumer show for Omid?)
Total 17/40
Confused.com
The most established company in the insurance comparison market is also the one to promote itself on the quality of its product rather than its wackiness; its ads feature members of the public enthusing about the ease of use of its website, which apparently allows you to easily customise your search. Competitors offer similar products, but Confused.com is the only one to rely on a low-key explanation of its merits. On the other hand, its name is rather more memorable than the others.
Ad quality 3/10 (talking heads are the last refuge of the desperate "creative")
Ad memorability 5/10 (apparently lots of people like Confused.com - some might even look like your annoying colleague or neighbour)
Useful information about product 6/10 (it actually shows the webpage and explains how you can select things)
Spin-off potential 1/10 (maybe they'll find a future cult star, like that guy from the mobile phone advert who wanted to start a band)
Total 15/40
uSwitch
This brand initially started with comparisons of gas and electricity suppliers at a time when the energy market was becoming increasingly competitive and fragmented. As another old player, they also offer a less in-your-face experience. The latest round of commercials feature a man and a woman in smart-casual fashions stepping into a computer screen to see what is on offer; it may be inspired by the Matrix, but not in a sexy or violent way. It will be interesting to see whether uSwitch, as a long-time player, can hold on to their market share.
Ad quality 3/10 (bland)
Ad memorability 4/10 (bland)
Useful information about product 4/10 (you can compare prices apparently!)
Spin-off potential 2/10 (the couple could be trapped inside their PC in some kind of Tron/Matrix thing, with added romantic comedy potential, but it's unlikely)
Total 13/40
The winner, unsurprisingly, is the meerkat.
All these companies have a similar business model; they act like insurance brokers or financial advisors in a bygone age, pointing people towards a policy and taking commission. It's worth noting that some insurance companies are refusing to appear on price comparison websites. The reason is not clear; it may be that for a large brand it is cheaper to appeal directly rather than pay commission, or it may be because they don't want their prices compared (Ryanair took legal action to prevent their prices appearing on price comparison websites, not to save their commission but perhaps because once you add on their additional fees their product is far less competitive than the headline price they themselves quote).
Insurance companies Aviva and Direct Line each boast of cutting out the middle-man in their commercials. Aviva have amusing ads starring comic actor Paul Whitehouse (The Fast Show) in a variety of heavily disguised roles. Direct Line have loud and annoying commercials featuring the voices of Stephen Fry and Paul Merton. Fry in particular has appeared in a series of terrible commercials (previously for Twinings) but perhaps his pursuit of a quick buck is supposed to subliminally encourage the audience to pursue the best deal.
But which is the best comparison service? Consumer ratings site dooyou.co.uk gives Confused.com 5/5 on a large number of reviews. Based on a far smaller number of reviews, Go Compare.com and uSwitch get 5/5, Money Supermarket 4/5, and Compare the Market 3/5. With many of these sites there is bias due to people being more likely to report bad esperiences, and alternative site reviewcentre.com gives almost everyone poor reviews, with Go Compare coming out best.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend's Too Stupid To Know About: the undying spirit of twee
Although rock music has for 55 years been the sound of rebellion, from Elvis and Bill Haley through punk and grunge, many people notice that it's not very rebellious at all. It repeats the same violent, masculine, destructive principles of society as a whole - rockers hold their guitar like a machine gun (and the mic like a pistol or penis). But what if you had a musical genre that privileged weakness, inaction, observation, sexual uncertainty, childishness, and innocence? For nearly 30 years that genre has been twee, the greatest and longest-lasting underground pop movement since the invention of rock and roll.
The godfather of twee was Dan Treacy of the Television Personalities. The band was born out of the late 70s punk scene, its name taking a mocking view of celebrity that was part of punk's desire to start a new and different version of entertainment or art (similarly the lead singer of the Adverts called himself TV Smith). Initially the TVPs made a name with raw-sounding recordings that satirised the music scene in songs such as Part-Time Punks ("They pay 5p on the buses and they never use toothpaste but they still got £2.50 to go and see the Clash tonight"). Co-founder Edward Ball went on to a varied career, with the Times, Teenage Filmstars, the Boo Radleys and solo projects, while Treacy has kept the band going on and off to the present, with album A Memory Is Better Than Nothing released in 2010.
Following their debut single "14th Floor" (1978) and a couple of punky EPs, the TVPs' sound matured for their first truly great song, and their first truly twee. Released as a single in 1980, Smashing Time celebrated a day that Treacy spent taking his cousin on a tour of London. It affectionately mocks some parts of the city, praises others, and overall sums up the joy, excitement, and nervousness of a provincial person visiting the big city: "we were scared in the London Dungeon, it's silly I know, and we were both slightly embarrassed in Soho ... and she thought it was really good and so did I."
This was followed by the album ...And Don't The Kids Just Love It (1981), kicking off a sequence of great releases in the first half of the 1980s. Lyrically Treacy varied from aching love songs like "Someone To Spend My Life With" (which makes twee-ancestor Jonathan Richman's "Girlfriend" seem hard-hearted) to the brooding "How I Learned To Love the Bomb", a slice of mid-80s nuclear paranoia pop to stand alongside Frankie's "Two Tribes" or Nena's "99 Balloons". At times he overreached himself, as with the over-the-top psychodrama "Back To Vietnam", but the best of his songs presented an overwhelming romanticism, sometimes childlike, sometimes hard-fought or snatched against the odds from despair.
