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

By Marc Spitz

New York Times, Spin, and Vanity Fair contributor Marc Spitz explores the first great cultural movement since Hip Hop: an old-fashioned and yet highly modern aesthetic that’s embraced internationally by teens, twenty and thirty-somethings and even some Baby Boomers; creating hybrid generation known as Twee. Via exclusive interviews and years of research, Spitz traces Generation Twee’s roots from the Post War 50s to its dominance in popular culture today.

Vampire Weekend, Garden State, Miranda July, Belle and Sebastian, Wes Anderson, Mumblecore, McSweeney’s, Morrissey, beards, artisanal pickles, food trucks, crocheted owls on Etsy, ukuleles, kittens and Zooey Deschanel—all are examples of a cultural aesthetic of calculated precocity known as Twee.

In Twee, journalist and cultural observer Marc Spitz surveys the rising Twee movement in music, art, film, fashion, food and politics and examines the cross-pollinated generation that embodies it—from aging hipsters to nerd girls, indie snobs to idealistic industrialists. Spitz outlines the history of twee—the first strong, diverse, and wildly influential youth movement since Punk in the ’70s and Hip Hop in the ’80s—showing how awkward glamour and fierce independence has become part of the zeitgeist.

Focusing on its origins and hallmarks, he charts the rise of this trend from its forefathers like Disney, Salinger, Plath, Seuss, Sendak, Blume and Jonathan Richman to its underground roots in the post-punk United Kingdom, through the late’80s and early ’90s of K Records, Whit Stillman, Nirvana, Wes Anderson, Pitchfork, This American Life, and Belle and Sebastian, to the current (and sometimes polarizing) appeal of Girls, Arcade Fire, Rookie magazine, and hellogiggles.com.

Revealing a movement defined by passionate fandom, bespoke tastes, a rebellious lack of irony or swagger, the championing of the underdog, and the vanquishing of bullies, Spitz uncovers the secrets of modern youth culture: how Twee became pervasive, why it has so many haters and where, in a post-Portlandia world, can it go from here?

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780062213051

Book preview

Introduction

Hello Brooklyn!

Summer 2013

In which I, a fourth-generation Brooklynite, marvel at the transformation of my former home from working-class immigrant stronghold and rent haven for a few dozen pioneering artists to open-air supermarket for the privileged and precious. I then quickly dispense with shock, subjectivity, and (most) personal anecdotes in order to scientifically explore how the inhabitants of the new Brooklyn, epicenter of Twee, as well as a sort of global Brooklyn are possibly helping the world become a kinder, closer, and cooler place. Brooklyn is accomplishing this, in part by embracing artists and objects once-arcane and niche, all of which can be grouped under the vintage, transparent plastic umbrella of the often pejorative term Twee. Twee, in short, may not be all bad. For one, it’s now the most powerful youth movement since Punk and Hip-Hop. It may not be all new, either. For decades Twee has been a school of the larger catchall Indie and a home to the Indie kids who held a close bond with Hello Kitty and the Lovin’ Spoonful as well as if not in place of being versed in J. G. Ballard, the harsher end of Neil Young, and Slint. Slowly, however, Twee is growing and absorbing its Indie host. All things Twee are very Indie. All things Indie are not necessarily Twee . . . yet.

NOTE: When Indie is referred to in this book, it’s on the gentler rim of the spectrum of tone and mood ranging from sunny to pitch-black: from the upbeat Free to Be You and Me soundtrack to the dour Needle in the Hay sequence in The Royal Tenenbaums.

At times, the story of the rise of Twee will be anecdotal; the making of a Twee-seminal album (the Smiths’ self-titled debut, Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk) or a film (Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming) or key literary works (The Catcher in the Rye, The Diary of a Young Girl, The Bell Jar, the McSweeney’s titles) that changed minds and, eventually, common behavior on a grander and grander scale. Other times, the chronicles of Twee-nia will simply consist of the charting of struggle and progress; the slow transporting of the Twee ethos (bullying is bad, perennials are good, so are Christmas and owls) out of the bedroom and into the streets. Technological advances and new ideas (YouTube as the modern diary) or even the rise of an Epicurean notion (there’s more to pickles than green food coloring and a pinch of dill) will be considered as well.

