A few years ago, I started hearing about a fan genre called "Twi-Rock." Similar to the way the genre "Wizard Rock" produced “Harry and the Potters," Twi-Rock gets its lyrics from the themes/heroes from Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. I became obsessed with the whole Twi-rock phenomenon because, despite the series’ weak female characters and thinly veiled religious values (Meyer has wiped Mormonism all over those books,) I couldn't help loving the fact that they were mostly nerdy teenage girls writing weird acoustic rock songs based on books (for instance, the guitar, bass and tambourine combo in one of the "Bella Cullen Project" videos I watched can almost be a weird love child of Kum-bay-yah generic Christian acoustic and The Fabulous Stains).

So I guess Twilight couldn’t be all that bad if it was encouraging young girls to be passionate enough to write their own music within the safety of their romantic/vampire book sub-culture, right? For a while, bands with names like "Bella Cullen Project,” “Forks High School", "Bella Rocks," ” and "The Twilight Music Girls" started getting national attention, playing major chain bookstores, the Hot Topic Tour, and getting shout-outs from the likes of MTV.com and Seventeen Magazine.

But then, I forgot about Twi-rock for a while. And when when I checked back on it this week, I noticed new bands had stopped cropping up, and existing bands stopped posting new music or playing shows. According to the most recent post on the Twi-Rock Livejournal fan page: “Well, it appears that twirock is sort of winding down; hasn't been anything new to post, that I know of, in quite awhile. With the last movie(s) coming out soon, we may see a few more but it does appear getting it's on it's way out of fashion. That's okay, though, because all things come and go in their time.”

Was Twi-Rock so intrinsically short-lived because because it is based on the most puerile adolescent emotions? Or because the material from the Twilight pool was too shallow to keep getting material from? Well, goodbye Twi-Rock. Maybe the new movie coming out this week will motivate some more of these bands to do stuff...if not, fans can find solace in the fact that 63-year-old Stevie Nicks has released a Twilight-influenced song called "Moonlight (A Vampires Dream)" on her solo record this year.