A history of the emo generation
‘To borrow the words of Groucho Marx, “I would not want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.” This is a typical sentiment expressed by people in a select subset of the current generation. Everyone is so hush, hush about it.
It’s not that people are trying to hide some deep dark secret. It’s just that the word they are shunning is anything but descriptive.
You know the word and you know what it’s short for. It’s “emo,” no giant leap from “emotional,” a term originally created to describe a certain contingent of musicians that existed from the late ’80s to the mid-’90s, but that has come to describe the zeitgeist of twenty-somethings whose self-search of meaning and emotional resonance shows up almost everywhere in the culture.
The problem is, to call something emotional is about as generic a term as can be. We are emotional by nature. It’s like calling a genre of songs “human music.” Both terms are derivative and veritably nonsensical.
“To say our generation is more emotive than a previous generation is preposterous,” said Kyle Fischer, guitarist/singer of Rainer Maria. “We’re wired to feel as much as we do. It’s natural.”
Emo is in the eye of the beholder. Some people who have had different experiences give different meanings to the word. Some believe it has no set definition. Still others feel like it has a very set definition. With so many conflicting opinions, it becomes up to subjective interpretation.
“Emo is a very specific thing,” said David Lewis, who works for Hopper PR, the in-house publicists for the Jade Tree label – the quintessential emo label. “Everyone who understands emo will tell you the same history of it. If you were whiny, you were too emo for your own good. Now, fifteen years after it began, it’s becoming a Time Magazine trend piece. It’s the grunge of the new millennium.”
Lewis, a one-time club booker from the east coast, takes a traditional perspective. He was there when it started and watched it change.
In his eyes, it is dying.
Sean Jenkins, creator of “The Fall” – an art magazine – takes a different perspective on emo.
“Emo has just evolved with time,” said Jenkins. “Without change, it would have died. It is definitely not the same thing it used to be, but that’s what keeps it going. While it went through one of its metamorphoses, it became really popular. Younger kids are just clinging onto it more because they are more open about their feelings and that’s what separates emo from punk. Punk deals with feelings in a harder way, while emo is softer.”
Out of the eight people interviewed for this article, each person had a different definition that ran the gamut, further making the taboo term a matter of subjectivity.
One thing that can be said about emo is that it has taken on a life of its own and is becoming a buzzword on the lips of more and more people. To those who grew up with it, it is considered dead. To those who learned about it recently, it continues to garner fans and mainstream recognition. It is reaching its heyday.
No matter which side of the debate you are on, this is a topic that needs to be discussed and a record that needs to be set straight.
A Brief and Incomplete Synopsis of Emo Music and its Role Models
Believing that Rites of Spring was the first emo band is like believing that Adam and Eve were the first human beings. It depends on how much faith you have on a topic not documented until long after it began.
It can easily be argued, though, that they were the first band to be recognized by the label. Rites of Spring existed as a band for less than two years before front man Guy Picciotto and drummer Brendan Canty left to form Fugazi.
The band was characterized by lyrics like the outpouring in the song “Spring” of “Caught in time so far away from where our hearts really wanted to be…”
To a fan of Chris Carraba’s band Dashboard Confessional, this may not seem like much. In 1986 this was huge. Straight from the heart of the D.C. punk scene, a reactionary movement was born.
In its purest form, emo was an attempt to give a peaceful balance to the chaos of the hardcore scene.
“These bands, like Rites of Spring and Gray Matter, came out of the hardcore scene as a reaction to the high level of testosterone,” said Andrew Beaujon, Senior Contributing Writer for Spin Magazine. “It told people to step back and see who they were affecting, but also, it was intensely personal.”
It was adding heart and brains to the brawn of hardcore in an attempt to give it life. An unstoppable monster was created. To dissect and analyze that entire monster is impossible, though. This is merely an attempt to look at how some of its major organs functioned.
