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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Yearning for the glory of pop's faded eras, Kindercore and the twee world celebrate rock 'n' roll without the sex and drugs. A report from Expo 2000 Athens.
Aug 31, 2000 | If you're not of a certain age or social subset -- as director Hal Hartley once put it, "white, middle-class, college-educated" and on and on -- you might not know a thing about this thing called twee. And if you're not obsessed by music, obscurantist, willfully infantile and smitten with all things Japanese, you probably don't even care.
But this loose subculture lives among you, in English-speaking countries and abroad (especially in Spain and Japan). Twee music and the twee lifestyle -- such as there is one -- are a refutation of all that we know about rock 'n' roll. For twee kids, who use the term with equal parts reverie, disdain and cheek, the subculture doesn't really have anything to do with actually, you know, rebelling or anything. Twee kids listen to an emasculated version of rock 'n' roll. They don't care much for sex or drugs. They favor puppy love over scary sex, prefer Japanese candy over beer and pot and like looking at postcards instead of going out into an intimidating, rainy world.
They clad themselves in tight T-shirts with "Brady Bunch" stripes and mix-and-match corduroy. They wear unfortunate bedhead hairstyles and thick glasses rescued, almost always, from the bottom of a cardboard box at the local Lenscrafters.
Twee kids are a lot like the punk rockers before them, but you could say that twee, since its erstwhile inception in the '80s, has always rebelled against punk. Back then, cornerstone twee acts like the Smiths and Marine Girls (an outfit featuring Tracey Thorn, who went on to become the singer in Everything But the Girl) eschewed the gutteral reactionism of punk in favor of the sweetness and light (and yes, craft) of naive '60s pop groups such as the Mamas and the Papas or the Association. At the same time, twee cops several of punk's do-it-yourself moves: There are twee magazines, twee all-ages shows, twee record labels and twee local music scenes filled with bands that can't really play their instruments -- or at the very least, bands that aspire to radically unlearn what has gone immediately before them.
And in that radical unlearning, that nostalgia for the great pop eras of the past, there's the one major and defining difference between punk and twee: Twee kids love Mom and Dad. In fact, if they could, they'd stay with them forever. I've seen several twee shows at family homes. Twee kids, instead of defining themselves against their parents, embrace a Jonathan Richman worldview: The Old World was better; love was pure and, more than that, less confusing.
Today, Belle and Sebastian, the dainty Scottish pop band, are the Beatles of twee, and their influence looms large over just about every group in the subgenre.
The Kindercore record label is the biggest purveyor of twee music and happiness in the United States. First an Athens, Ga., label, then a New York one and then very shortly thereafter based in Athens again, Kindercore enjoys a generous patronage through a manufacturing deal with California's Emperor Norton label and, as a result, has put out more high-quality twee product, pound for pound, than probably any of its competitors worldwide: March Records, Siesta (based in Spain), Matinee and a handful of others.
And there's apparently an audience for it, although it's hard to tell unless you do the books for an independent record store. Besides Belle and Sebastian, whose last record debuted in the '80s on the Billboard chart, no twee band moves the number of records it would take to, say, be even mildly attractive to a major label. But if you put all the bands into a genre, they can earn a small pile of cash for a little record store, just as punk bands do by hobbling along on word of mouth. In terms of whether twee bands and labels register on SoundScan, the service that tracks record sales, well, they don't. Moneywise, it isn't very much. But then again, the rock underground has rarely made millions for anyone until it ceased being underground.
And that's exactly why Kindercore was able to pull off Expo 2000 Athens, a five-day celebration of the label's take on twee. With 50 releases in all, Kindercore is big enough to have something like this and know that people will come to it, but still small enough to know that it'll know most of the folks who do.
That's because Kindercore, like so many of its successful punk and twee predecessors, keeps close tabs on fans. The Kindercore expo, with its $30 passes, was as much about thanking those 300 or so fans as it was about celebrating its own achievements (neither of the label's co-heads is even close to being out of the 20s) and showing off some new signings. All told, 30 bands played over the five nights, all but one of which were held at Athens' legendary 40 Watt Club -- the same club (although now in a different location) where bands like R.E.M., Pylon and the B-52's put Athens on the map more than 15 years ago. Of the 30 bands, roughly half hailed from or had significant ties to Athens. That made the Athens of Expo 2000 a rare sight in rock 'n' roll: a faded boomtown booming once again. The coffee shop a few doors down from the 40 Watt bore a handwritten sign, knowingly saying, "Welcome Indie Rockers!"
The four nights of music I attended revealed a group of awkward, beat-phobic kids getting turned on to what most of us in the world of pop music have known for a while: Dance music is really fun! They also demonstrated a label on the cusp of growing out of its Garanimals, and bittersweetly relishing every minute of it. Because as much as Kindercore's pop jones invites dinky, jangly twee bands, it was only a matter of time before the label invited in featherweight pop as a whole. And from the crowd, it looked like Kindercore at long last was stretching out its hands and accepting what it for so long had hinted at: a genuine love for pop in all its forms.
