It’s been a confusing week. Ken was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Harry Truman unleashed a sparkly pink mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. And Elon Musk, aka death, destroyer of social media worlds, decided the time was right to shoot Twitter’s bluebird in the head and replace it with a black “X” apparently designed by a 14-year-old boy with unresolved anger issues.
Surprisingly, the last of these is actually true. Musk’s increasingly deranged stewardship of the company formerly known as Twitter (think Gollum gleefully clutching the One Ring as he falls into the fires of Mount Doom) reached a new level of self-immolation last weekend when he announced the renaming of the company. “Not sure what subtle clues gave it way [sic], but I like the letter X,”, he x-ed on X (no, me neither), alongside a picture of himself in front of a poster for Tesla X, which may or may not be some sort of car. It takes preternatural chutzpah to replace the bluebird – traditional symbol of hope and happiness – with a letter of the alphabet associated with nihilism, crypto-fascism and porn. But it seems Musk is determined to secure the role of the deranged tech psychopath in an as-yet-unmade Will Ferrell farce.
[ Karlin Lillington: X? Really? Really, Elon Musk? X?Opens in new window ]
Elsewhere across this week’s media, you will find much gnashing of teeth over this exercise, which represents a sort of inversion of Mattel’s strategy of brand extension with the Barbie movie. Musk appears instead to be intent on ensuring that, in the words of Spinal Tap’s manager, Twitter’s appeal will become ever more selective.
So be it. But let’s take a brief moment to mourn the departure of the platform’s formerly ubiquitous and hitherto inoffensive little bluebird. That logo wasn’t a part of the company’s earliest years; the notion of a “tweet”, a short burst of inconsequential but entertaining information, came first in the story of what, in the heyday of the tech industry’s late-noughties War on Vowels and Capital Letters, was originally called twttr.
But, deliberately or not, that avian theme serendipitously led to the adoption of a symbol of unusual and enduring resonance. In three-millennia-old Chinese folklore, the bluebird brings messages of happiness. In Russian fairytales, it’s a harbinger of hope at moments of despair. In the 1890s, French symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck’s play L’Oiseau bleu introduced the bluebird into 20th century popular culture, where it resonated down the decades in plays, books, songs and films. Bluebird of Happiness was a massive hit song in Depression-hit 1934. Shirley Temple dimpled her way through The Bluebird in 1940. Vera Lynn raised the spirits of Allied troops in 1942 by assuring them there’d be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover (though ornithologists point out this is highly unlikely).
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Inevitably – and relevantly for this week’s story – the symbol accumulated layers of ambiguity and darker meanings with the passing of the years. We now know that when Judy Garland sang “If happy little bluebirds fly, why oh why can’t I?” she’d been pumped full of amphetamines by MGM to keep her weight down and her energy level up during filming of The Wizard of Oz. Candy Darling, the transgender protagonist of The Velvet Underground’s Candy Says, is “gonna watch the bluebirds fly. Over my shoulder”. But the former Andy Warhol “superstar” is also “gonna watch them pass me by. Maybe when I’m older, what do you think I’d see. If I could walk away from me?” Darling died at the age of 30, leaving a note for Warhol and his crowd. “Unfortunately before my death I had no desire left for life,” she wrote. “I am just so bored by everything.”
Death and the bluebird are never that far apart. “This way or no way, You know I’ll be free,” sang David Bowie, anticipating his own imminent demise on his final single, Lazarus. “Just like that bluebird, Now ain’t that just like me.”
Hope, joy, disillusion, despair, death . . . The life cycle of Twitter and the story of the little bluebird have more in common than Musk’s Generation X-arrested mind could ever imagine (or, to be fair, than the founders of Twitter probably ever realised when they chose it for their brand identity).
Musk may or may not be a fan of the Great American Songbook, but it’s still not too late to take a hint from the master, Cole Porter: “When your instinct tells you that disaster is approaching you faster and faster. Then be like the bluebird and sing, Tweet tweet, tra-la, tra-la, tra-la.”