After Picciotto and Canty formed Fugazi, their slate was wiped clean and the moniker was no longer associated with their current project. A new face was destined to forever be the poster child of emo. Jeremy Enigk typified what was to become of the genre before the media caught wind of it.
Enigk, a dark, intellectual and imposing figure, was the voice of Sunny Day Real Estate and the voice for a generation of sensitive outcast teenagers. If Picciotto is the Adam of emo’s creation, Enigk is the Abraham, bearing countless offspring.
His words, his charm and his poignant falsetto spoke directly to and from the hearts of those that listened, and his band acted as the conduit to them. As Andy Schneidkraut, owner of Boulder’s Albums on the Hill, pointed out in a previous interview, “No one is more emo than Sunny Day Real Estate.”
While the music that Sunny Day Real Estate played was characterized by start/stop rhythms, odd time signatures and light and airy vocals, not everyone was buying it. There were still people from the hardcore scene who appreciated the intelligence behind the music but wanted something a little closer to punk.
Those fans took refuge in Jawbreaker, Cap’n Jazz, Texas is the Reason, Quicksand and Christie Front Drive.
Jawbreaker was the victorious underdog of emotional punk in the California, Cap’n Jazz in Illinois, Texas is the Reason and Quicksand in New York and Christie Front Drive, right here in Colorado.
The most influential of these bands have been Jawbreaker and Cap’n Jazz. Jawbreaker’s songs hit close to home with many kids not because of the edgy punk melodies but, rather, because of the lyrics. Inspired by writer Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, Jawbreaker’s Blake Schwarzenbach made the roughest of breakups and the ugliest of relationships sound romantic in his songs. Any boy could take solace in knowing that he was not the only person whose heart has been so devastatingly shattered.
Cap’n Jazz, the most underrated of seminal emo bands, put a greater focus on their raw and artsy sound. Consisting, in part, of brothers Tim and Mike Kinsella, the band wrote the book on art noise and math rock. Their effortless combinations of unheard of progressions, unending tonic note screams and time signatures so complicated that they required a calculator to figure out inspired an entire scene to pop up from the suburbs of Chicago.
“What I always hoped was emo was a communally developed harmonic sensibility and unique expression that the bands from the suburbs of Chicago, like Braid, Cap’n Jazz and Rainer Maria, shared with each other,” said Kyle Fischer.
Bands like Braid and Cap’n Jazz fed off of each other and their music evolved by a game of one-upmanship. If you listen to old Braid and Cap’n Jazz records, you will find numerous similarities in their songs, including shared lyrics and progressions.
Other bands, including Texas’ Mineral, The Getup Kids, Rainer Maria and ex-Cap’n Jazz member’s Promise Ring were soon to follow.
Mineral, staple band of Crank! Records, picked up exactly where the short lived Sunny Day Real Estate left off. By their second album, “EndSerenading,” which was released shortly before the band’s breakup in 1998, showed singer-guitarist Chris Simpson with a finely honed whine over mellow arpeggiated, intricately intertwined progressions.
The Getup Kids, working closer to the songs-about-girls formula were an instant success and helped to bring a mainstream appeal to their underground sound.
Rainer Maria, another Chicago band, derived its formula from the guitar riffs of the Kinsellas and added the twist of a female vocalist to it. The band, along with other female fronted bands at the time, such as Tsunami and Jenhitt helped open the doors for women to feel comfortable in the scene. Rainer Maria also experienced an interesting phenomenon with their earlier fans.
“We used to call the music we made ‘Couples Rock,’” explained Fischer. “In the band’s beginning years, we (Fischer and bassist/vocalist Kaithlin de Marrais) were a couple writing songs and playing it to couples who would claim to have gotten together or broken up to our records.”
Soon, The Anniversary, Mates of State, and other female voices could be heard from the scene. By this time, though, the focus of emo was switching away from them. The word was taking on a new meaning.
“The Promise Ring was way ahead of their time for how mainstream rock they sounded,” began Beaujon. “I don’t think they were taken seriously even though they sold a bazillion records.”
