Pop/Rock » Alternative/Indie Rock » Twee Pop

Twee Pop is perhaps best likened to bubblegum indie rock -- it's music with a spirit of D.I.Y. defiance in the grand tradition of punk, but with a simplicity and innocence not seen or heard since the earliest days of rock & roll. Twee pop traces its origins to 1986, the year the British weekly NME issued a cassette dubbed C-86, which included a number of bands -- McCarthy, the Wedding Present, Primal Scream, the Pastels, and the Bodines among them -- influenced in equal measure by the jangly guitar pop of the Smiths, the three-chord naivete of the Ramones, and the nostalgic sweetness of the girl group era. Also dubbed "anorak pop" and "shambling" by the British press, the C-86 movement was itself short-lived, but it influenced hordes of upcoming bands on both sides of the Atlantic who absorbed the scene's key lessons of simplicity and honesty to stunning effect, resulting in music -- given the universal label of twee pop -- whose hallmarks included boy-girl harmonies, lovelorn lyrics, infectious melodies, and simple, unaffected performances. In the U.K., the hub of the twee-pop scene was for many years the now-legendary Sarah label, home of groups including the Field Mice, Heavenly, and the Orchids; upon Sarah's demise, its founders created a new label, Shinkansen. In the U.S., the twee-pop scene took root most notably in the Olympia, WA area, the home of K Records, a label owned and operated by Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson.