You! Me! Blogging!
A deep dive into blog rock -- "twee" subdivision
You can hear this article in the form of a podcast below!
Many people have observed that there’s this lacuna in our collective musical history, which is, loosely and with plenty of exceptions, 2006 - 2010. These are the years before Spotify normalized streaming but after the internet had killed the record industry — a Wild West era where some people were still burning CDs, and a few pioneers were listening to Pandora or whatever Last.fm was, but most people were building up huge iTunes libraries—sometimes obsessively maintained libraries we thought would last forever, now scattered like dust across the digital plains.
And we were building these libraries from our CD collections, from iTunes purchases,(What a waste of money! iTunes gift cards did to me what NFTs did to whoever those people are.) and we were building our collections from the blogs.
MP3 Blogs were, to me, where the internet peaked. I’m talking about sites like You Ain’t No Picasso, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, This Recording — oh my god, This Recording was so good. I found so many bands there. If you weren’t logged on for the This Recording days, let me tell you how good we had it. Molly Lambert would post a beautiful essay about that week’s Mad Men episode, and then at the bottom of the article would be two Mp3s you could download, a pair of songs from a new and interesting band that had some loose thematic connection. And then you’d read another writer’s brief and sort of incomprehensible but lovely meditation on a road trip they took with their father in 2002 and there’s be ANOTHER two mp3s at the bottom of that. And you’d play this game — you’d read the post and if you liked it, you’d download the songs because you’d probably like them too, the vibes were simpatico. And you felt like you could pick and choose because you didn’t think it would go away. (I so desperately wish we could go back to the 2009 internet. I feel like I barely scratched the surface.)
Because yeah, all that went away. Slowly! — it’s still kind of going away slowly, Pitchfork was recently gutted… but at this point it’s mostly gone and it’s never coming back. Even the heroes of the blog era who managed to pivot successfully, like the Stereogum guys, who went independent, and guys like David Chen and Devindra Hardawar from SlashFilm who also spun their podcast off away from that blog after it was acquired — even those guys don’t feel completely safe from the market forces that killed the 2007 internet. Bill Simmons is a guy I look up to a lot despite not being a sports guy, and the reason I do is because of the way he made his site, Grantland, into the first liferaft for the writers of this era. Molly Lambert from This Recording went there, and like almost everybody from Grantland pivoted to podcasting to stay afloat. And then when ESPN shut down Grantland, Bill went off and reverse-engineered the same website again — creating The Ringer as an independent entity and podcast-producing machine and then fusing it with Spotify. Today, I don’t even think The Ringer is safe — when I listen to a lot of my favorite podcasts right now they all sound like they’re staring at blood in the water while they talk. Gimlet Media, a formerly huge and inspiring beacon of podcasting that gave us Reply All and Startup and Mystery Show, has been at this point crushed down into almost nothing by Spotify. Eventually it happens to everything.
And it’s so hard to find a new foothold in the new internet, an internet that is all closed systems, all apps that refuse to cooperate with each other, all phones where you can’t easily preserve or maintain downloads. I’m working on some songs with my brother right now and if I want to hear them on my phone I have to download them from my email every single day. They don’t stay remain in my Spotify app because nobody’s making money on them.
If you’re a person who makes things online, if you’re a content creator, there is no one hub to interact with your audience anymore. If you make TikToks you’re also posting them on Reels, and you’re also hoping they’ll go viral beyond your reach and people will be talking about them in places you don’t even know about and can’t even see. If you’re a podcaster, you don’t even know how people listen — the apps they’re using and the kind of links you should be posting to help them hear you. You can talk about a song and play a clip and hope nobody’s lawyer gets mad at you and nobody’s algorithm changes to detect and delete you but you can’t put a link to download the song in your show notes. Download it from where? What is any of this built on anymore? What is stable and permanent?
We talk about the way the music of the pre-streaming era has vanished from the public consciousness but that’s probably nothing compared to what will happen to today’s music. I can dig a bunch of higher quality audio files off my external hard drive if I want to talk about Bloc Party and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah but like… if I want to listen to that Wednesday record in twenty years do you think my band camp login is going to work? No.
But that’s a problem for the future— future music historians, future podcasters or whatever they will call podcasts when they start making them for VR headsets or whatever. The people of the future will sort this out with their goggles, I’m sure of it. Today I want focus on that gap we already identified — the blog rock era, and its forgotten music. I want to do a little excavation. Particularly, I want to dig into a particular word and examine that word’s musical legacy. I’m talking about the word TWEE.
What do you think about when you hear the word Twee? Zooey Deschanel? Sort of Etsy-ish, cute but weird in a nonthreatening way. Ukuleles? Zooey Deschanel with a ukulele? Maybe you are landing somewhere in the neighborhood of Dapper. Not exactly Dapper, but a neighbor of Dapper.
