It also comes in pretty handy when you stumble across an artist with a completely unpronounceable name—like that of intensely emotional San Francisco-based band Xiu Xiu, whom, if this were a radio segment, would be right this minute correcting my almost-certainly-incorrect pronunciation of their name. So as a public service to Edmontonians who have been espousing their affection for “zoo zoo” or “tsu tsu,” Vue Weekly will now once and for all settle what has become the most frustrating conundrum for hipsters since the great !!! debate of 2003.
“That’s how we pronounce it,” says Xiu Xiu frontman and songwriter Jamie Stewart approvingly after I fluke out and correctly identify the band as “shoe shoe.” “But we’ve been told by, like, nine million people that we pronounce it wrong, and those nine million people have told us nine million different ways to say it.”
Stewart points out that he’s never found the inevitable mangling of his band’s name all that troubling, although he admits that one variation is a bit contentious. “I think the only pronunciation that we actually object to is ‘zoo zoo,’” he says, “just because it sounds like a bad hair-metal band.”
http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=2204
Well, I was kind of embarrassed too cause I tried to interview you after and I didn't realize there's all these PR things you gotta go through to set up these kinds of things. You made a list or something, and I sent it to my editor and nothing really came of that. So, yeah. About your sound in Xiu Xiu. "Shoe-Shoe," is that the correct pronunciation?
We usually say "Shoe-Shoe." Or "Shui-Shui" if we're getting really sleep-deprived. I think our only objection is "Zu-Zu." I don't know, we're not too particular about it.
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/interviews/xiu_xiu.htm
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"Shui-Shui" is the pretty much the same thing as "Zwee Zwee." Personally, I think that sounds better than "Shoe-Shoe" which sounds like you are being bothered by flies or something (shoo fly shoo). By the bye, I was the first person to ever mention Xiu Xiu (that I know of) at the old board. It was in a thread about new music and I wrote about them, Pretty Girls Make Graves and Film School way back in 2002. Most of the rest of the replies in that topic of yore were about debating the relative merits of The White Stripes, The Hives, and The Strokes.