"YOU ARE SO EMO"
What are we owning up to? Our tight shirts, straight-legged jeans, messy hair, and thick-rimmed glasses? Our penchant for bands our age that moan about exclusion, the girl that they can't have, and angry sex? Our shameless fancies for Mandy Moore, Love Actually, and Star Wars?
The stereotypical emo kid cries everyday. He wears jeans so tight that you can see his junk. His shirts generally fit so close that you can see his nipples. He has jet black hair, possibly with streaks of red, which he cuts himself and usually falls over on eye. Tattoos and piercings aren't uncommon. His hobbies include writing bad poetry, going to local shows, and playing horrible acoustic guitar. He pines after girls that he can't have, and those girls are commonly his good friends. It's a tough life. Oh, and the girls look and act almost exactly the same as the guys. Sometimes it's hard to tell them apart.
MTV would define “emo” as whatever credible bands play their own instruments, sing of heartbreak, and have caught the eye of many the teenage girl with their bashful, coy smirks and tight chick jeans. Seventeen magazine says it's all about the fashion of the bands, and they think there's a difference between what the guys and girls wear. As I said above, there isn't. Well, who has the right definition?
Near as I can tell, pretty much anything you can think of can be emo nowadays. As kids continue to widen their understanding of this sub-cultural phenomenon and add new parts and styles to their attire and music, all of the arrivals are simply assimilated.
The typical emo outerwear two years ago was the “hoodie,” or hooded sweatshirt usually bearing some band or skateboard company's logo and a tongue-in-cheek tagline for them. Since then, windbreakers and track jackets (there is a difference), jean jackets with hoods sewn in the back and baseball tees have all become acceptable. Some subgroups of the emo phenomenon are even more specific, requiring the necessary topmost garment be of a certain color, as hardcore kids must only wear gray hoodies.
Accessories are even more ridiculous. Carabineer keychains that are worn on the back belt loop, keys tucked into the back pocket; black leather cuff watches that consume nearly half the forearm of the owner; sweatbands featuring everything from retro video game characters to witty anti-scene sayings; studded belts in every color, with embroidered stars, or most uniquely faux bullets, accompanying; ears gauged so wide one could stick their finger through the earlobe; any kind of facial piercing, most commonly the lip or eyebrow with a block hoop; tattoos of broken hearts, stars, favorite lyrics, Jesus, and characters from The Nightmare Before Christmas; black jelly bracelets, anywhere from two to a thousand; even copies of modern classics by Vonnegut, Ginsburg, and Kerouac.
Perhaps the only time-honored emo fashion staple is that of thick, black, horn-rimmed glasses. Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello were the first to popularize these geek-chic specs, but it was Weezer's Rivers Cuomo that got credited with introducing them to a new generation in the mid-90s. Only approximately half of the genre's musicians actually require them to correct their vision. Something Corporate's frontman Andrew McMahon wears a completely cosmetic pair of the glasses to “keep the hair out of his eyes on stage.” It probably doesn't hurt to attract emo-enthusiastic pre-teens to buy their records because of the cute guy on the back of the CD case either.
This same all-encompassing aesthetic applies to the music itself. Originally, emo music was emotionally (Get it? Emo=Emotional) charged punk rock. In it's earliest evolution the subject matter went from politics to relationships and the instrumental shifted from three overdriven power chords to three distorted power chords with pop-sensible riffs, still in a guitar, bass, drum lineup. This package was first presented for the approval of the world on a massive scale by Weezer in 1994. A quartet from the Midwest made up of nerds that wrote songs about sweaters and girls because that's all they knew, they were accepted immediately. However, the success of their debut (blue) album proved too much for singer/songwriter/guitarist/frontman Rivers Cuomo to handle so he put himself through college and went crazy. Now he's handled by three young, sexy Asian females. No one is allowed to talk to him. He won't sign autographs for fans, but he will play foosball with them, as long as they don't make eye contact. Today the torch of emo godfather has been unwittingly picked up by Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, a clean cut, diminutive in stature 30-year-old ex-special ed school vice principal from Florida with a painful relationship history who isn't afraid to figuratively cut himself open onstage every night for the release of his audience's emotions. Carrabba's second is Taking Back Sunday's Adam Lazzara, a 22-year-old from North Carolina, extremely feminine in nature, prone to swinging his mic in physics-defying fashion and collapsing on the stage after giving the crowd all he's got. By the way, members of the emo scene like a good mob reference.