I will chart a half century of pop cultural revolution from the postwar ’50s to the present; gentle at first, but now seemingly unstoppable. I will also, hopefully, provide you with a satisfying, funny, and educational read that may even inspire some questions along the lines of, Wait a minute? Am I Twee? And if so, do I need help? (If you do, there are some useful lists at the end of the text.)

They line up by the cash machines outside the asphalt yard of the Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School on Clermont Avenue. A Gothic structure, it stands across from the 108-year-old Masonic Temple, which now occasionally hosts Indie-rock shows organized by the Masonic Boom collective. The young men here mostly have mustaches, some waxed and twisted into spiny points. Others have thick lumberjack beards that are also carefully groomed. They’re all skinny but seem somehow out of shape and slow, like koala bears. The women wear little makeup. Many have cut their hair in the pixie style that suggests Jean Seberg or have grown out bangs to evoke Anna Karina, Julie Christie, and other ’60s film stars. They wear vintage granny dresses with Doc Martens and a discreet amount of black eyeliner, or loose, carefully worn-in tees, some silk-screened with the faces of other vintage legends: Hanoi Jane–era Fonda or the young, snappish Bob Dylan circa Don’t Look Back.

Outside the fences, draped with tattered flags, faded school banners, or burgundy-and-gold faux Moroccan tapestries, there are opportunists on these grounds too. They’re simply selling ice-cold water. These Brooklynites make no fashion statements and thus seem decades older than their customers even when they are contemporaries.

A scattering of eco-Punks distributes flyers from their worn canvas satchels. This literature contains tips and scoldings and general instructions for saving Brooklyn, which increasingly means saving the world. The tourists bear this out. They’ve journeyed, thousands of them every season, from Japan, Germany, France, Brazil, and Iceland, all drawn to this lot and others like it. Since 2001, the number of visits to New York City has increased from around 35 million annually to nearly 53 million, with a large percentage who might not have even considered a trip to Brooklyn a decade ago now making Manhattan their second destination; hence luxury hotels like the chic but bohemian Wythe, a converted waterfront factory, opening in Williamsburg. Brooklyn has become not just a borough of New York City but rather an idea, an aesthetic, a selling device, an industry, and a dream of some kind of global Narnia where everyone has the right books, clothes, shoes, records, cookies, and pickles. Everyone is young and most of the young are Twee.

There are similar marketplaces like the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Flea all over the world. In 2013, one no longer has to be in Brooklyn—the borough, the county, the former hood—to be in Brooklyn. Austin is Brooklyn. In fact, some argue that Austin was Brooklyn before Brooklyn was Brooklyn, but lackadaisical or just plain mellow, the weird Texas hamlet never really had the right fuck-you attitude and Eastern drive to lead a culture-penetrating charge (most of us have seen Slacker). Parts of Chicago and L.A. (Silver Lake, Echo Park, Highland Park) are now Brooklyn. Paris is Brooklyn. Among young Parisians, there is currently no greater praise for cuisine than très Brooklyn, a term that signifies a particularly cool combination of informality, creativity, and quality," wrote the New York Times’s Julia Moskin in 2012 in a feature about the kind of food trucks that line the back of this yard like a smoky, meaty, or vegan convoy, smelling of curry and mint and brisket and steaming rice. In Egypt and Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, the young want their Brooklyn too. And both Brooklyn and Brooklyn keep Twee and its designs, chief among them the freedom (and often the daring) to be soft in an increasingly hard world, alive and thriving.