Despite coming up through the punk scene, Treacy's influences were quite different. Rather than the Ramones or Sex Pistols he was more interested in 1960s British pop and psychedelia; as well as a musical influence on tracks such as "The Dream Inspires" and "King and Country", this can be seen in lyrically in songs like "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives". Treacy revered Syd Barrett, whose eccentricity and later madness offered an alternative role model to rebels like Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison - a radical withdrawal from the world (Barrett was unable to cope with his early success with Pink Floyd, retired from the music scene, and lived with his mother for in Cambridge many years) and a withdrawal from sanity.
Like the Smiths around the same time, the TVPs rejected the traditional iconography of rock music (which was mainly American, masculine, violent, celebrating freedom and rebelliousness) and preferred British popular culture, particularly from the 1960s (hence the song and album "I Was a Mod Before You Was a Mod" - the mods were smartly dressed, listened to soul music, and were the antithesis of dirty rock fans). He celebrated British new-wave filmmakers who explored working class life, often focussing on tragic young women (as in Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow, or Georgy Girl); TVPs song "Favourite Films" names actresses such as Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey, The Knack, Smashing Time). He also covered legendary eccentric British producer Joe Meek's I Hear A New World (Meek was a homosexual who recorded horror stories and predicted he would die on the anniversary of Buddy Holly - in 1967 he shot his landlady and himself).
The TVPs also put the Avengers on the cover of one album (And Don't The Kids Just Love It); not a twee symbol directly, but one of female empowerment. Treacy seemed to empathise more with women than men, and many TVP songs focused on tragic or suffering women, poor and rich. "La Grande Illusion", "Sad Mona Lisa", "Silly Girl", "The Girl Who Had Everything", and others were not love songs, and some were cautionary tales. But in "La Grande Illusion" he offers a recognition of the suffering of others, such as might be gleaned from watching and imagining from afar, a sadness redeemed only by the pain it stirs in Treacy's heart, the desperate sympathy of "Girl's got tears in her eyes - and I don't know what to do" establishing the cruellest of bonds between them. It's a bond the girl does not even know, unless she hears his song.
Treacy did not have a twee life. He was a heavy drug user, often taking amphetamines before performing. In the early 2000s he spent time in jail (on a prison boat) for drug-related offences. He commented "Christ, Pete Doherty does 3 weeks in Wandsworth and he's the new Johnny Cash! Guess I must be the new James Brown/Albert [sic] Lee/Brian Wilson put together!" This seemed to renew people's interest in him, and there were benefits and collections that provided enough money for him to buy a guitar and record a new record on release. Prison had not hardened his heart, and although My Dark Places (2006) and Are We Nearly There Yet? (2007) were not his best work, they still had moments of pop perfection and overwhelming honesty.
Most of the characteristics of twee can be seen in the TV Personalities. There are the two main moods, joy and winsome sadness, which are both types of romanticism. There is a celebration of passive femininity and a denial of masculinity; and an obsessive self-referentiality about the music scene. But the movement goes far beyond Treacy. While antecedents can be found in Jonathan Richman, the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album, and some of the Beach Boys' more serious moments ("God Only Knows"), it is a movement that flourished on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s.
It really came to music fans' attention, and gained a name, with C86, a tape of up-and-coming bands compiled by the NME. More than half of the tape had little to do with tweeness (The Wolfhounds, Fuzzbox, Big Flame, Microdisney spin-off Stump, and the jangly but more masculine Wedding Present and Half Man Half Biscuit) but it did feature several tracks in a melodic guitar-based pop style that was often called "C86" after the tape. The immediate influences for this music included early-80s Scottish bands like Orange Juice and Josef K, bands associated with Postcard Recordings in Glasgow, who made sweet jangly introverted music far from rock and roll posturing, but in a harder, more rhythmic new wave idiom.
The most crucial C86 act, although they were not on the actual tape, was perhaps the band Talulah Gosh, who introduced the world to twee figurehead Amelia Fletcher. Following the rapid demise of Talulah Gosh, she has been in a series of bands all continuing something of the spirit of twee. Heavenly had more guitars and more of a rock influence, but split after the suicide of Heavenly drummer Mathew Fletcher, Amelia's brother. With a new drummer they became Marine Research who only released one album; later she emerged with Tender Trap, playing bright pop with often satirical lyrics ("That girl had a copy of Herjazz while she was at school ... Her record collection separates women from men; sometimes she lets them mingle then breaks it up again", "That Girl" says).
Primal Scream are perhaps the most famous of the twee bands on the original C86 compilation; they possessed a skill at genre hopping as great as Blur or Madonna, and quickly left twee behind to find dance and then rock. Their C86 track "Velocity Girl" not only helped define twee and lent its name to a jangly guitar band, it seemed to have an influence on Stone Roses and the more melodic side of the Madchester/baggy scene. The C86 era found its spiritual home on Sarah records, who released Heavenly, Another Sunny Day, The Sea Urchins, The Orchids, Field Mice, Northern Picture Library, and St Christopher (whose Terry Banks later formed the splendidly-named Tree Fort Angst). Another Sunny Day sang perhaps the definitive twee song title "I'm In Love With a Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist".
Mirroring Treacy's early tracks like "Posing At The Roundhouse" and "Part-Time Punks" were quintessential twee novelty act the Pooh Sticks, best known for "I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan Mcgee Quite Well", a song about getting in with the legendary record label boss who was inspired by the Television Personalities to start a record label packed with jangly Glaswegian guitar bands (post-twee he signed Oasis).
In the mid 1980s, a time of Thatcherism, greed, and class war, twee offered a multi-layered critique of society. Drawing on forefathers like Dan Treacy and The Smiths, it questioned masculinity and celebrated outsiderdom, weakness, and failure; and it revived punk's amateurism and do-it-yourself spirit - although Treacy was a great guitarist his vocals were at best a whiny moan that conveyed considerably more emotion than tune.
