The New Weird Generation (part 1)

In the documentary The Eternal Children (see also ‘CocoRosie’ ), Antony Hegarty, lead singer of the pop ensemble Antony and the Johnsons, perceives the waning of a postmodern sensibility, and the rise of something else.

I think this is a more wake period in culture. That was a horrible period. You know, the early nineties, you had like Kurt Cobain. The only thing that could manage to break through that wall was this scream of depression and rage that was Kurt Cobain. But other than that, what was there? Things sort of radically diversified after the new millennium. […] Suddenly, there was this frolicking group of outrageously colourful young people with their eyes wide open. But not like naïve, but almost emerging from a basic need to survive and to live… […] There was something very primary and very beautiful about what they were doing, and creating spaces that had the potential for hope to exist in them. […] It’s not cynical, that’s the thing.

Indeed, something has drastically changed since the beginning of the new millennium. Something, or someone, managed to break through ‘that wall’ - without screaming or raging (as grunge did in the early nineties), or without becoming apathetic (as punk did in the late seventies and eighties). During the past decade a generation emerged that does not turn to anger or defeatism, but instead seeks to create alternate spaces for hope and desire. This generation reflects a cultural shift, a shift from a period of cynicism towards a more ‘wake period’, as Antony tends to describe it. I am talking, of course, about the latest folk revival in western history mostly referred to as free-, NU- or freak folk. A musical genre that is exemplary the rising of the New Weird Generation and (it’s) New Romanticism.

Antony wasn’t the only one though sensing the end of postmodernism in popular music. As early as 2003, Scottish music journalist David Keenan prophesised the emergence of a generation that no longer shares the postmodern attitude. In an article on a two-day music festival held at a cotton mill in the wooded area of Brattleboro, Vermont – the Brattleboro Free Folk Fest – Keenan introduced his readers to the rise of the New Weird America: ‘a groundswell musical movement rising out of the USA’s backwoods [l]oosely called free folk’. With the term New Weird America he referred to the making of a counter culture in the early sixties of the 20th century, when among artists such as Bob Dylan (and The Band), John Fahey and Joan Baez there was a communal counter movement that occurred in reaction to the Vietnam war and excessive capitalism. Just as in Brattleboro, the heart of this counter culture was formed by folk music inspired by the American ‘hillbilly’ and ‘blues’ tradition once recorded by ethnomusicologist and mystic Harry Smith on his still legendary album An Anthology Of American Folk Music. In Invisible Republic (1998) music journalist Greil Marcus called this tradition Old, Weird America.

So, what is New Weird America?

Henrik Vibskov

The Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov doesn’t like to be pigeonholed. Besides designing four collections a year for both men and women, Vibskov plays drums in the live band of electronic musician Trentemøller and is part of The Fringe Project, together with visual artist Andreas Emenius. Everything Henrik Vibskov does has only one goal: to create his own surreal universe where the sky is the limit. Vibskov, a true romantic at heart who only applied to the fashion design course at Central Saint Martins because a girl he fancied was going there, finds his inspiration in Nordic folk traditions and childhood memories of his hometown in Jutland, Denmark. But it’s never just about the clothes with Henrik Vibskov; to present his collections he creates extravagant narratives, filling catwalks with bicycles, wooden boats, shiny boobies, humongous hamster wheels and black carrots, like a little boy’s fantasy that has come to life. His style is best described as whimsical and quirky, with show titles as The Fantabulous Bicycle Music Factory (SS08), The Human Laundry Service (AW 09/10) and The Last Pier Pandemonium (SS11) that sound like Roald Dahl stories. Vibskov’s world looks like it’s made of Lego with colorful designs that sometimes seem to belong in the circus instead of on the catwalk, but they never stop being wearable, they never completely lose touch with reality.

Image: Henrik Vibskov's Big Wet Shiny Boobies collection (SS07)

Video: Henrik Vibskov's The Human Laundry Service collection (AW 09/10)

CocoRosie

“To engage with CocoRosie requires absolute suspension of disbelief”, The Guardian once wrote about the sister-duo CocoRosie. Anyone who has been to one of their live shows or has seen The Eternal Children, a documentary on the so-called freak folk movement made by Dutch filmmaker David Kleijwegt, knows exactly what The Guardian is talking about. Bianca and Sierra Casady live in a dream world, populated by elves, unicorns, fairies and other dreamlike creatures. This can be tiring at times and I learned the hard way that you’d best restrict yourself to the records and not visit live shows. But when you do succeed in suspending that disbelief, when you get past all that gibberish about elves and whatnot, CocoRosie can be magical. With their junk-shop kiddie instruments, the angelic voice of Sierra and the childlike squealing of Bianca CocoRosie creates her own nursery rhymes, blending hip hop and opera along the way. And although they might seem innocent, their songs are anything but. Heart wrenching is the duet Beautiful Boyz with Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons: Born illegitimately / To a whore, most likely / He became an orphan / Oh what a lovely orphan he was / Sent to the reformatory / Ten years old, was his first glory / Got caught stealing from a nun / Now his love story had begun. True, at times CocoRosie seems too gimmicky, too ironic, to the point where it almost gets cringeworthy, but in the end their enthusiasm prevails. CocoRosie may not make you believe in fairy tales in the end, but you’ve got to appreciate them for trying. And who knows, they might make you wonder if, just if...

video: CocoRosie's first single Rainbowarriors from their third album The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn.

Quirky

Quirky is a word that critics apply to American ‘indie’ movies with a tiresome predictability – indeed, it sometimes seems to be treated as synonymous with the contemporary American independent film landscape as a whole. However, while it certainly can be used merely as a tedious buzzword, I would also argue that – properly defined – it may also be the best shorthand we have for one observable strand of recent American film – specifically: the sorts of comedies and comedy-dramas conjured up by names such as Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Jared Hess, Alexander Payne, David O. Russell, Miranda July, and so on. I have recently published an article in the new Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism which lays out in detail my interpretation of the term; what follows is a condensation and reformulation of a few of the arguments that I make in greater detail in that piece.

Quirky is a sensibility that can be recognised most easily by its tone, which we might broadly describe as walking a tightrope between a cynically ‘detached’ irony and an emotionally ‘engaged’ sincerity. This tone is created in a number of ways.