When the late Apple visionary Steve Jobs envisioned a sort of global, utopian, design-driven planet where all are connected no matter what religion, creed, gender, province, or class one belongs to, he was tapping into a sort of scale model of the current Brooklyn in which Mose Allison, Animal Collective, and Drake live in harmony in the cloud, and gluten-free vanilla whiskey biscotti or a cavalry hat made from repurposed felt are status symbols because of their purity, are in because of their outré status, desirable and marketable because they deserve to be; because they are good. We aren’t quite there yet, not completely. There are imposters, knockoffs, and faux Brooklyn crafts. The old divides remain as well. All one needs to do is jog up out of the subway exit and onto the street, under the giant mural of slain rapper and old Brooklyn saint Biggie Smalls, to instantly detect these schisms in the new, hyper-gentrified Brooklyn.

Jobs died of cancer in October of 2011 before really learning whether this color- and class-blind vision could possibly hold. (It still remains to be seen.) Biggie never lived to see what happened to the corners where he used to sell crack and battle-rhyme. The realities of life inside the Twee model for the world are complicated. Today, most street Brooklynites are college educated, white, and affluent, or at least middle class, with semidisposable incomes, or at least enough cash on hand to search for a Galaxie 500 album on vinyl rather than simply downloading (or stealing) it. I personally think of the modern Indie aesthetic as a lifestyle, says Tamara Winfrey Harris, a writer and blogger who has explored this divide with humor and frankness on her blog What Tami Said. It relates to people with a lot of time on their hands to ride around on bikes with giant wheels and stick birds on things. There would be a cost to a black man or a black woman walking around in holey clothes they got in vintage stores. That’s not to say black men in suits aren’t rousted in stop and frisk, she adds of the city’s controversial policy of randomly targeting its citizens regardless of whether or not they have committed or are about to commit a crime. But you are probably increasing your chances [if you are wearing vintage clothes].

Few speak as openly of the divide between class and race, but on a bright, hot Saturday in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, it’s certainly detectable. A middle-aged African-American man in a sweat-soaked navy T-shirt (sans 1960s icon or personal statement about loving bacon) has set up a pile of old issues of Jet, Ebony, and Vibe magazines to sell on the sidewalk.

Nineties, man! Nineties! You got it! he says, hoping to impress a group of bemused white kids in thick glasses as they pass. Retro! They don’t stop. They’re on their way to the aforementioned cash machine and then to the Flea, to browse coffee mugs etched with ducks, owls, squirrels, and foxes; old green glass Coke bottles; hatboxes printed with violets and daisies; fake-fur cropped jackets; and wind-up, spark-spitting King Kong, Godzilla, and Creature from the Black Lagoon toys. I wonder, in my darker nights of the soul, Am I writing a book for well-off white people? But I press on and remind myself that to even question that is part of the problem. Twee, like Punk and Hip-Hop, no matter who pioneered it, is at its best pure and open, a meritocracy and a good party. This is why it’s lasted. Profile the aesthetic, tell the history, and you will be okay. Still, it’s hard to ignore that many of these old brownstones and apartment complexes used to belong to working-class, nonwhite families. Greenpoint used to be a real, livable neighborhood with low rents that attracted first immigrants and then pioneering artists. Now it attracts the arty, and the next few waves of artists savvy enough to feed their need for all things Twee. The divide can cause fleeting moments of discomfort during an otherwise idyllic weekend outing. Some of these new residents stand fascinated by a local wood-carver’s booth. He’s set out a plastic sign indicating that he will happily accept Visa, AmEx, MasterCard, and Discover for his decorative whittled logs. Brooklyn has simply boomed, and few booms are graceful or without collateral damage. The number of business establishments in Kings County grew from around 37,000 in 1998 to nearly 50,000 in 2011. Since 1990, the population has increased by nearly 300,000 with a whopping 222,842 falling between twenty-five and twenty-nine years of age. Of Kings County’s 2.5 million residents, according to Census Bureau data, nearly 50 percent are white. Nearly a quarter of the population is under eighteen. One is almost assaulted by the youth energy upon hitting the street, and the pockets of Old Brooklyn need and fatigue become things the mind can sometimes yearn to bypass.