Meanwhile in the USA, the tall, gangly, deep-voiced Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening was doing twee things in Olympia, Washington, going on to inspire much of the rock scene there (even Courtney Love namechecked him). He celebrated his dorkiness and awkwardness and lack of masculine success; his records were cheap and tinny like they were playing over an old AM radio ("I look at them out together and I see she's wearing my sweater", he starts "Cat Walk", a surprisingly cheerful song about being dumped for someone else). Johnson's influence also fed into 1990s emo, bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate, long before a distant version of that genre went mainstream.
On both sides of the Atlantic, tweeness led into Riot Grrl, genres with a crossover in fans and a common interest in writing and exchanging zines (self-published magazines produced on a minimal budget that originated with punk titles like Sniffing Glue, but were revived in the late 80s and early 90s until the internet killed them off). Both had a strong feminist interest, offering an alternative to the conventional male-dominated music scene that combined a strong subcultural identity with an easy-to-play style.
As time went by, the genre changed and diversified. Late 80s/early 90s Glaswegian drunks The Vaselines, fronted by the funny, forward Frances McKee and the more laid-back and debonair Eugene Kelly, mixed the twee with the offensive. Molly's Lips, one of their most famous songs, is either about a child's encounter with a grandmother, or about cunnilingus. Monster Puss has a similar duality, and they did a gender-confusing cover version of gay disco classic You Think You're A Man. The Vaselines like Calvin Johnson and the TV Personalities inspired Kurt Cobain, who sometimes wore a dress onstage and briefly threatened to overturn the masculine norms of rock and roll.
Another lasting career began with the Field Mice, who recorded epic-sounding largely acoustic songs, often focussed on Robert Wratten's failed relationships. Their Kiss and Make Up was covered by St Etienne, and Wratten and other bandmembers continued in Yesterday Sky, Northern Picture Library, and Trembling Blue Stars. The best of their songs, like "Landmark" and "Willow", managed a clear-headed description of love and heartbreak that captures the drama and saddest thing about love, the way good intentions and sincere admiration so often lead to heartbreak. Although twee is commonly associated with childishness, Wratten's emotional honesty, clarity of expression, and lack of sentimentality make him one of the most adult of songwriters.
The Field Mice's "Willow" unusually features Annemari Davies, Wratten's sometime girlfriend, on lead vocals; she sings in a high, wispy voice lyrics which seem directed at Wratten, "I told you things that turned out to be untrue. When I said them I meant them. There are so many moments from when we were together that I do treasure. Don't you go thinking I never did love you." It's reminiscent of the poetry of Ian Hamilton, whose terse lyrics used the word "you" far more than "I" to express the sorrow of ended relationships.
Twee-influenced synth-pop band Bis threatened the mainstream in the late 1990s, famously appearing on Top of the Pops without a record deal and writing the closing theme for the Powerpuff Girls. Despite their childish image and roots in fanzine culture, they had little in common musically with C86, TV Personalities, or Calvin Johnson. In the face of widespread ridicule (some unfairly directed at singer Manda Rin's appearance, others more justly directed at their deliberately immature music) they never made it big.
More recently the standard-bearers in Britain have been Welsh eight-some Los Campesinos. Loud and boisterous despite their intelligence, they combine exceptionally clever and reference-packed lyrics with upbeat tuneful pop music. Combining the manically upbeat sound of Bis with fiercely intelligent lyrics and a close attention to popular culture (they're probably the most famous band to mention LiveJournal in a song), they established themselves as a many-legged fixture on the music scene, the saviours of twee.
Having said that, the band did not charm everyone, and the now sadly missed music journalist Steven Wells fought a particular vendetta against them, claiming
As can be seen, twee has reappeared wherever young and innocent people have picked up musical instruments and tried to write songs that reflect their confusion, that combination of youthful optimism with a melancholy suspicion that you'll never be cool. One mid-90s example was the Australian band Noise Addict, who penned "I Wish I Was He", about American folk-rock singer Evan Dando of the Lemonheads ("he gets his NMEs sent by air not boat...") and also did a song in favour of sarongs. Another face of contemporary twee is Tullycraft, who since the mid 1990s have combined a retro surf-influenced sound with an obsessive interest in music fandom, as manifested in the knowing lyrics of tracks like "Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend's Too Stupid To Know About" and "The Punks are Writing Love Songs".
Like most genres twee's soul is contested: is it about childish fun and upbeat music, or a genuine refusal of a still-masculine society and a narrow-minded rockist music industry? Or is it simply composed of people too sensitive for their times writing lovely songs about girls they're too scared to speak to? Middle-class perhaps, defeatist maybe, but always music for people who desperately need music that understands what they feel like. And equally importantly music that maybe they can make themselves, an act which can complete the circle of empathy - feeling something, hearing it expressed, and then expressing it yourself. It's punk for people who get beaten up by punks.
The godfather of twee was Dan Treacy of the Television Personalities. The band was born out of the late 70s punk scene, its name taking a mocking view of celebrity that was part of punk's desire to start a new and different version of entertainment or art (similarly the lead singer of the Adverts called himself TV Smith). Initially the TVPs made a name with raw-sounding recordings that satirised the music scene in songs such as Part-Time Punks ("They pay 5p on the buses and they never use toothpaste but they still got £2.50 to go and see the Clash tonight"). Co-founder Edward Ball went on to a varied career, with the Times, Teenage Filmstars, the Boo Radleys and solo projects, while Treacy has kept the band going on and off to the present, with album A Memory Is Better Than Nothing released in 2010.
