Jedward's deep tweets: great minds think alike, and only fools would beg to differ

There's a surreal beauty to the rambling tweets of Jedward. Are they great philosophers? Three experts decode the Grimes twins' cryptic messages, writes UNA MULLALLY

WITH MORE THAN 300,000 followers, Jedward can claim a cult following amongst those who are not necessarily fans of their music, but are entertained by the twins’ rambling thought processes and strange, spat-out pronouncements on every topic imaginable.

Occasionally, a sort of surreal beauty emerges from the unique way they describe an activity, or the bizarre but compelling observations they make. Is this accidental genius at work, or do Jedward really have a way with words? And is there purpose to the prism through which they view the world?

We asked a philosopher, a playwright and a novelist whether there are hidden depths to tweets from @planetjedward.

PHILLIP McMAHON is an award winning playwright and one half of THISISPOPBABY, currently producing The Year of Magical Wankingat the Absolut Fringe Festival in Dublin and Trade at the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival.

“Often infantile, their 140-character messages paint a picture of two young men devoid of any history, made up like a primary school collage of various pop-culture references, while totally existing within their own skin,” McMahon remarks. “Like two futuristic teens sent to us with a message of positivity, Jedward, through their tweets, are discovering the 21st century before our eyes, and, unsurprisingly, they are confused.”

Exhibit A: “John’s Hair just like Edward’s Hair are a Reflection of each other! Our Hair is looking into the future!”

“This futuristic theme comes up again and again,” McMahon says. “Unlike many Irish people, John and Edward seem not to be encoded with our shared history. It’s doubtful that it’s down to a lack of education, as both boys went to good schools, but rather an unwillingness to be shackled by ghosts. As a nation we have found it useful and important to look back, but perhaps it’s time for us to shake off the past and look to the future.”

BELINDA McKEON is a writer whose debut novel Solaceis winning high praise.

“Jedward’s tweets could be argued to be the inheritors of late Wittgensteinian language theory, in that, late in his life, Wittgenstein spent some time in Connemara, in a cottage at Rosroe,” McKeon says. “Afterwards, the reams of manuscript pages he’d left behind were used by a local farmer to line a chicken coop. Now, in the tweets of Jedward, the whole aura of that last, lost book of Wittgenstein’s has been reincarnated, combining language games and family resemblances with high-pitched squawking and flying feathers.”

Exhibit B: “Meow!...is the sound cats make! Bark! Is the sound dogs make! Change them around and a barking cat is so cool!”

“That’s Wittgenstein’s whole beef with ostensive definition, right there,”

McKeon reveals. “The thing that the word stands for does not give the meaning of the word. Our ability to use the word presupposes a knowledge of its meaning. Or, as Jedward have also phrased it, ‘Fun=Jedward=really Fun=ice + baby=ice ice baby.’

It’s a meditation on subjective consciousness which also highlights the influence of a contemporary philosopher of mind, Thomas

Nagle, famous – to keep to the avian theme, no doubt a deliberate juxtaposition on the part of the Grimes twins – for his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Jedward have answered you Nagle. They're bats. And this is what it is like."

GAVAN JENNINGS is the honorary secretary of the Irish Philosophical Society, having earned an MA on George Berkeley and concentrated on Aristotle for his PhD.

Exhibit C: “Writing words on a page creates a maze that the little paper people that live on the paper wander around trying to escape!”

“This line appears to be a rendering in Twitter-speak of the founding slogan of Phenomenology: ‘Zu den Sachen selbst’,” reckons Jennings. “It was coined by the founder of Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and means ‘Back to the things themselves’, meaning to say that we’ve got lost in a maze of concepts and need to get back to reality. So this is quite a Husserlian tweet.”

Jennings, like McKeon, also draws on Wittgenstein, saying some of Jedward's tweets match the "pithiness of the aphorisms to be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and [are] certainly as puzzling as some of those maxims".

Exhibit D: “Riding in a car can be fun but the only thing you need is you! To make you happy think hey we are driving to Freedom and going some where”

“This ethical consideration suggests that Jedward may be inspired by Aristotelian virtue ethics,” Jennings remarks, “which holds happiness to lie in lasting personal qualities (‘the only thing you need is you’) over ephemeral experiences (a spin in a car); it is also very Aristotelian in that it is teleological or destination-focused (‘going some where’). Certainly the kind of thing Aristotle might have tweeted had there been a Twitter in fourth-century BC Athens.”

So there you have it. If Aristotle were tweeting today, he’d actually be Jedward.