Davey von Bohen, front man of the Promise Ring, was taking his lispy voice and pop punk formula in a new direction. The band departed directly from their indie rock freshman release of “30 Degrees Everywhere” to the heavy pop formula of “Nothing Feels Good” and continued shedding layers through their final release of “Wood/Water” without ever losing the emo label.
Soon, the MTV crowd was listening and the MTV2 crowd was claiming that they’ve been there and done that. Saves the Day, Newfound Glory, At the Drive-In, and International Noise Conspiracy were all getting radio and video play. The underground broke above the surface and maintaining coherence within the indie genres became a free for all.
“Emo continues to become very popular and is heading towards mainstream,” said Beaujon. “So people who grew up in the scene will tell you it is dying or dead but if you ask pop culture, it’s very much alive.”
To most people, the scene is thriving now more than ever. Labels have realized the mass appeal of the music and have turned tears into dollar signs. Everyone from pre-pubescent teens to MTV to the New York Times has picked up on the trend.
“What you’re seeing now is the beginning of the co-modifications of sincerity,” said Fischer. “Everyone in the mainstream is looking for the real thing while everything is as deep as a piece of paper. Meanwhile, these scenes that have grown up underground are coming to fruition and people are starting to notice. There is top-down organizing around emo.”
Lewis took a much different approach to the popularization of emo. From his perspective, it is not the true emo bands that are making money. It is bands who wear its cloak.
“The bands making money as being emo are bands like Newfound Glory and Finch, pop bands that are being marketed from a slightly different angle than Creed,” said Lewis. “Whereas Creed is for your pseudo-hot step mom, Newfound Glory is for her teenage daughter.”
As a style of music, emo is rap’s marketable counterpart. Record labels have been consistently losing money on non-emo rock albums. So, what emo wants, emo gets…for the moment, anyway.
This history of emo is admittedly incomplete. It doesn’t even touch on the Gainesville/No Idea scene, let alone screamo and numerous other subsets of the genre. For a good primer on emo, purchase the Deep Elm series of compilations titled “The Emo Diaries.”
The Fashio
Ani DiFranco once sang “Art may imitate life but life imitates TV.” As pessimistic as it may sound, the statement has some validity to it. After the debut of NBC’s “Friends,” there was a public frenzy amongst women racing to look like Jennifer Aniston. Soon, the bodies of many 12-year-old girls and 40-year-old women became indistinguishable.
The trend to recreate posh popular culture came to maturation in younger age groups as well. Over the past five years, two noticeable archetypes for teenagers girls have been Rachel Leigh Cook’s character in “Josie and the Pussy Cats” and Avril Lavigne. With the media spotlight on these two women, punk was more than in. It took center stage. T-shirts and ties, studded black leather chokers, belts and wristbands, and hip-hugging jeans became the popular thing to do.
Aside from the distinct, but short-lived, stint of tie wearing, the fashion of emo is sexless.
“Androgyny is pretty fucking cool,” said John Doe, front man of the punk band X. “Being neutral gendered is very sexy.”
Standing in the middle of the sexuality teeter-totter can have an elusive allure to it. Since it presents the factor of being unknown, the surface shows an inveigling mystery that makes you want to find out what lies beneath.
The general rule of thumb that Aldroid.com uses in their guide to emo fashion is “If it didn’t come from a thrift store, it probably ain’t emo.” We’d like to add an addendum to that statement. If it doesn’t look like it came from a thrift store, it probably ain’t emo.
The blend-into-the-background emo fashion has been stocking the unisex shelves of teen marketed stores such as Urban Outfitters for years now. Thanks to mom and dad’s credit card, anyone can look like they just walked out of a thrift store with a new outfit for about $200 to $300. Of course, you can just go to a thrift store and spend $20 on an entire wardrobe of the same Urban Outfitters quality, but it’s probably harder to find a Starbucks by a thrift store, and that’s just not kosher.