Following their debut single "14th Floor" (1978) and a couple of punky EPs, the TVPs' sound matured for their first truly great song, and their first truly twee. Released as a single in 1980, Smashing Time celebrated a day that Treacy spent taking his cousin on a tour of London. It affectionately mocks some parts of the city, praises others, and overall sums up the joy, excitement, and nervousness of a provincial person visiting the big city: "we were scared in the London Dungeon, it's silly I know, and we were both slightly embarrassed in Soho ... and she thought it was really good and so did I."
This was followed by the album ...And Don't The Kids Just Love It (1981), kicking off a sequence of great releases in the first half of the 1980s. Lyrically Treacy varied from aching love songs like "Someone To Spend My Life With" (which makes twee-ancestor Jonathan Richman's "Girlfriend" seem hard-hearted) to the brooding "How I Learned To Love the Bomb", a slice of mid-80s nuclear paranoia pop to stand alongside Frankie's "Two Tribes" or Nena's "99 Balloons". At times he overreached himself, as with the over-the-top psychodrama "Back To Vietnam", but the best of his songs presented an overwhelming romanticism, sometimes childlike, sometimes hard-fought or snatched against the odds from despair.
Despite coming up through the punk scene, Treacy's influences were quite different. Rather than the Ramones or Sex Pistols he was more interested in 1960s British pop and psychedelia; as well as a musical influence on tracks such as "The Dream Inspires" and "King and Country", this can be seen in lyrically in songs like "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives". Treacy revered Syd Barrett, whose eccentricity and later madness offered an alternative role model to rebels like Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison - a radical withdrawal from the world (Barrett was unable to cope with his early success with Pink Floyd, retired from the music scene, and lived with his mother for in Cambridge many years) and a withdrawal from sanity.
Like the Smiths around the same time, the TVPs rejected the traditional iconography of rock music (which was mainly American, masculine, violent, celebrating freedom and rebelliousness) and preferred British popular culture, particularly from the 1960s (hence the song and album "I Was a Mod Before You Was a Mod" - the mods were smartly dressed, listened to soul music, and were the antithesis of dirty rock fans). He celebrated British new-wave filmmakers who explored working class life, often focussing on tragic young women (as in Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow, or Georgy Girl); TVPs song "Favourite Films" names actresses such as Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey, The Knack, Smashing Time). He also covered legendary eccentric British producer Joe Meek's I Hear A New World (Meek was a homosexual who recorded horror stories and predicted he would die on the anniversary of Buddy Holly - in 1967 he shot his landlady and himself).
The TVPs also put the Avengers on the cover of one album (And Don't The Kids Just Love It); not a twee symbol directly, but one of female empowerment. Treacy seemed to empathise more with women than men, and many TVP songs focused on tragic or suffering women, poor and rich. "La Grande Illusion", "Sad Mona Lisa", "Silly Girl", "The Girl Who Had Everything", and others were not love songs, and some were cautionary tales. But in "La Grande Illusion" he offers a recognition of the suffering of others, such as might be gleaned from watching and imagining from afar, a sadness redeemed only by the pain it stirs in Treacy's heart, the desperate sympathy of "Girl's got tears in her eyes - and I don't know what to do" establishing the cruellest of bonds between them. It's a bond the girl does not even know, unless she hears his song.
Treacy did not have a twee life. He was a heavy drug user, often taking amphetamines before performing. In the early 2000s he spent time in jail (on a prison boat) for drug-related offences. He commented "Christ, Pete Doherty does 3 weeks in Wandsworth and he's the new Johnny Cash! Guess I must be the new James Brown/Albert [sic] Lee/Brian Wilson put together!" This seemed to renew people's interest in him, and there were benefits and collections that provided enough money for him to buy a guitar and record a new record on release. Prison had not hardened his heart, and although My Dark Places (2006) and Are We Nearly There Yet? (2007) were not his best work, they still had moments of pop perfection and overwhelming honesty.
Most of the characteristics of twee can be seen in the TV Personalities. There are the two main moods, joy and winsome sadness, which are both types of romanticism. There is a celebration of passive femininity and a denial of masculinity; and an obsessive self-referentiality about the music scene. But the movement goes far beyond Treacy. While antecedents can be found in Jonathan Richman, the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album, and some of the Beach Boys' more serious moments ("God Only Knows"), it is a movement that flourished on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s.
It really came to music fans' attention, and gained a name, with C86, a tape of up-and-coming bands compiled by the NME. More than half of the tape had little to do with tweeness (The Wolfhounds, Fuzzbox, Big Flame, Microdisney spin-off Stump, and the jangly but more masculine Wedding Present and Half Man Half Biscuit) but it did feature several tracks in a melodic guitar-based pop style that was often called "C86" after the tape. The immediate influences for this music included early-80s Scottish bands like Orange Juice and Josef K, bands associated with Postcard Recordings in Glasgow, who made sweet jangly introverted music far from rock and roll posturing, but in a harder, more rhythmic new wave idiom.
The most crucial C86 act, although they were not on the actual tape, was perhaps the band Talulah Gosh, who introduced the world to twee figurehead Amelia Fletcher. Following the rapid demise of Talulah Gosh, she has been in a series of bands all continuing something of the spirit of twee. Heavenly had more guitars and more of a rock influence, but split after the suicide of Heavenly drummer Mathew Fletcher, Amelia's brother. With a new drummer they became Marine Research who only released one album; later she emerged with Tender Trap, playing bright pop with often satirical lyrics ("That girl had a copy of Herjazz while she was at school ... Her record collection separates women from men; sometimes she lets them mingle then breaks it up again", "That Girl" says).