Williamsburg and Greenpoint replaced the East Village, says the droll and bold Brooklyn-based writer Jonathan Ames, one of those pilgrims who in the early 1990s moved to the still quiet, affordable family neighborhood just one subway stop from East Fourteenth Street in Lower Manhattan. The streets of Williamsburg were desolate after ten P.M. back then. Some of them smelled like gasoline, or burning chemicals. There was no view of Manhattan across the East River because massive, often abandoned Gothic factories obscured it. No developers had yet built the skyscraper condos that now edge the shore. "When the real estate developers gave artists these cheap lofts they were chumming the waters. ‘We’ll let artists live here and at some point a really cool café will open up and then the New York Times will write about that really cool café,’ Ames says. After a while, if you said, ‘I’m moving to DUMBO,’ they wouldn’t think you were moving there because you wanted to be in an art scene. You just wanted to be where all the restaurants and bars and young people are living."

The tall, gleaming condos lay empty and spooky for much of George W. Bush’s second presidential term and well into Obama’s first. I recall a sold-out Belle and Sebastian concert on the waterfront in late September of 2010 that basically took place in their shadow and seemed stranger for it. Here was a Twee superband that personified the new Brooklyn, playing their ballads and jaunty rock for an adoring crowd, but backdropped by ghost towers. With the election of President Obama in 2008 and the return of optimism, these haunted houses began to fill up, as did Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg’s main thoroughfare, as crowded on a weekend afternoon as Times Square or Piccadilly. The pilgrims came back with a vengeance. Just as it was after the Second World War, we got a big scare with 9/11, and in the wake, all we wanted—us Westerners anyway—was youth, beauty, and food that made us feel special for selecting it.

TV got a lot better. So did hot sauce. It’s going to make your mouth happy, a woman hawking probiotic hot sauce promises to passersby inside the yard. Did probiotic hot sauce exist five years ago, when there was talk of another Great Depression? The Bush era aged us all, and some of us before our time. It enervated the actual young, and made the aging older before their time. Once it finally concluded, young and youngish Americans seemed to be determined to get their lost innocence back with a vengeance; even the thirty-somethings and young boomers wanted to reclaim some youth taken by fear and war and truthiness and . . . more fear. I’m into this woodworking stuff, the mysterious Adam (Adam Driver) says during a rare and revealing moment from HBO’s award-winning comedy Girls. Most days, as imagined by creator Lena Dunham, he’s a cool customer, but clearly there’s a part of his soul that is crying out for beauty and truth. Adam, who drinks milk like an infant, constantly and compulsively, is searching for the right way to grow up.

Some Narnias are not full of industrious souls. Rather, they are otherworlds, which simply enchant without stoking the urge to collect and consume. They’re fantastical, mostly fictional. In Brooklyn and Brooklyn (the real world, if you will) you have to purchase the snow and the creatures and the experience itself. While it might seem folly to some, this retail-happy land is not without its share of genuinely inspired inventors. Among these aesthetes is the clever soul who has penetrated the lid of an old-fashioned glass mason jar and welded a metal straw to the top for sipping. It’s not the lightbulb, the combustion engine, or the silicon chip, but America doesn’t make these things anymore. What we produce is . . . Brooklyn. It’s our greatest export to the world right now, the way Hollywood was a half century ago and Silicon Valley was three decades later.

Another vendor has set out a basket of quills. They’re glossy and long and, upon first glance, one can imagine someone writing a poem with them, dipping the tips into ink. I haven’t decided what to do with them yet, she says. I’m just selling them. Sometimes I stick them through my hair.

Pursuing youth and beauty can be dangerous too. There are children, again mostly white, in shorts and sneakers, snapping off those old firecrackers against the asphalt, one after the next—Pop! Pop! Pop!—and cackling gleefully. Some are plucking rubber noses and wax lips from rough wood bins on the ground, and it occurs to me that they are acting the same as the adults around them who are looking for their initials among the rusted metal letters or inquiring about how the cucumber-mint lemonade comes together, percentage wise.