Of course, there is no reason to just be generic and say “thrift store” when we can create our very own stereotypes off of which to play. No emo kid should be without his or her own stereotype. We’re going to offer five to choose from. The best thing is that you can mix and match. You can pick a different clich/ for every weekday. So, here goes nothing.
Outside of these overly simplified derivations, there are some staples of emo that cut clear across the genre as a material style. Large gauge lobe plugs, studded accessories, band pins, band t-shirts, fuzzy beards and died black mop top hair all fit nicely into the fashion.
“It was tight t-shirts, jeans that stop at the ankles and black shoes,” said Fischer. “That look seems to be getting reprised still but there is a lot more going on. You’ve got your people with your trucker hats and the people with the star tattoos on your hand. Those tattoos are the sign that you’re in the UFO emo cult.”
Tamara Black, vocalist of the now defunct D.C. band Jenhitt put it all in good perspective.
“In general, music is usually conceived of as a component of culture but (sub)cultures arise around musical genres,” said Black. “I can imagine a band that plays emo music but doesn’t bother embracing a visual asthetic or some set of behaviors that could be labeled as distinctively emo. In fairness to the people who make that scene, I’d say that the music itself takes primacy over other elements of fashion, style, etc.”
The bands do and the fans follow.
Needless to say, the emo style goes far beyond the limits of these reductionist descriptions. For further information, visit the following websites: http://dobi.nu/emo/girls.htm
http://aldroid.com/emo/
Sexism and Sexuality
“Girls in emo songs today do not have names,” said Jessica Hopper, founder of Hopper PR, in a recent article she wrote for Punk Planet magazine. “We are not identified… We span from coquettish to damned and back again. We leave bruises on boy-hearts, but make no other mark. Our existences, our actions are portrayed SOLELY through the detailing of neurotic self-entanglements of the boy singer – our region of personal power, simply, is our breadth of impact on his romantic life.”
Hopper’s statement is vehemently charged with rife sentiments of a woman scorned by the music she has long considered herself to be a part of. It may be emotionally based, but nevertheless, it is valid.
On stage, the emo scene is overrun by males. Within the past five years, emo songs have been noted by their derogatory portrayals of women. If there is one definition of the music that people will not deny, it is that emo songs are tales by boys about girls who broke their hearts. The point that Hopper attempts to make in the article is accurate. It is all the same girl, and she is a huge bitch.
“Emo’s characteristic sensitive front is limited to self-sensitivity, it runs in a fanciful maze of reflexive self pity, rife with a vulnerability that is infinitely self-serving,” said Hopper. “It is a high stakes game of control – of ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ possession of the. Yet, in the vulnerability there is no empathy, no peerage or parallelism. Emo’s yearning is not to identify with, or understand, but rather to enforce sexual hierarchy and omit women’s power via romanticide.”
Unfortunately, the criticism should not be limited to emo. Women rarely get their say in music. There is little difference between emo and most rock music. Most of the songs seem to be about girls who walk all over boys. They always have been.
Women rarely even get their say in rap, a genre where they are more equally represented. Take Missy Elliott for example. She is portrayed as some sort of freakish robot or a machine in her videos, but rarely to never as a woman.
Emo does have one redeeming quality that saves it from being entirely sexist, though. Offstage, the crowd is dominated by more women now than it ever has been.
“Emo shows have a lot more women than any other shows I go to see,” said Beaujon. “That’s one of the positive things about the genre. It is a scene where young women feel safe going out to shows.”
When the genre is considered from a social perspective, the scene is as accepting and open as any other. Although many bands fit the women-bashing mold, others do make a conscious effort to be more conscious of their fans reactions. That is one of the most important things bands like Rainer Maria could do.
“A song written in the first person need not be gender specific and we make a conscious effort to make sure nothing refers to a specific gender,” said Fischer. “So, when women or men sing the song along in the audience, the gender of the singer is a moog point. People relate in their own level and put themselves in the place of the singer.”