Primal Scream are perhaps the most famous of the twee bands on the original C86 compilation; they possessed a skill at genre hopping as great as Blur or Madonna, and quickly left twee behind to find dance and then rock. Their C86 track "Velocity Girl" not only helped define twee and lent its name to a jangly guitar band, it seemed to have an influence on Stone Roses and the more melodic side of the Madchester/baggy scene. The C86 era found its spiritual home on Sarah records, who released Heavenly, Another Sunny Day, The Sea Urchins, The Orchids, Field Mice, Northern Picture Library, and St Christopher (whose Terry Banks later formed the splendidly-named Tree Fort Angst). Another Sunny Day sang perhaps the definitive twee song title "I'm In Love With a Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist".
Mirroring Treacy's early tracks like "Posing At The Roundhouse" and "Part-Time Punks" were quintessential twee novelty act the Pooh Sticks, best known for "I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan Mcgee Quite Well", a song about getting in with the legendary record label boss who was inspired by the Television Personalities to start a record label packed with jangly Glaswegian guitar bands (post-twee he signed Oasis).
In the mid 1980s, a time of Thatcherism, greed, and class war, twee offered a multi-layered critique of society. Drawing on forefathers like Dan Treacy and The Smiths, it questioned masculinity and celebrated outsiderdom, weakness, and failure; and it revived punk's amateurism and do-it-yourself spirit - although Treacy was a great guitarist his vocals were at best a whiny moan that conveyed considerably more emotion than tune.
Meanwhile in the USA, the tall, gangly, deep-voiced Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening was doing twee things in Olympia, Washington, going on to inspire much of the rock scene there (even Courtney Love namechecked him). He celebrated his dorkiness and awkwardness and lack of masculine success; his records were cheap and tinny like they were playing over an old AM radio ("I look at them out together and I see she's wearing my sweater", he starts "Cat Walk", a surprisingly cheerful song about being dumped for someone else). Johnson's influence also fed into 1990s emo, bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate, long before a distant version of that genre went mainstream.
On both sides of the Atlantic, tweeness led into Riot Grrl, genres with a crossover in fans and a common interest in writing and exchanging zines (self-published magazines produced on a minimal budget that originated with punk titles like Sniffing Glue, but were revived in the late 80s and early 90s until the internet killed them off). Both had a strong feminist interest, offering an alternative to the conventional male-dominated music scene that combined a strong subcultural identity with an easy-to-play style.
As time went by, the genre changed and diversified. Late 80s/early 90s Glaswegian drunks The Vaselines, fronted by the funny, forward Frances McKee and the more laid-back and debonair Eugene Kelly, mixed the twee with the offensive. Molly's Lips, one of their most famous songs, is either about a child's encounter with a grandmother, or about cunnilingus. Monster Puss has a similar duality, and they did a gender-confusing cover version of gay disco classic You Think You're A Man. The Vaselines like Calvin Johnson and the TV Personalities inspired Kurt Cobain, who sometimes wore a dress onstage and briefly threatened to overturn the masculine norms of rock and roll.
Another lasting career began with the Field Mice, who recorded epic-sounding largely acoustic songs, often focussed on Robert Wratten's failed relationships. Their Kiss and Make Up was covered by St Etienne, and Wratten and other bandmembers continued in Yesterday Sky, Northern Picture Library, and Trembling Blue Stars. The best of their songs, like "Landmark" and "Willow", managed a clear-headed description of love and heartbreak that captures the drama and saddest thing about love, the way good intentions and sincere admiration so often lead to heartbreak. Although twee is commonly associated with childishness, Wratten's emotional honesty, clarity of expression, and lack of sentimentality make him one of the most adult of songwriters.
The Field Mice's "Willow" unusually features Annemari Davies, Wratten's sometime girlfriend, on lead vocals; she sings in a high, wispy voice lyrics which seem directed at Wratten, "I told you things that turned out to be untrue. When I said them I meant them. There are so many moments from when we were together that I do treasure. Don't you go thinking I never did love you." It's reminiscent of the poetry of Ian Hamilton, whose terse lyrics used the word "you" far more than "I" to express the sorrow of ended relationships.
Twee-influenced synth-pop band Bis threatened the mainstream in the late 1990s, famously appearing on Top of the Pops without a record deal and writing the closing theme for the Powerpuff Girls. Despite their childish image and roots in fanzine culture, they had little in common musically with C86, TV Personalities, or Calvin Johnson. In the face of widespread ridicule (some unfairly directed at singer Manda Rin's appearance, others more justly directed at their deliberately immature music) they never made it big.
More recently the standard-bearers in Britain have been Welsh eight-some Los Campesinos. Loud and boisterous despite their intelligence, they combine exceptionally clever and reference-packed lyrics with upbeat tuneful pop music. Combining the manically upbeat sound of Bis with fiercely intelligent lyrics and a close attention to popular culture (they're probably the most famous band to mention LiveJournal in a song), they established themselves as a many-legged fixture on the music scene, the saviours of twee.
Having said that, the band did not charm everyone, and the now sadly missed music journalist Steven Wells fought a particular vendetta against them, claiming
Twee is a frequently reoccurring herpes virus under the foreskin of the popcock and Los Campesinos! are the weeping sore.He did like Dan Treacy, and even saw a briefly radical impulse in twee
The Television Personalities (and their alter egos The O Levels) were not twee. The clue is in the fact that they didn't suck. They didn't simper. They didn't peddle a drained-of-all-ideology, passive-aggressive, un-analysed and hideously ill-defined porridge of cringe-worthy pederasty, noxious nostalgia, oblique poetastery, tuneless fax-pop, bourgeois arrogance (posturing as DIY separatism) and right-wing anti-proletarian middle-class smugness (posturing as anti-macho anti-sexism).Partly his disdain was class war, twee having a tendency to be middle class (although many of punk's greatest figures came from the middle classes and leafy suburbia). And partly because he didn't like quiet music.
