What’s an Emo?

What’s an Emo?

So I have used the phrase a few times in my posts and I have had a few people ask me about it. Emo is important to me and sort of always will be.

 So for today’s post I am giving you a revamped version of a paper I wrote for a final. I have reworked it and reworded it a little to more reflect my current voice and writing style. 

So I hope you enjoy the read, I have added a few videos and links, so watch for the different colors.  Here goes…..

Does a band choose to be emo, or do the fans make them emo. 

What’s wrong with being emo anyways? 

Most bands hate the label, but continue to make music only in a way that can be described as emo.  Emo fans have become hipsters and almost popular now, so shouldn’t the bands just embrace the trend, and go for broke; or is too much of a sellout to continue to make lyrically heartfelt music and be worshipped by kids that would otherwise be getting bullied and cutting themselves when they got home?

                

To start with, maybe we should first define emo, only problem is that we would probably have more luck finding the chupacabra than defining emo. 

Scholars, authors, magazines and websites have been trying to define emo since it was first supposedly coined in the mid-eighties.  Urbandictionary.com currently has 1084 definitions for emo, with most of them making fun of it without any understanding of what it is. 

 In Nothing Feels Good, Andy Greenwald tried to define emo and asked many people to do so, but nothing definite could be defined.

 However, for a good explanation Greenwald described it as, “Emo is seeking a tangible connection out of intangible things.” 

Further on he says, “As long as there are feelings, teenagers will claim that they had them first. And as long as there are teenagers, music will get labeled emo.”

That being said, the best definition of what this thing is called emo is that it is different for everyone.  At some point every band makes a sort of emo styled song.   But since no band wants the label and no kid wants to admit it, a good list of emo bands truly doesn’t exist.

 The one thing known for sure is that emo is a shortened form of the word emotional.  But any true fan will tell you that it was once emo-core that kids were saying.  Bands like Jawbreaker, and Rites of Spring, and Sunny Day Real Estate, started making their sound acceptable and started paving the road that made it possible for bands like My Chemical Romance and Fallout Boy to achieve the high level of fame that they did.

 So really the “-core” in emo-core comes from hard core or punk, if you will.  So basically in the beginning the emo label went to bands performing with an 80s punk style but singing about breakups and heartaches rather than politics and just plain teenage angst.

 By the 2000’s emo had gotten a lot different, it became pop punk, and folk and the harder metal version was called screamo.  The emo label was put on anything that had a heartbeat, anything that had emotions.  Bands like Dashboard Confessional, Fallout Boy, Taking Back Sunday, and  Alkaline Trio (to name a few), were finding critical success and playing arena shows. The Emo scene had taken off and has not gone anywhere since.

So now that we have a grasp on what emo is, let’s discuss why exactly bands hate to be labeled emo. There are a variety of reasons but I think the most telling ones are; emo has always been considered a lesser style of music, bands hate to be labeled in any sense, and teenagers eventually grow up and fall in love and stop hating the world, thus if you are labeled an emo band, as soon as your fans grow up your career is over. 

“I’m tired, so tired, I’m tired of having sex”

Weezer’s sophomore album, 1996’s Pinkerton started with these lines and the album went through every phase in a young boy’s geeky awkward life.  Pinkerton was the follow up to the triple platinum certified Blue Album. 

There was no reason Pinkerton would not be a success. 

However the album never reached higher on the charts then 19.  It was a commercial failure and was even listed as one of the worst albums of the year.

 In Nothing Feels Good, Andy Greenwald calls Pinkerton the most important emo album of all time.  Many fans went on to start great bands; in fact, almost every modern emo band can probably point to Pinkerton as the album that changed them, or that they aspire to be.  

So why dismiss the fact that you are an emo band, if you can inspire and be revered.  Because, outside of the emo community, musicians for some reason or another don’t seem to respect heartfelt music. 

Remember those urbandictionary.com definitions, here are a few examples:

                Emo      

                Genre of soft-core punk music that integrates unenthusiastic melodramatic 17 year olds who don’t smile, high pitched overwrought lyrics and inaudible guitar rifts with tight wool sweaters, tighter jeans, itchy scarfs (even in the summer), ripped chucks with favorite bands signature, black square rimmed glasses, and ebony greasy unwashed hair that is required to cover at least 3/5 ths of the face at an angle.

Emo      

               

The type of music you listen to when, try as you might, you cannot get laid..and cry about it..