In today's emo scene you need a gimmick to separate you from the humdrum of the ten thousand other guys that are just doing the guitar, bass, drum thing. Yellowcard has a violinist that can do backflips. Something Corporate has an upright piano that gets banged out of tune when the pianist plays with his feet (it's also been lit on fire before). Flogging Molly has a fiddle, a mandolin, and an accordion, mixed with the idea that they're an real Irish band because they where suspenders, little caps, and drink lots of Guinness. Bowling For Soup has an extremely fat guy that can barely play his guitar because his arms can't reach around his stomach. Me Without You even has an autistic lead singer that doesn't so much sing as talk out of rhythm with the music and babble to no end about how great Philadelphia is between numbers. They are all emo.
Even if they don't want to be. There is yet to be a band that has self-administered the label. Even Carrabba, the poster child for modern day emo, will deny any involvement with the movement. Bands will classify themselves as rock, hard rock, alternative rock, rock and roll, hardcore, heartcore, romanticore, metalcore, nu metal, post medal, punk, pop-punk, and a slew of other ridiculous shots at establishing themselves as unique, but never emo. It hardly matters. As long as a fan relates to the heartfelt words of a singer giving a part of himself up there and the sentiment is thrown right back, it's emo. Coheed & Cambria are emo, and they're an experimental band whose albums use ‘80's hair metal style guitar riffs and completely alternative rock to back an on-going story of star-crossed lovers lost in an intergalactic war while making Biblical parallels, all brought together by Claudio Sanchez's signature Rush-esque falsetto and hair.
This thing called emo has an amazing way of working itself back through history, even past its own inception. Romeo and Juliet were emotionally-driven-to-the-point-of-total-irrationality teenagers much like the kids of today, along with Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger's Catcher In The Rye. Thrift stores are an emo kid's best friend, as a grandparent's discarded V-neck sweater, worn-out Dickies, and orthopedic jogging shoes all become “vintage” and can be incorporated into an acceptable emo outfit. Cult classic films like Cameron Crowe's Say Anything have become emo icons, as the Starting Line demonstrated in their video for “The Best of Me,” where they based the concept around the infamous scene in which John Cusack's character serenades his love with an upheld jambox from the lawn. Cusack has also become an emo icon himself, being lifted up as an unconventional hero, a symbol of their undying hopeless romanticism, shown best in Fall Out Boy's song “Honorable Mention.”
Emo hasn't forgotten to conquer cyberspace. www.emogame.com features, what else, The Emo Game, a five-part-to-date video game featuring emo's greatest heroes battling the evils of corporate America that constantly threaten to rape emo and steal everything that we love about it. Carrabba, Lazzara, and Sanchez, with the assistance of Brand New's Jesse Lacey, Alkaline Trio's Matt Skiba, and Thursday's Geoff Rickly, are armed in their fight only with seven-inch records and special emo superpowers ranging from mega-ovaries to Transformer and Jedi attacks. Also among emo's holds on the world wide web are blogs, or online journals. With the help of easyjournal, livejournal, blurty, xanga, and myspace kids can complain to everyone and no one about the jocks who picked on them today because their junk was showing because they hadn't properly tucked it back, or the girl that still doesn't know they exist after giving her the twelfth in a series of mixed CDs of songs describing how he longs to rescue her from the monotony of everyday life.
I had never seen Say Anything or played the Emo Game, I wore baggy shorts and appropriately sized t-shirts everyday, and I hated Catcher In The Rye and Shakespeare. The musical interest was there, but I was considered quite the insensitive jerk in high school, so I would have never thought I was emo. I was punk. The first day I got to college I discovered otherwise. All it took was a glance at the posters on my walls and I was labeled the emo kid. I wasn't sure exactly what that meant or how I was supposed to act, but some sparked inside me. I'm not even sure some of the freshmen next year will know my real name. Throughout the year I started wearing jeans and button down shirts. I began listening to a lot of Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday and I revived all my old Weezer albums. I cried every once in a while. I really became the emo kid.
This is all ridiculous. In the end, emo is just a buzzword that record companies, TV stations, and magazines use to describe kids, music, shows, movies, and literature with heart. The commercialism of marketing emo-cool deserves to be berated and checked in the ways that video games like the Emo Game, short films such as How To Be Emo, and people like me with this artivle are so happy to do.
After all of this, you might be asking yourself, "Am I emo?"
Yes. Yes, you are.
*The Microsoft Word dictionary does not recognize "emo" as a word. crap.
*excerpts from rakista.com*
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