Was twee ever genuinely radical? Was it ever anything more than a cowardly retreat from subversion, empowerment and experimentation into a nauseatingly reactionary paedo-aesthetic? Surprisingly, yes it was—for about 5 minutes. In Olympia, Washington State in 1984, a young man called Calvin Johnson decides to rip the piss out of the brutally macho, one-dimensional, throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater straight white male travesty that is American hardcore punk with a superlimp pissrippery called Beat Happening — the first American twee band. Beat Happening make also-on-the-bill Henry Rollin's superbly muscled head hurt. He stares at this abomination like a confused dog.
As can be seen, twee has reappeared wherever young and innocent people have picked up musical instruments and tried to write songs that reflect their confusion, that combination of youthful optimism with a melancholy suspicion that you'll never be cool. One mid-90s example was the Australian band Noise Addict, who penned "I Wish I Was He", about American folk-rock singer Evan Dando of the Lemonheads ("he gets his NMEs sent by air not boat...") and also did a song in favour of sarongs. Another face of contemporary twee is Tullycraft, who since the mid 1990s have combined a retro surf-influenced sound with an obsessive interest in music fandom, as manifested in the knowing lyrics of tracks like "Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend's Too Stupid To Know About" and "The Punks are Writing Love Songs".
Like most genres twee's soul is contested: is it about childish fun and upbeat music, or a genuine refusal of a still-masculine society and a narrow-minded rockist music industry? Or is it simply composed of people too sensitive for their times writing lovely songs about girls they're too scared to speak to? Middle-class perhaps, defeatist maybe, but always music for people who desperately need music that understands what they feel like. And equally importantly music that maybe they can make themselves, an act which can complete the circle of empathy - feeling something, hearing it expressed, and then expressing it yourself. It's punk for people who get beaten up by punks.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Book(s) for sale
Craig Saper, ed., Words (2009). In January 1931, Bob Brown worked with Nancy Cunard's Hours Press to publish Words—two sets of poems printed in a single volume. The book was subtitled "I but bend my finger in a beckon and words, birds of words, hop on it, chirping." One set of poems was printed in 16-point Caslon Old Face, a classic font style used in all Hours Press publications. The other was relief-printed from engraved plates at less than 3-point size (perhaps, according to Cunard, less than 1-point). Because the subtitle was also printed in the microscopic text, archives, libraries, and bibliographies often mistakenly omit it.(Charles Bernstein's blog)
Although Brown was, for Cunard, "at the very center of his time, a zeitgeist in himself," they printed only 150 copies, and the book passed into relative obscurity. It is generally mentioned only as a footnote in discussions of Cunard's life or in reference to Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, Brown’s better-known anthology of experimental texts by modernist writers, including Cunard herself. Over time, this experiment in blurring the distinction between text on the one hand and its design and presentation on the other has become a major prophetic work. Noted Brown scholar Craig Saper brings Words back to light, with a thorough explication of its meaning and role in literary history.
(Rice University Press website)In the reading-machine futureOne of the most important in the series of experimental texts written and published by Bob Brown in the early twentieth century, Words is among the very first literary works to anticipate the post-McLuhan melding of message and medium, with text being dramatically reshaped and even redefined by the myriad new ways people now deliver it to one another. Words is two sets of poems—one set in conventional type, the other set in 1-point type and requiring use of a magnifying glass—the sets of poems simultanously outstanding in their own right and part of a fascinating poetic commentary and dialog with one another.
Say by 1950
All magnum opuses
Will be etched on the
Heads of pins
Not retched into
Three volume classics
By pin heads.
—Bob Brown
Part of the thriving expatriate literary scene in 1930s Europe, and a friend and collaborator with Marcel Duchamp and other Surrealists and Dadaists, Brown predicted that technological progress would so dramatically change the world that the reading experience—and, for that matter, the very nature of text—would be completely changed by the devices and media through which we communicate written art and ideas to one another. At the time, Words and other Brown experiments seemed simple, playful, and largely pointless games. In retrospect, they are remarkable works of prophecy and commentary. Noted Brown expert Craig Saper’s afterword furnishes enlightening context to the republication of this prescient collection of poetry.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
The war against the secular
Roger Ebert in his consistently interesting blog has a post about how Twitter and internet browsing are destroying his concentration, reducing his ability to enjoy Victorian novels. It's a sensation many people may have felt, although whether the internet is anything more than a scapegoat is uncertain.
The epic films of the 1960s and 70s, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky's Solaris, and Apocalypse Now, began with an often glacial slowness, and didn't get much faster. It seems like they aspire to the condition of dreams, enveloping the viewer in a strange world. But it is not exactly the dream they want to create, but the concrete, the secular - which means variously the non-spiritual, the long-lasting, and the non-eternal - a space where they can exist and be free. All art needs this room, a space and time where the audience can move and stretch their legs and experience something at length, escaping the momentariness and fragmentation of ordinary life.
There is a book to be written about how changes in artwork density from gallery to gallery and era to era have affected the visual arts - pictures crammed on walls in the 19th century, now sitting in solitude in white galleries - and how today we may be giving contemporary art too much space. Because after all, despite our dense urban lives, it is time we really have a shortage of - we can flit from work to shallow sensationalist work in a gallery but not commit the time to enjoy temporal arts like the novel, the slow-moving epic, or the opera.