There’s much less interest from certain members of the young African-American community in joining, says Winfrey Harris, whose blog often deconstructs issues of popular culture and race, in posing as Twee, and not growing up.

The actual children are the whimsy-obsessed offspring of a largely unchallenged generation. This generation used to be called X. Then came Y, or the Millennials. Today they’ve all combined, even along with some late-cusp baby boomers, and fused into some kind of multiheaded Generation Twee, or Twee Tribe, all the while breeding ever-gentler boys and girls with epicurean taste and a love for the formerly obscure and the baroque. To many this hydra is a serious threat to culture.

Chiefly derogatory, warns the Oxford English Dictionary before defining the word twee as excessively affected, quaint, pretty, or sentimental. It’s derived from the sound of a small child attempting to say the word sweet. Imagine a three-year-old pointing at a rosebush and observing, Flower smells twee! Now imagine a twenty-five-year-old man saying the same, or a sixty-year-old grandfather. Now imagine him dressed like a vested, precocious Truman Capote in 1948. Who wouldn’t want to punch that guy in the ear?

But there may be virtue here as well, fighting to be noticed as the class and racial divides are slowly parsed and hopefully one day eliminated. Twee, captial T, like Punk, captial P, is not merely a fashion statement or what Winfrey Harris correctly labeled a lifestyle. It is all of those things, but only in the same reductive way that Punk was about three chords, torn tees, safety pins, and giving an old person the reverse victory salute. But Punk was also about freedom, as Kurt Cobain famously stated, and Twee can be similarly liberating from the pressure to be cool, swaggering, aggressively macho, and old at heart.

There’s an intrinsic value and appeal, the writer Simon Reynolds says today of the movement’s prevalent style and ethic. Beyond saying it’s class bound or race bound, there are intrinsic values and appeals to it. A handcrafting aesthetic is probably nicer than buying things at Target. The idea of being sensitive. The idea of guys not being dicks. The good outweighs the bad as an option or a way of being in the world and seeing yourself. I see the appeal of it. But it gets cutesy-fied. I went to an Etsy-type fair some months ago and there seems to be a big move from owls to narwhals, those whales with horns. Narwhals seem to be appearing on a lot of T-shirts, whereas the previous year it was owls. It does get a bit Twee. You can’t get around that.

Like the most enduring youth movements, it’s also strongly political; whether it pertains to preservation of a threatened methodology or the championing of green business acumen or simply pushing back against the pricks—virtually all Twee heroes, fictional and real, from Dumbo the flying elephant to Calvin Johnson (the monkish Indie label head) to Morrissey (arguably the King of Twee) to, most recently, Casey Heynes (the Australian teenager who body-slammed a menacing classmate and became a YouTube superstar after a lifetime of suffering for being shy and overweight) and Zooey Deschanel (the self-styled Queen of Twee), make their bones confronting cruelty, sometimes even as they inspire backlashes and voilence by nature of their very preciusness and often proud punchability.

When I was twelve years old I put on my velour jacket and I wrote with my fountain pen—in my Moleskine notebook, which I had before it was cool—‘Haters gonna hate,’ says actor and author John Hodgman, only half joking, and I knew I was onto something. We are now in the era when the free-range, organically fed chickens have come home to roost.

Where there’s an ethos and an ideal, there’s going to be resistance. Twee yearns to welcome a spectrum: all professions, ages, types, and there is a growing awareness that if its reforms are to continue and the movement is to thrive and last, like Punk or Hip-Hop, it will have to address these issues of race and class. Its ethics, however, have remained concrete:

*  Beauty over ugliness.

*  A sharp, almost incapacitating awareness of darkness, death, and cruelty, which clashes with a steadfast focus on our essential goodness.

*  A tether to childhood and its attendant innocence and lack of greed.

*  The utter dispensing with of cool as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin.

*  A healthy suspicion of adulthood.

*  An interest in sex but a wariness and shyness when it comes to the deed.