Many fans do this, and Andy Greenwald documented this reaction in detail in his upcoming book titled “Nothing Feels Good: punk rock, the Internet, and the Emo Generation.” The songs, to many listeners, get translated into personal experience, where they can fully resonate.
The most recent Rainer Maria record, “Long Knives Drawn” may present the most progressive female perspectives as of yet. Singer/bassist Caithlin de Marrais takes on the dissonant and aggressive tones to her vocal stylings. She takes the typical emo sad boy story and flips it around to have it viewed from her perspective. She clearly has her own voice in this record.
Men, on the other hand, do not seem to be speaking up for women in the genre. They do, however, speak up for other men at points.
Emo may be the most welcoming scene for homosexuals to feel comfortable.
Many of the bands in the scene wrote very homoerotic lines in their songs, ranging from Cap’n Jazz’s line, “Boys kissing boys,” to the Promise Ring’s “Best looking boys go all the way, home is where they stay.” Homosexuality was more of an open forum within the genre.
Those who did not flaunt their sexuality hid it for everyone to feel included. Members of bands ranging from At the Drive-In, Murder City Devils, Boy Sets Fire, Propagandhi (although Propagandhi claims to be as far from emo as possible), and numerous others have either homosexual undertones in some of their songs or they display a sexless guise.
The scene may be far from being equally diverse and represented on record but, in the crowd, everyone is included.
Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that the songs stand as verbal assaults and, like any kind of attack, are bound to inflict pain.
“Writing can be a really aggressive act,” said Beaujon. “You can’t respond to it. The person on the other side of that accusation never has the opportunity to say something back. That being said, though, is it anymore sexist than our inherently sexist world.”
To read Jessica Hopper’s article in Punk Planet, go to http://www.punkplanet.com/archives/00000004.html.
The Internet
The current generation of teenagers and college-age students owes a good deal to the Internet. In addition to keeping us wired to the most current information and providing the accessibility to download virtually any game, song or program, the Internet is also providing kids with an outlet for their emotions.
“The Internet has allowed every kid in every town to get wired into the subculture,” said Greenwald. “That has led to a mass individualism. If you go onto sites like makeoutclub.com, you will see kids from the smallest towns in the U.S. and Canada who all wear the same black glasses and have the same arty quotes and have read the same books on photography.”
Sites like Diaryland.com, Blog.com, and Makeoutclub.com provide free services that range from journaling, chat rooms, and profile posting. These organizations allow people to post their feelings, describe themselves, and meet other people. As Greenwald points out in his upcoming book, you can find solace on the Internet. No matter how much of an outsider you are in real life, you can connect to people who are just like you online. It erases the limits of physical distance and allows the writer to truly feel like he/she is a part of a community – or at least, the facsimile of a community.
“What’s really interesting to me is that teenagers are writing these diaries online with lyrics that are just like the songs that they listen to,” said Greenwald. “People read your thoughts and your emotions and you become fans of your peers instead of some rock musician. That’s as close or as laudable of an emo moment as you can come and the best thing about it is that it updates instantaneously.”
The kids who have tapped into this subculture are reaping the emotional benefits of it. It is true that they might not leave the house or interact with their immediate surroundings as often, but they are a part of something much different than the traditional model of youth.
In a virtual space, a safe haven can be created for people to express their feelings. Different sites are designed to attract different types of people and it is much easier to make friends and share your deepest, darkest secrets with someone clear across the globe via the Internet than it is to do while you are playing football in the local park.
The emphasis is no longer as strong on sports and riding bikes as it once was. Now, the general concern is ‘how do you feel today?’
“Kids are a lot more in touch with feelings and emotions than people of older generations are,” said Beaujon. “When I’ve interviewed kids in line to see a show, they’ve started telling me all this stuff about their personal lives, like how a band helped them get through their breakup. It’s stuff you normally don’t tell strangers, but I don’t think it’s bad at all.”
It may take a bit longer to break through and kids may not be as social anymore but when they do talk, they are comfortable with talking about how they feel.
Greenwald’s book will be released in November, 2003 by St. Martin’s Press.