People still have time for long TV series, box sets, but they are paced and punctuated for stop-start viewing with their ad-space-friendly ten-minute acts and credit sequences. What they do not offer is the long slow sensation of drifting off. Everything is Brechtian now, shocking you out of its reality, showing you its frame.
The epic films of the 1960s and 70s, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky's Solaris, and Apocalypse Now, began with an often glacial slowness, and didn't get much faster. It seems like they aspire to the condition of dreams, enveloping the viewer in a strange world. But it is not exactly the dream they want to create, but the concrete, the secular - which means variously the non-spiritual, the long-lasting, and the non-eternal - a space where they can exist and be free. All art needs this room, a space and time where the audience can move and stretch their legs and experience something at length, escaping the momentariness and fragmentation of ordinary life.
There is a book to be written about how changes in artwork density from gallery to gallery and era to era have affected the visual arts - pictures crammed on walls in the 19th century, now sitting in solitude in white galleries - and how today we may be giving contemporary art too much space. Because after all, despite our dense urban lives, it is time we really have a shortage of - we can flit from work to shallow sensationalist work in a gallery but not commit the time to enjoy temporal arts like the novel, the slow-moving epic, or the opera.
People still have time for long TV series, box sets, but they are paced and punctuated for stop-start viewing with their ad-space-friendly ten-minute acts and credit sequences. What they do not offer is the long slow sensation of drifting off. Everything is Brechtian now, shocking you out of its reality, showing you its frame.
Just putting line breaks in something doesn't make it poetry
German miserabilist philosopher Theodor Adorno asked how it was possible to write poetry after the Holocaust, and Charles Reznikoff produced one of the greatest collections of poetry about the Nazi genocide by not writing anything at all. A master of found poetry, he pursued the avant-garde goals of driving out subjectivity and directly apprehending the world, while managing to document crime and suffering in central Europe and the USA.
Reznikoff was born in Brooklyn in 1894 of Jewish Russian parents. He studied journalism and later law and wrote reports for a legal publisher, but also wrote poetry, at first influenced by the decadent poets of the 1890s and the French Symbolists, and later by Imagism. He printed much of it himself, and made little money. He constantly worked and re-worked his poems, on one occasion demanding work back from Harriet Monroe's prestigious Poetry: A Magazine of Verse when the magazine refused to let him change it before publication; staying out of the magazine was preferable to a ban on tinkering.
He never made much money from his verse, and worked at a range of jobs from hat salesman to a spell as assistant to Albert Lewin, a Hollywood writer, producer, and director, who helped create such seductive and decadent movies as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951). He always depended on unliterary day-jobs for his money and wrote in the evenings:
Williams wrote of the necessity of "ridding the field of verbiage": giving poetry a new form suited to its present role. He wrote: "the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes. [...] This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse." (quoted by Peter Jones in Poetry Magazine). Zukofsky ranged from short poems to epics, from the four-word The:
In the 1940s and 50s, Reznikoff's published output declined as he concentrated on other tasks, but he was never idle. All of Reznikoff's interests - poetry, law, history, journalism - were combined in his book Testimony, which he had worked on for decades. Finally published in 1965, it turned old court reports from the late 19th and early 20th centuries into verse. This:
Many of the great modernist poets, from TS Eliot to William Carlos Williams, made use of quotes and samples in their writing. Eliot's The Waste Land included footnotes by the author explaining how "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina" was from Dante's Inferno and "Why then Ile fit you" and "Hieronymo's mad again" from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Williams incorporated personal correspondence (including mail from Allen Ginsberg) and other prose in his epic poem Paterson.
More recent poets like Charles Bernstein (one of the pioneers of language poetry) have made equally creative use of found texts, seeking to question the idea of poetry as communication of meaning by pointing up the reuse and repetition of its linguistic building blocks. In the 1960s, Ronald Gross attempted to copy pop art with his pop poetry, taking text from advertisements and commercial writing:
Gross's writing, like Reznikoff's, is part of the genre of found poetry, where a writer (or collector) comes across a few sentences and decide it should be poetry; it has a long history. In 1936 Yeats edited the Oxford Book of English Verse and included a section of Walter Pater's prose description of the Mona Lisa broken up into separate lines (New Criterion).
More recently, Hart Seely collected the poetry of George W Bush's defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (Slate). From a 2001 defence briefing comes this, which Seely entitled "Glass Box":
Reznikoff was born in Brooklyn in 1894 of Jewish Russian parents. He studied journalism and later law and wrote reports for a legal publisher, but also wrote poetry, at first influenced by the decadent poets of the 1890s and the French Symbolists, and later by Imagism. He printed much of it himself, and made little money. He constantly worked and re-worked his poems, on one occasion demanding work back from Harriet Monroe's prestigious Poetry: A Magazine of Verse when the magazine refused to let him change it before publication; staying out of the magazine was preferable to a ban on tinkering.
He never made much money from his verse, and worked at a range of jobs from hat salesman to a spell as assistant to Albert Lewin, a Hollywood writer, producer, and director, who helped create such seductive and decadent movies as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951). He always depended on unliterary day-jobs for his money and wrote in the evenings:
After I had worked all day at what I earn my living,But nonetheless, Reznikoff produced a large number of books of his poetry, self-published or from little publishers such as the Objectivist Press which he ran with Louis Zukofsky, Charles Offen, and others. He became closely linked with the Objectivists, who also included George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, the British Basil Bunting, and the legendary William Carlos Williams. They rejected sentiment, subjectivity, and vagueness of language (but were unrelated to the objectivism of Ayn Rand).
I was tired. Now my work has lost another day
I thought, but began slowly,
and slowly my strength came back to me.