Is Wes Anderson dapper or twee? What if you gave Wes Anderson a banjo? See, in my head, in the sort of Venn diagram I am visualizing, when I add the banjo in I am actually approaching the edge of twee and moving instead toward a sort of Stomp and Holler aesthetic like The Lumineers and Mumford and Sons. Those guys wore suspenders and bowler hats and which certainly COULD be twee, but wasn’t in their case because it was sort of dusty and Steinbeck-y instead. Steampunk is also not twee, by the way, but it’s in sort of the same universe.
Honestly the very first song I think of when I think of Twee — the very middle of the circle in the diagram, is one by a band called The Boy Least Likely To— and it’s a s song called “I’m Glad I Hitched My Apple Wagon To Your Star.” Feels twee already, right? Well, listen to the song.
Here’s the thing about this kind of music: It rules. In the prechorus this song does this little dip into a minor chord with a major lift up the chorus, and it’s so perfectly syncopated with the banjo and the guiro — which is that scritch-scratch percussion instrument — very satisfying.
Now— do you need a guiro and a banjo to be twee? No. But do you need a glockenspiel or some other kind of bell-based instrument? Maybe. I’m thinking now of this New Zealand band I saw once open for Rilo Kiley called The Brunettes. They had this kind of surf-rock-but- with-toy-instruments sound that was really fun and infectious. They dressed a little like side characters from the movie Grease. They were amazing by the way, one of the better live performances I’ve ever seen.
But if you were not introduced to this band first in a live performance, and you first heard a song of theirs I really like called Polyester meets Acetate, which starts out all guitars—you know, you might think we could be going anywhere. But those bells come in after a few seconds, and you get it. (N.B. there are two versions of this song on Spotify and in one the drums are isolated in the right stereo channel and in the other they’re isolated in the left channel. I don’t know what that is about.) This is a such a great song.
Now The Brunettes had two lead singers, a male and a female singer, and for whatever reason something about that reads as twee to me. Maybe this goes back to Zooey Deschanel, standard bearer for twee, who had a band called She and Him with the great singer-songwriter M. Ward. Maybe they retroactively made the dual, opposite sex lead singers into a twee thing. Does that make Fleetwood Mac twee? I think Tusk at least qualifies?
Anyway, there are a whole bunch of twee and twee-adjacent bands from the blog rock era which were just one lady and one dude. Like The Subways. This song is called “I Want to Hear What You Have Got To Say” - the titles are so great, right?
This song is good because it has a rock solid melody, and it musically feels like it’s doing enough even before it kicks in hard on the second verse. Does it seem odd to say that twee music is marked by simplicity even though it often features toy instruments and odd percussion (I mean we haven’t even got to the oddest percussion we’re gonna get to)? Those are superficial complications. The music itself is often really simple, satisfying shit. Cowboy chords with a novelty necktie. Another good example is a duo called The Blow— this song is called “Parentheses.” There is something really wonderful about the very direct, lightly nasal vocal delivery. Maybe it’s a little ASMR-y for me? I don’t know. But it’s good.
While we are talking about twee musical duos it would be journalistic malpractice not to talk about Mates of State, a blog-rock-era band who bubbles up every now and again still just because they have like a dozen certified bangers. Their album BRING IT BACK is wall-to-wall— but the one I’m putting on our mixtape today is called “For The Actor” the first song of theirs I ever heard.
It’s really fast and loud — drums, keyboard, and both singers going full speed from the jump. Musically it’s not super complicated, like that little breakdown at the end of each line in the verse just a bunch of octaves of the same note — but it has ENERGY. And that is another common thread I’d like to identify and associate with twee. It always has energy. Even the quieter songs have syncopation, they have satisfying melodies, they never drag.
I’m sort of trying to figure out the order of this mixtape in my head, you know, and that energy can sometimes present a sequencing problem. You can’t follow “For The Actor” with another high energy duo.
So, what other kinds of musical set ups do we typically see with twee bands? What’s kind of funny is that the majority of them seemed to have only two members or like, so many members that it was never even clear how many members there were. The Polyphonic Spree is an emblematically twee band. They all wore choir robes, they jumped around on stage, they were sort of earnest but sad in a way that was hard to parse.
Members of the band included Annie Clark, now of St. Vincent fame, who I think was once twee but kind of evolved out. Maybe she never was. It’s marginal, I guess. Her first album “Marry Me” has some songs like “Jesus Saves, I Spend” which are pretty tongue-in-cheek cutesy, but it also features “Paris is Burning” which is still one of the most menacing songs in Clark’s catalog.
OK, honestly I think Annie Clark, despite launching in the blog rock era and bearing at least some twee signifiers, doesn’t really belong here. But her old band the Polyphonic Spree had a theremin player. They are never beating the allegations.
Can I just give you one hyperspecific gripe about this song? It starts with piano and drums, and the way the semi-closed hi-hat sounds and meshes with the piano chords sounds EXACTLY to me the way a corrupted audio file sounds -- it’s giving “digital artifact.” It distracts me every time I hear the song. Like literally for years I thought the mp3 I downloaded of this song from This Recording was just a bad rip.
