Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film

Rob Sheffield (RS): Where does twee come from?

Marc Spitz (MS): Long answer: Twee, the aesthetic, is born during and just after World War Two. Its key figures saw combat and cruelty and destruction. They were scarred by it but not broken. They responded with creativity and sometimes whimsy. I m speaking of Disney, who was overseas during World War One and made films to rally the troops during the Second World War. So did Theodore Geisel aka Dr. Seuss. And Salinger, maybe the most influential Twee figure, who was a solider and saw the horrors of both combat and the camps and later suffered a nervous breakdown. These are the godfathers of the movement, the ones who responded to horror and pain with creativity. Short answer: Brooklyn. Just kidding.

RS: Your last book, Poseur, documented your rock & roll youth in gloriously excruciating and hilarious detail. Is writing a book about twee a continuation of that project? Is there something autobiographical about Twee?

MS: It's funny because I knew I would be going from one book into the next and it was kind of like going from the dark into the light. I knew there'd be Steiff bears and Sundays records waiting for me at the break of the forest if I could only avoid being eaten by my Elliott Smith LPs (or bears). I had the Twee gene, put it that way, but I also had, like yourself, the reporter gene so I had to hope the latter was dominant.

RS: Why has twee become such a defining style for our moment in history? What s so twee about the 21st century?

MS: A few things, really: the world got scary on Election night 2000 and then scarier and scarier and sadder and it kind of drove us into a sort of collective bedroom. And our laptop cameras became our diaries, and our books and records our friends and ways of coping. Then there's the marketing aspect. I write about the famous VW Cabriolet commercial that features Nick Drake's "Pink Moon," in the book. It's not much of a jump from that to the Garden State and Juno soundtracks winning Grammys and going platinum. Cool got uncool once the Strokes started to disappoint. Finally there's a real estate issue, which is not exclusive to Brooklyn. It became to expensive to live and make art in as Jeff Daniels would say in The Squid and the Whale "the filets of the neighborhood" so you find enclaves and parties and cafes and ultimately the Times and tourists outside and a lot of these artists are not "city hip" so it seems like twee is spreading.

RS: Who are some of the greatest heroes and icons in twee history?

MS: The aforementioned Disney, Salinger, Seuss, the Eames-es, James Dean (compared to Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum etc.), Capote or Capote's literary alter egos (early), Ray Davies, Brian Wilson, Godard, Jean Seberg, The Velvet Underground (esp. when Mo sings) Jonathan Richman, Prince (early), Judy Blume, Roald Dahl, Maurice Sendak, Edwyn Collins, Morrissey, Stipe (early), Calvin Johnson, it goes on and on through Wes Anderson and Zooey Deschanel, who is probably the last great Twee icon.

RS: What is the future of twee? Will there ever be a moment where we see the end of twee as we know it?

MS: You'll notice that most of the people I named above are not minorities. I think like Punk and Hip Hop for a movement to really stick it has to be more inclusive with regard to both race and gender and class. I think the hubbub over season one of Girls was actually a good thing. Lena Dunham addressed it straight on. Twee has been building for about a half century and has just peaked so it's hard to say where it's going. Short answer: To Brooklyn.