Surely the tide comes in twice a day. (*)
Williams wrote of the necessity of "ridding the field of verbiage": giving poetry a new form suited to its present role. He wrote: "the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes. [...] This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse." (quoted by Peter Jones in Poetry Magazine). Zukofsky ranged from short poems to epics, from the four-word The:
Thewhich appealed to boat-obsessed Scottish artist-poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, (Jacket Magazine) all the way to his epic daybook entitled A.
The
desire
of
towing.
In the 1940s and 50s, Reznikoff's published output declined as he concentrated on other tasks, but he was never idle. All of Reznikoff's interests - poetry, law, history, journalism - were combined in his book Testimony, which he had worked on for decades. Finally published in 1965, it turned old court reports from the late 19th and early 20th centuries into verse. This:
"It's a lie!" she cried. He struck her in the face with his newspaper, andcame from this:
then with his straw hat;
and she struck back with a fish she had just bought
and then with the pocketbook she still held in her hand.
The steel clasp scratched his face and it began to bleed.
As she left the store,
he shouted after her that she should not come back
and his house was closed to her forever!
He went upstairs to the rooms where they lived
and gathered up all her clothing he could find
and cut and slashed it with knife and scissors.
The complainant denied the charge, and charged her husband with lying. He struck her in the face with his straw hat and with a newspaper. She struck him, first with a fish which she had just been buying for breakfast, and then with a pocketbook which she held in her hand, and whose steel clasp scratched his face and drew blood. The parties were separated. The complainant left the house, and defendant shouted after her, and sent word to her by his son that she could not come back again. She went to her father's house. Three days afterwards the husband said to the son, who was working for him in his store, that he must decide whether he would go with his mother or stay with him. The son decided to go with the mother, and left. The husband then sent word to the wife to take away her clothing, but, before delivering it to her, mutilated each piece of it thoroughly with a knife or scissors, or other sharp instrument, so that a large number of costly female garments of all kinds were utterly destroyed, and in that condition sent to the wife. (Streitwolf v. Streitwolf, 47 A. 14, 18 (N.J. Ch. 1900).)(Example from Benjamin Watson, Legal Studies Forum, Volume 29, No. 1 (2005)). Reznikoff set out his principles and working methods in the following brief statement (Watson again):
The Method of RevisionThe follow-up to Testimony was Holocaust, with texts taken from the war crimes trials at Nuremberg and from the Eichmann trial. You can listen to him reading from it at Penn Sound, a project of the University of Pennsylvania. Being taken from court testimony, not legal judgments, the poems present the evidence not the verdicts; facts, not commentary.
1. Write all seemingly good lines
2. Examine every word to remove all possible latinisms and unnecessary words
3. Examine the meaning of the sentences in their order
4. Examine the rhythm of the lines
5. Examine the rhythm of the whole
6. Then revision by contemplation
Once the commander of a camp had eight of the strongest amongReznikoff died in 1976, a year after Holocaust was published. Despite mixed reviews for it, his popularity was on the rise, with the support of the prestigious Black Sparrow Press. His voice remains on filmmaker Abraham Ravett's recordings, reading other people's words.
the Jews
placed in a large barrel of water,
saying that they did not look clean,
and they had to stand in this barrel naked for twenty-four hours.
In the morning, other Jews had to cut away the ice:
the men were frozen to death.
In this camp - and in others also -
they had an orchestra of Jews
who had to play every morning and evening
and whenever Jews were taken to be shot.
In one such camp,
the orchestra had all of sixty men. (*)
Many of the great modernist poets, from TS Eliot to William Carlos Williams, made use of quotes and samples in their writing. Eliot's The Waste Land included footnotes by the author explaining how "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina" was from Dante's Inferno and "Why then Ile fit you" and "Hieronymo's mad again" from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Williams incorporated personal correspondence (including mail from Allen Ginsberg) and other prose in his epic poem Paterson.
More recent poets like Charles Bernstein (one of the pioneers of language poetry) have made equally creative use of found texts, seeking to question the idea of poetry as communication of meaning by pointing up the reuse and repetition of its linguistic building blocks. In the 1960s, Ronald Gross attempted to copy pop art with his pop poetry, taking text from advertisements and commercial writing:
An optional featurebegan his "The Miracle of Creation", text taken from a toy catalogue that seems strange and suggestive when removed from its colourful illustrations and given the full concentration of the poet or reader. Presumably, the text is describing the Visible Woman, an educational anatomical model (of the sort Damian Hirst later reproduced - BBC), and its optional add-on the Miracle of Creation.
designed to make
the Visible Woman
even more useful
as an educational toy
is the Miracle of Creation.
Understanding female biology
requires observation
of those parts
relating to gestation.
Gross's writing, like Reznikoff's, is part of the genre of found poetry, where a writer (or collector) comes across a few sentences and decide it should be poetry; it has a long history. In 1936 Yeats edited the Oxford Book of English Verse and included a section of Walter Pater's prose description of the Mona Lisa broken up into separate lines (New Criterion).
More recently, Hart Seely collected the poetry of George W Bush's defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (Slate). From a 2001 defence briefing comes this, which Seely entitled "Glass Box":
You know, it's the old glass box at the—In 2009, former British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion was criticised from some quarters (see the Telegraph) for his poem An Equal Voice, made up of the testimonies of British soldiers. For this poem, he minimised signs of his intervention by choosing a regular line length:
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's—
And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—
Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—
But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.
War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble.It looks like a column of text; like prose.
Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust
reports, blueprints one day and the next –
with the help of a broken-down motor car
and a few gallons of petrol – marching men
with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes,
horses straining and plunging at the guns,
little clay-pits opening beneath each step,
and piles of bloody clothes and leggings
outside the canvas door of a field hospital.
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