*  A lust for knowledge, whether it’s the sequence of an album, the supporting players in an old Hal Ashby or Robert Altman film, the lesser-known Judy Blume books, or how to grow the perfect purple, Italian, or Chinese eggplant or orange cauliflower.

*  The cultivation of a passion project, whether it’s a band, a zine, an Indie film, a website, or a food or clothing company. Whatever it is, in the eye of the Twee it is a force of good and something to live for.

These are the values that redeem the true Twee and separate them from the poseurs and hypocrites and weekenders and bad apples and, most egregiously, the cynics, who buy and sell bootleg versions of the aesthetic. A testament to the strength of Twee as a modern movement is the sheer volume of carpetbaggers eager to unload a version of it and the well-meaning, perhaps naïve souls who, knowingly or not, abet them.

The buyer of $9 jam, after all, isn’t another maker of $9 jam, the writer Benjamin Wallace pointed out in a New York magazine feature on the rise of this culture, The Twee Party, published in the spring of 2012. It’s the guy whose multinational robotic assembly line spits out jars of $1 jam. Or it’s his trustafarian son, the Global Jam Logistics heir. Or it’s the private-equity guy who just off-shored GJL to a sweatshop in Bangalore, Wallace writes. Seventies Punk and eighties Hip-Hop were street-hardened and suspicious youth movements. Indeed, Twee is often a too-trusting movement, where the well meaning sometimes do not equal the well informed, those business starter-uppers who have not read Small Is Beautiful, the British economist E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 bible for conscientious and eco-minded business decorum. For every genuinely conscientious Warby Parker, there are plenty of wolves out there in their Warby Parker–style nerd spectacles, emboldened by the voracious desire for curator culture. Thrift suddenly becomes vintage and anything edible can fall under the hard-to confirm-but irresistible term artisanal. The microsuspicions of purity feed the macrosuspicion some hold for Twee; it’s simply too lousy with frauds and impossible to truly purify or regulate. This, again, is no new battle.

For the rich countries, they say, the most important task now is ‘education for leisure,’ Schumacher writes (again, forty years ago!), and, for the poor countries, the ‘transfer of technology.’ As the world is Brooklynized will it truly be so, or will we make what Schumacher calls the suicidal error of assuming that so long as a product appears artisanal, it’s all good? The illusion of unlimited powers, nourished by astonishing scientific and technological achievements, has produced the concurrent illusion of having solved the problem of production. Shilling and collecting faster does nature no favors and remains part of the suicidal error.

Take the classic Brooklyn Without Limits episode of the sitcom 30 Rock. Here, Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon is briefly enchanted by Brooklyn Zack, a mystery utopian who throws pool parties in Dumpsters and, more important, cuts affordable jeans that make her ass look fantastic. Big business is what’s screwing up this country, Lemon tells her mentor, the realist Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin). I live like a cowboy by buying quality locally made jeans [and] also eating beans out of a can due to impatience. This exchange perfectly captures the sense of cheap outlaw fix one gets from weekending in what was once a genuine bohemia. Lemon is quickly disabused of the notion that stores like this are saving the world when Donaghy reveals that Brooklyn Without Limits (a sort of stand-in for American Apparel) crafts its canvas messenger bags from unused waterboarding hoods and is secretly owned by evil empire Halliburton. Lemon must choose between her true personal/political values and the intoxicating smells and temptations of Brooklandia. She chooses the truth.

We are told that gigantic organizations are inescapably necessary, Schumacher writes, but when we look closely we notice that as soon as great size has been created there is often a strenuous attempt to attain smallness within bigness. Such will be the Zen-like challenge for the jam maker as we head toward what may literally become an endless summer. The gaint banking corporations that sponsor public bike exchanges are part of both the problem and the solution as we strive for some/equilibrium, or kind of Tweequilibrium.

But let’s briefly, and happily, return to the books and records, since that, not fruit preserves or locally fished sea critters, is the real food for the modern tribal Twee—and again, it is a tribe, the Twee Tribe, not a singular generation. It has its elders and its newbies, and this strength in numbers has placed it above other subsets of the macro Indie or a kind of Perma-Punk; dubious offshoots like Sea Punk, Steampunk, or with regard to Hip-Hop, Gangsta Rap, or Booty Bass Rap. All Twee is one.

