Jangle / Twee / C86 / College Indie

History

The jangle itself traces to 1965, when Roger McGuinn's Rickenbacker twelve-string lit up The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" and set the template every later band chased. The family proper coalesced in Britain around 1980, when Glasgow's Postcard Records issued Orange Juice's "Falling and Laughing" and married the chime to a fey, DIY pop sensibility. The Television Personalities and early Pastels supplied the homemade ethos; The Smiths, with Johnny Marr's "This Charming Man" (1983), proved jangle could top the indie charts. America answered through R.E.M., whose 1981 "Radio Free Europe" seeded college rock across the campus circuit. The defining moment came in 1986, when NME's C86 cassette gathered Primal Scream, The Wedding Present, The Shop Assistants and dozens more into a movement and, accidentally, a genre name. Talulah Gosh sweetened it into twee pop; Bristol's Sarah Records (founded 1987 by Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes) turned The Field Mice and Heavenly into anorak-pop saints. The lineage ran on through Belle and Sebastian and a 2000s revival, and it still feeds nearly every guitar band that calls itself simply "indie."

The sub-genre landscape

The family's center of gravity is its jangle trio. Jangle Pop is the bright, melodic core (Orange Juice, The Smiths, early R.E.M.), Jangle Rock gives it more weight and drive (The Wedding Present, mid-period R.E.M.), and Indie Jangle carries the same chime into the modern guitar-band mainstream. Right beside them, Twee Pop is the family's softest and most identity-defining lane, the childlike, fanzine-fed sweetness of Talulah Gosh and the Sarah Records roster, with Twee Rock toughening that into something you can actually mosh to.

College Rock is the American wing, the campus-radio guitar pop that R.E.M. and the 1980s US underground built, and it is just as load-bearing as the British jangle lanes. The folk and surf branches, Folk Jangle and Surf Jangle, are real but more specialized, threading acoustic strum or Beach Boys shimmer through the chime; Britpop Jangle is the lane where 90s Britpop borrowed the family's ringing guitars.

Around this defining core orbit the spin-offs that the encyclopedia still has to map. C86 and College Indie name the scenes themselves; Sarah Records-Lane Indie, Anorak Pop and Shambling Indie capture the twee underground's most precious corners; Lo-Fi Jangle, DIY Pop Underground, and the later Jangle Revival trace the sound's bedroom-recorded persistence into the present.

Sub-genres in this family

18 sub-genres · 9 written up

Defining artists

• The SmithsSpotifyYouTube
• R.E.M.SpotifyYouTube
• Belle and SebastianSpotifyYouTube
• Orange JuiceSpotifyYouTube
• The ByrdsSpotifyYouTube
• The PastelsSpotifyYouTube

Essential listening

• This Charming Man(1983) — The SmithsSpotifyYouTube
• Radio Free Europe(1981) — R.E.M.SpotifyYouTube
• Mr. Tambourine Man(1965) — The ByrdsSpotifyYouTube
• Falling and Laughing(1980) — Orange JuiceSpotifyYouTube
• The Boy with the Arab Strap(1998) — Belle and SebastianSpotifyYouTube
• C Is the Heavenly Option(1992) — HeavenlySpotifyYouTube

Sources

• Wikipedia: C86 (NME 1986 cassette, jangling guitars, Primal Scream's Velocity Girl opener, Rough Trade LP November 1986)
• Wikipedia: Sarah Records (Bristol label founded 1987 by Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes, twee/indie pop, active to 1995)
• Wikipedia and Discogs: Orange Juice 'Falling and Laughing' (1980 debut single, first Postcard Records release)
• Wikipedia: This Charming Man and R.E.M. 'Radio Free Europe' (Johnny Marr jangle pop 1983; R.E.M. Hib-Tone single July 1981)
• Wikipedia: Twee pop, The Pastels, Talulah Gosh (Glasgow/Oxford twee pop origins, formed 1981 and 1986)
• Discogs and Bandcamp: The Field Mice 'Sensitive' (Sarah 018, 1989) and Heavenly 'C Is the Heavenly Option' (Le Jardin de Heavenly, 1992)