               

               

After the commercial failure of Pinkerton, Rivers Cuomo (Weezer’s principal song writer) went into seclusion, calling Pinkerton disgusting.  At one point it was rumored that he was trying to buy the master tapes so that he could destroy them.  There are dozens of rumors of what Cuomo was doing during Weezer’s nearly five year hiatus, but one thing is for sure, Cuomo hated the album.

 Weezer has never touched on lyrical content so personal since Pinkerton, and in return critics and pop music fans have rewarded the band with all 6 albums since 1997 peaking higher on the charts than Pinkerton.  But Weezer has never rewarded their original brethren of fans with a “Pinkerton 2,” and Cuomo is o.k. with that.

 In a 2002 Guitar World article, Cuomo calls Weezer fans “little bitches,” stating that he has to do what makes him happy and not the fans. He always wanted to be a pop star and idolized Gene Simmons, and now he has that life.  

So for the case of Weezer taking that turn of putting out one “emo” album really changed the band.  It changed the way that fans perceived them and in some ways the way they perceived themselves.

Other bands have had the same fate.  Dashboard Confessional found more commercial success after ditching the emo genre as did The Starting Line and Taking Back Sunday.  Jimmy Eat World did not become a household name until they became poppier and signed to a major record label. 

So bands have discovered that critics, radio stations, Tower Records, and tour promoters don’t want to push an “emo” band; and are now making more money after being labeled under some other genre. 

               

How would you classify a band like the Beatles?  

Was Led Zeppelin strictly  rock or did they change the way music was perceived? 

You can stay up late watching infomercials for CD collections of genres that have gone by.  “The Buzz” is a collection of 90’s alternative music.  Time Life music has an arena rock collection.  “Dirty Grunge” is a collection of songs written by Kurt Cobain wanna-bes. 

The sad thing about all of these collections is that all of the artists that are a part of them are all for the most part one hit wonders, or one Album wonders.  All of these bands got labeled by the media or swallowed up by record executives because they sounded a lot like another already successful band.  

Hootie and the Blowfish were once touted as the saviors of “College Radio”, but after releasing 6 singles off of their debut album (4 of them cracked the top ten), and selling 16 million copies of that album, the follow up was a bust with the best single off the album reaching 13 and one reaching 38 and the last not even charting at all.  In fact the band failed to chart any singles off their remaining 5 albums.  Darius Rucker (The band’s leader) is now a successful country singer, while the rest of the band is on Hiatus. 

The point is, Once a band gets a label, they are stuck behind it No matter how hard you try, if Your name is not Tom Petty or Paul McCartney, or any of the other greats, you have nowhere to go and will have to fight for commercial success outside of the genre that the world has chosen for you.

This is truer in today’s times than it ever was before. 

With the internet, and sites like Myspace and YouTube; bands have new avenues to come and go through and there is always someone else waiting in line to take your place.  So bands can’t take any chances of getting labeled and once they are, they better not try to shed it.

               

“I know I should get next to you ,You got a look that made me think you're cool But it's just sexual attraction That’s all there is so I'd rather keep wackin'” 

 Let me get a little 1st person here for a second, if you will.   The first time I heard that line. I couldn’t have been much more than 14, I don’t know if I clearly understood it, but I knew that some guy wanted some girl, but he was shy and figured he would have more luck with his hand. 

Funny, yet at the same time true to heart, any guy can tell you that it’s still the same routine in your twenties when you go home from a bar alone.

I never grew out of my “emo” phase but most people usually do.  I think that I have stayed diverse enough. 

But for most teenagers eventually they grow up, get the girl, and live the life that emo music opines for.  So what happens to a band whose fans grow up?  Eventually their popularity begins to fade and they end up falling off the face of the earth.  So if you have received the scarlet E for emo and your fans start to grow up and realize that the world isn’t so bad then you have nowhere to go, because as we have discussed, the music industry is not ready to take you seriously and everyone already knows that you are an emo band.

Boy bands will always be interchangeable.

Teen girl pop stars come and go.

Such is the case for emo bands, the only difference is, you will probably never see an emo band on Behind the Music, or Where are They Now.

               

So you can clearly see that emo is quite a debacle of its own, whether it is the premise of the ill-defined definition or just trying to decide what band is an emo band, and what band wants to be an emo band. 

The only one thing for certain is that the music is good, the lyrics mean more than anything you will ever hear, and emo will always be around.

  After all, if emo is short for emotional, do we really want to live in an emotionless world?