Naturally trusting (or yearning to be trusting) as it is, the Twee Tribe has already proven to be a very tricky one, perhaps the trickiest of them all, to join. Unlike Punk or Hip-Hop, an aspiring tribal Twee cannot get there simply via haircut or by turning one’s baseball cap around. You have to read . . . a lot . . . and, generally, alone. You have to make friends with your Crosley suitcase turntable and record collection, your Criterion Collection, your 33 ⅓ books, and your cut-out-and-pasted photos of dead film stars and authors. Simply taking yourself outside of society isn’t enough. Once outside, you have to actually study. Twees cannot kick with the fray unless they carry a lot of cultural history in their heads, or at least on their devices: they are Jeopardy! contestants, boning up on Felt, the Swell Maps, Judee Sill, Anne Sexton, Michel Gondry, Peanuts, Roald Dahl, and The Phantom Tollbooth. And you don’t only have to know those bands and books and filmmakers; you have to formulate an aesthetic around them. Take Belle and Sebastian’s leader Stuart Murdoch. Handsome, pale, and vastly talented, Murdoch is a Gen Twee icon and one of those courageous, sensitive, perhaps too-smart figures we will chronicle farther along in these pages. In the mid-1990s, the Glaswegian dreamer was recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome and had to drop out of school and literally move back into his childhood bedroom. When you’re down and out, what you want is escapism, Murdoch told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 2005. At the period of time there was a core of groups in music that I listened to that took me somewhere else. And then I got very much into certain filmmakers as well. But then there reached a point where I wanted more escapism and more fantasy, and that’s when I started to invent it for myself.

To listen to the audio commentary on a Blu-ray of a Wes Anderson film (he is another soul we will meet along the way here) is to enter a sort of confessional booth in which the director cops to shots he’s stolen from dead heroes. This book will create a canon of sorts, and nearly every person mentioned will have a sharp awareness of other, sometimes greater canons. They aren’t randomly chosen or reliant on coincidence or expediency or even the cosmic (perhaps I shouldn’t point out that Holden Caulfield’s middle name happens to be Morrisey, one S shy of the former Smiths’ lead singer’s handle). Many are connected either directly (Peanuts animator Bill Melendez, one of Wes Anderson’s heroes, got his start at the early Disney studios, working on marvels like Fantasia) or via a shared approach, with an adeptness at making original art from the sum of their influences—their imaginary friends and unmet heroes, as it were. Murdoch, Anderson, Dave Eggers, Andrew Bujalski, Miranda July, and, before them, Salinger, Schulz, Sendak, Gorey, Godard, Plath, the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, the Buzzcocks, Andy Kaufman, the Raincoats, the Smiths, They Might Be Giants, Whit Stillman, and Kurt Cobain are all unique and all precocious, impressionable, and, in this writer’s reading, utterly, irrepressibly Twee. They are a kind of heroes’ gallery of pajama people whose work will speak truth to the actually young and spiritually young for all time. They are sad Punks, scared Punks, angry nerds, violent femmes, bedroom sitters, undaunted idealists, and raggedy aesthetes, and they all share another aspect: lots of people hate them.

Even with regard to its artists, films, albums, and literature, and not merely its adherents in their cardigans, nobody is ambivalent about Twee. One either loves Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker’s wry take on the 1930s gangster film with its all-child-actor cast talking like hoodlums and dames (the Tommy guns shoot whipped cream) and its jaunty, speakeasy score by diminutive Twee pop icon Paul Williams, or you think it’s an enervating and endless cutesy-poo. Similarly, a young Michael Jackson’s nasal, clueless rendition of the melancholy, world-weary Sinatra classic It Was a Very Good Year (from the Diana Ross television special when Jackson was barely a teen) is either adorable or insufferable. Again, children