At the beginning of September, I was browsing Songkick – the website, mobile app, and generally ubiquitous online service that keeps users informed of upcoming concerts – looking for bands I may not want to miss, when one in particular caught my eye: Cute Is What We Aim For, a pop-punk-slash-emo group, would be playing a concert at Webster Hall to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of their debut album, The Same Old Blood Rush with a New Touch.
Although I had been a fan of pop punk and emo music throughout high school, I was already into my second year of college (and my third or fourth year of Yo La Tengo) by the time Cute Is What We Aim For’s first album was released, and so can safely describe the band as after my time. I do, however, recall seeing their name over the years, often in conjunction with likeminded groups in heavy rotation on the festival circuit, like Panic! At The Disco or Say Anything. And every time I’ve come across it, the band’s name has given me pause. In fact, the feeling I got when I saw the Webster Hall calendar was awfully close to revulsion.
Why did the band’s name affect me so? Groping for an explanation, I immediately seized on the fact that it was a ten-year anniversary concert – the band members must certainly be grown men by now; grown men calling themselves cute was in itself pretty repulsive. But the band’s name had always bothered me, even when they were ostensibly teens or young men, an age when cuteness is more or less acceptable, and certainly preferable to the alternatives of awkward, gangling, bezitted. So what did I find so objectionable?
Cuteness is by its very nature manipulative. In 1943, the Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed the theory that “baby schema” (Kindchenschema), a set of physical traits common to infants, such as large eyes and round faces, are perceived as cute and motivate caretaking instincts in other humans. It’s a sound evolutionary concept, a mechanism that developed over time to ensure infants’ survival; a study conducted by faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and University of Muenster, whose findings were published in 2009, bore this theory out.
So cuteness is duplicitous, a biological tendency towards freeloading. In the very young it is forgivable, a necessity of development neither asked for nor desired. Past the advent of self-awareness, though, it becomes something else. This later-stage “intentional cuteness” is a more insidious kind of duplicity, manipulation disguised as naivete. And as the first cracks appear in a veneer of cuteness, the whole enterprise becomes suddenly grotesque.
An example: In the opening sequence of the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, we see a Merry Melodies-style cartoon featuring the title character and an adorable tot named Baby Herman. After three and a half minutes, a voice cries, “Cut!” and a live-action human director enters the cartoon scene. Baby Herman, whose only previous lines had been infantile cooing and the garbled refrain of “Cookie,” pulls a beleaguered expression and demands gruffly, “What the hell was wrong with that take?” He huffs off the set, shouts, “I’ll be in my trailer, taking a nap,” then peeks up a woman’s skirt with a perfunctory, “’Scuse me, toots.” For many of his remaining scenes, Baby Herman is seen holding a cigar.
The curtain has been pulled abruptly back on Baby Herman’s cuteness. The revelation that it was manufactured, calculated – a put-on – renders it almost horrifying in retrospect.
Manufactured cuteness is particularly prevalent when marketing is involved; a huge swath of Christmas advertising falls into this category. It crops up, too, any time a news outlet tries to tie together two or more unrelated stories, forcing selfsameness onto disparate, unrelated things. It’s when the package ties up too neatly – the New York Philharmonic playing the Gershwin accompaniment to a screening of Manhattan, or bumper music that reflects in its lyrics the news story that was just reported.
The admission that cuteness is a goal puts Cute Is What We Aim For firmly on the side of the advertising agencies and the 24-hour news cycle. Manufactured cuteness is necessarily grotesque; the grotesque is necessarily repellent.
Before I ever heard a note, this is where the band lost me. When I first saw the name, perhaps as early as 2006, it struck me as cloying, almost obscene. It’s not that sincerity must be what we aim for, but cuteness ought never be a goal. Once it is, the undertaking is little more than a baby smoking a cigar. And that baby gets old awfully quickly.