emo

P’s Take: Listen, I don’t care what anyone does anymore. I’m a grown-ass man now, my punk rock holier-than-thou shit was never really strong and it’s disappeared now. You know, more or less. But this Emo as a movement thing, this… this is not my kind of a movement.

I left the country for a minute and when I returned “Emo” was an independent identity like Skinhead, Punkrocker, Canadian or Standard Asshole. Again, I don’t care, but let us back up a minute.

Wasn’t Emo just a kind of derisive way of describing hardcore bands that didn’t always sing about “the Crew”. Wasn’t it that? Remember Sick Of It All’s video from back in the day, where they showed a bunch of nerds rocking back and forth with the caption underneath saying “Emo Style”? Wasn’t that them just making fun of non-New Yorkers and college graduates? Right? It was just like kind of a soft diss I thought.

I have been wondering about this so I checked into it. By this I mean I went to Wikipedia for 20 minutes. According to them Emo may be traced back to Rites of Spring way back in ’85 in clever D.C. Okay that might be, but that doesn’t explain all this nonsense, with the odd hair, sad looks and ridiculous self-harm.

I took a sociology course once. I failed it, but I remember something about a thing called co-option of labels. Like the gay community took back queer and use it as badge of pride. Like blacks can say nigger but I can’t. This is a form of empowerment I was told. Empowerment is good, I agree with it always.  Except when it’s enweakenment. Hardcore painted itself into a corner real quick with the violence, band after band putting out song after song designed to put blood on the floors. It can’t be about knuckling all the time. Bands had to reach out, reach down and spread out for Hardcore, for the Mighty Punk Rawk, to keep from becoming a fucking caricature. Bands tagged Emo seem to be picked at random. I have heard from 3 different people that they were moved to tears at Bad Brains shows, I have yet to hear anybody though call Bad Brains Emo. Jah would smite ye, bloodclot. No band would self-apply Emo, because it’s limiting, bogus and most of all weak.

But there are kids, kids who get their rebel gear at the mall, who walk around claiming Emo. Lots of them. Again fine. But what they are adopting is a weak, phony stance. Punk Rock told you that you CAN beat them. All you gotta do is stand up. Emo seems to say, listen kid, you’re beat, just stay down. At 15, how can you, why would you want to become part of (an utterly made up) a scene that offers nothing but bad clothes and defeat?

American hardcore was a lot of things to a lot of people. It gave you shelter if you were an outsider, it gave you a place to vent if you were angry and a click to be angry with. It was and is far from perfect, but the movement offered you the strength to get down with life on your terms. It’s a shame to see kids embrace what helps them accept and thrive on defeat.

T’s Take: So it’s 1999 and I’m writing a weekly music column for my college paper. I’m lucky enough that I have a ton of free CDs coming in on a daily basis to choose from (this is something the FSS sorely needs, take note). Anyway, one comes across my desk from Fueled By Ramen by a band called Jimmy Eat World. The press release for them says they are an “emo” band. My thoughts… what the fuck is “emo”. Grown men whining about having butterflies in their stomachs? I can’t remember now and I’d have to go into my basement to find my old box of newspapers, but I think I gave it a favorable review and tried explaining somewhere in it just what in the hell “emo” was. My explanation was that it’s an abbreviation of the word “emotional” and that the music was fitting. But still, ten years later and that’s about all I got. And really it’s thin at best. All music is “emotional” on some level. Even music without emotion can conjure emotion in the listener. For example when I hear techno I get really pissed off. So again back to square one. What the fuck is “emo”?

I guess I’ll start with what people commonly refer to as the bands and albums that started the genre. When Brother P and I picked up “Diary” by Sunny Day Real Estate in high school at Pier’s Platters (R.I.P.) we thought we were getting an alternative rock album. Years later someone told me it was emo. I listened to it today and yup still as alternative rock as 1994 had to offer. I also heard the same thing about “Dear You” by Jawbreaker. While it’s their most polished album (thank you David Geffen) it’s still Jawbreaker branded Punk albeit a littler darker at times. “Pinkerton” by Weezer gets similar credit. A critical and commercial failure when it was released that built up a cult following mostly due to how emotionally fucking disturbed it is. But emo? Other bands that get credited with being guilty of “emo” are Embrace and Rites of Spring (Ian and Guy of Fugazi’s pre-Fugazi post-hardcore outfits). I have albums by both these bands and don’t see the emo connection. They’re decidedly post hardcore. Back then some called it emo-core and the bands labeled thus told everyone to fuck off with their silly labels. So that’s five albums in my catalog that people say are emo. Each one different from the next. Each one falling better into other sub-genres. Each one not emo.

Aright then what about The Promise Ring. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who denies they’re emo. Right? But you’d be wrong because I’m about to. The connotation with emo is that it’s whiny, lovelorn, sad, morose, etc. “Very Emergency” is one of the happiest albums I’ve ever heard. Even when they’re saying shit like “you dropped a bomb on my bad day” they sound ecstatic. It’s emotions on Prozac. A shit ton of Prozac. I think early promo copies of this album came with free samples of the drug. Okay then what about The Get Up Kids? Surely they’re emo. Right? Wrong again. In fact I remember the band on multiple occasions rejecting the label. In a recent interview with Drowned In Sound, Jim Suptic remarked “Honestly, I don’t often think about the state of ‘emo’. The punk scene we came out of and the punk scene now are completely different. It’s like glam rock now. We played the Bamboozle fests this year and we felt really out of place. I could name maybe three bands we played with. It was just a sea of neon shirts to us. If this is the world we helped create, then I apologise.” He went on to say “Fugazi is the reason I am in a band today. When I was 14 I heard Fugazi and started a band the next day. We grew up on indie rock. Superchunk, Rocket from the Crypt, Sunny Day Real Estate, Cap’n Jazz. That’s the kind of stuff we were listening to when we started.” Brother P and I have seen Fugazi (once) and Rocket From the Crypt (many times) and can tell you with great certainty that they are not emo.

So I’m back again asking. What the fuck is emo? And here’s the odd thing. Bands that say they’re emo and kids that say they’re into emo all base themselves on the exact opposite of everything I just wrote. Are they delusional? Am I? Here’s my conclusion. Bands that say they are emo are probably just that. They bought into the label and instead of striving for originality they forced themselves to conform to a stereotype. Kids that base their musical existence on emo need to get out more. There’s nothing wrong with being in touch with your feelings but you shouldn’t hide behind them either. I understand myself and have my own outlook on life and how I’m feeling at any given moment will lead me to listen to this or that. It shouldn’t be the other way around. That is to say I shouldn’t have emotions based on the music I listen to. Art should imitate life. Things get funky the other way around.

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