When I was a teenager I noticed that my tastes in music was different than my peers, when britpop died. I tended to lean towards more gentle sounding bands such as Belle and Sebastian, my fave track on The White Stripes White Blood Cells album was We are going to be Friends and did I ever play the first Aberfeldy and Hidden Cameras albums to death. Not too mention the band that changed the way I looked at music: Beat Happening
Later on I gravitated towards films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , Donnie Darko and of course The Royal Tennenbaums.
Later on I realised that this type of music is called Twee and that this genre extends beyond the music and encapsulates films and fashion, a whole attitude really and Marc Spitz’s Twee explains this phenomenon in great detail. Starting from Buddy Holly and the French New Wave to Vampire Weekend and the films of Wes Anderson. It’s all told lovingly and with tons of passion, and more importantly Spitz manages to say something new about twee music, film and fashion and I learnt a few new things in the process.
Unfortunately Spitz died last February and it would have been interesting to see what he thought of twee culture four years after this book was published and besides writing non fiction he was a novelist and a playwright. Twee was also the last piece of work that got published so as a legacy this book is quite a fitting one.
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