Lifespan and Mainstream Appeal
“By the time something reaches its critical mass, which is an important thing to happen, it has become a last ditch attempt to understand a cultural movement,” said Lewis.
Emo is just that, a reactionary cultural movement. Although some may deny or not see its social significance, it is much more than a style of music. We are the emo generation. We are not just the music fans that loved Weezer’s “Pinkerton” but had our hearts broken when Rivers Cuomo turned his back on us. We are people more in tune with our emotions, but who are not any more emotional than previous generation. We just focus on feelings more.
It’s just difficult to determine if the scene is dead, dying, or thriving.
“It’s dead in the way that ‘alternative’ or ‘indie’ are dead, which is to say, overuse, misuse, and loose-use of the term has rendered it unrecognizably transformed at best and meaningless at worst,” said Black. “It’s alive in the sense that people continue to listen to and write music inspired by bands that have historically been widely considered part of that genre.”
Beaujon points out that both the music and the scene are extremely important to the kids who otherwise would not have a place without it. As the kids and the bands grow up, both will grow up and part ways.
The problem is that people in their mid-20s and up helped to birth the scene and watched the bristling movements take shape and coagulate. To this group of people, it is more than a word to be shunned or genre to openly deny being a part of. It is like a child. As a new crowd takes ownership over the scene, they are finding it hard to let go. It is easier to proclaim the scene’s death than to relinquish ownership of it.
“Those of us in our post-collegiate years have a sense of proprietary rites to the scene,” said Fischer. “It gets passed along, though. There are new bands and new kids listening to the bands. For those kids in the scene, it is very much alive.”
It is alive but in a completely different form. The media pushes the genre on the kids, taking the indie out of emo, and the kids willingly accept. Doing so does not inherently destroy the music. It just makes it more accessible to people.
People interviewed for this article that were not directly tied to the scene all asked the question, “Why is it that as soon as I discover a band I really like, I found out the band broke up a year earlier?”
Emo and indie bands have relatively short life spans – like emotions themselves. That was the mystique of the scene. You rushed to find a band before all of your friends did. It was comparable to uncovering a hidden treasure and you could claim you knew the band first.
With the instantaneous gratification of the Internet and TV, it becomes much simpler to have someone else do the work for you. Now, you can find all the same bands and not have to worry if they already broke up or not.
What isn’t emo
It is not difficult to find a variety of rubrics to determine what is and isn’t emo, especially if you search the Internet. The infamous original Emogame even provides you with a quiz that asks questions from how much you weigh and if you can fill in the blanks from staple emo songs. If you go to http://www.brownbagmag.com/emoornot you can even submit a picture for other people to vote on whether or not you are emo.
“That which has been traditionally classified as emo no longer serves as a working definition,” said Lewis. “It has always been amorphous but it all seems built on fashion nowadays. You wonder if Carraba gets pigeonholed as emo just because he has tattoos.”
Tattoos, thick-rimmed plastic glasses, studded belts; there are many aesthetic markers. From a traditional perspective, it’s more of a question of the heart-tugging lyrics, the ones that well the tears in your eyes. If you can recognize any of the following lines, it may be a better clue that you are emo than the clothes you wear:
“I’m afraid of everything.”
“And if I started crying would you start crying?”
“Although you hit me hard I come back.”
“‘Too proud to hope, too weak to climb.’”
“We’re too smart to watch TV. We’re too dumb to make believe this is all we want from life.”
“I’ll cry until I can’t see the whites of your eyes for two more years.”
“They say what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Well maybe some of us are just too sick and tired of being so damned strong.”
o
“I’m dying to tell you I’m dying.”
Comparatively, though, it is infinitely easier to find information on the Internet that attempts to prove what isn’t emo. Everyone wants to assert their un-emo-ness, an interesting facet of the subculture.
“We’re all so afraid of being ghettoized by this term,” said Fischer. “If they came up with a cooler name, none of us would care. Emo means Emo Phillips to me.”