I’m hesitating a little bit on the idea of the robes and all that with Polyphonic Spree. I am wondering if in fact they are verging into psychedelic instead? When we think about the outer limits of twee, for sure, psychedelic is on one border, another is steampunk. I’d say The Decemberists are on the steampunk side of the border. Just barely, but they’re over there. Another border is like, just preppy, you know? Vampire Weekend is not twee, they’re preppy.
And yet — my next track for this mixtape is a song by and band called Bishop Allen — and they fall right on the twee side of the preppy/twee border. This song is called “Click, Click, Click, Click” which is one point in the twee column already. Then pretty much immediately you’ve got bells, and you’ve got a bouncy little beat, and you’re right in the pocket.
Bishop Allen illustrates something else important about twee music, which is that the lyrics are often profound or even kind of bleak. You dress up the darkness in a vintage vest and it hits a different way. I think a lot about the climax of this other Bishop Allen song called “The Monitor.” It sort of builds a metaphor for emotional self-worth out of the story of the Battle of Hampton Roads, which marked a turning point in Naval warfare.
Fun fact about this song is that it’s one of my two favorite songs about the Battle of Hampton Roads, the other one being “The Battle of Hampton Roads” by Titus Andronicus, another (decidedly untwee) song from an album that builds a metaphor for emotional self-worth and self-sabotage out of the entire Civil War. That album, not coincidentally, is called The Monitor. Something about that battle really resonated with early aughts musicians who really resonated with me, I guess!
Another band where I was never sure how many members were in the band or if it was just like a DJ project or what is a group called The Go! Team. It’s important to note that the “Go!” includes an exclamation point. Punctuation in your band name is not a hallmark exclusive to twee—after all, there is the drone/metal/experimental band Godspeed You! Black Emperor to remember and honor in this space. But it’s not a surprising thing to find in the genre we’re exploring today.
This song is familiar to many people, I have learned, as the theme song to a podcast, Jordan, Jesse, Go! To me it is the sound of my college radio station, which is where I came across this CD when it was mailed to us by the record label.
High energy, gang vocals, great song titles — all hallmarks of the genre. They also have a song I really love called “Hold Yr Terror Close.” One of the greatest song titles of all time. It’s possible that the Go! Team is actually too cool to be twee? Obviously I am not saying that twee isn’t cool, I clearly have a lot of respect for the genre. But there are tiers of cool and those tiers supersede almost every other classification on earth.
A couple more bands I wanted to touch on. Tilly and the Wall is pretty famous among my friends and family, and they caught on with everyone I knew back then because the elevator pitch of this band is one of the best of all time: what if you replaced your drummer with a tap dancer? Very twee, but also — sick as fuck. Let’s GO!!!!
We have established that the twee music of the blog rock era was very high energy, but very few bands approach the energy and fun of especially Tilly & The Wall’s first two records — Wild Like Children and Bottoms of Barrels. Even by LP2 they started integrating traditional drums, which worked, but I think they were such curious and exploratory musicians that before long they’d experienced some mission drift. Nick White, longtime member of TatW, is a musician you see featured all over the Saddle Creek records diaspora, playing with Bright Eyes, Better Oblivion Community Center, and other favorites of mine.
I could go on for a long time here. There’s a couple of girl groups who are somewhere between twee and like, “coven of witches,” like Au Revoir Simone. There are bands that came along too early for Blog Rock but clearly invented this musical style — well known bands like Belle and Sebastian, but lesser known groups like Beulah, too — there is a song I love called “Popular Mechanics for Lovers” — more great titles!
There are artists like Regina Spektor, who has twee signifiers but doesn’t really make twee music — bands like The Dresden Dolls too, but I think even trying to discuss Amanda Palmer alongside the destruction of the conventional musical economy would require like another 10,000 words.
For our last song on this list, let’s go with Los Campensinos. This song is called “You! Me! Dancing!” And for sequencing reasons we’ll actually put it first on the mixtape we’re building in our minds - the song doesn’t really start for 1:40, But it’s worth it. Listen to this.
Bells! Chaotic but simplistic arrangements! 2008! It’s kind of the quintessential twee blog rock anthem, and it gives me a great idea for a title.
For your record keeping purposes, here are my picks for the Blog Rock Lost Era Twee Bangers Mixtape:
You! Me! Dancing! By Los Campesinos.
I’m Glad I Hitched My Apple Wagon to Your Star by The Boy Least Likely To
Polyester Meets Acetate, The Brunettes
I Want To Hear What You Have Got To Say, by The Subways
Parenthesis by The Blow
For The Actor by Mates of State
Section 12: Hold Me Now by the Polyphonic Spree
Click, Click, Click, Click by Bishop Allen
Huddle Formation by The Go! Team
Fell Down the Stairs by Tilly and The Wall
Thanks for reading/listening. I am still trying to figure out exactly what to do with this substack but thought this would be fun.