Emo has been around long enough that it should have died a natural death by now. But it won’t go away. It hangs around, moping just out of view, like a skinny wuss with a journal in his messenger bag and tears in his eyes. You tell him to fuck off and he skulks away, but you see him following you again the next day. Emo needs that rejection to keep its heart pure, you see. Ugh, so creepy? Can you believe you ever thought there was something special about emo?
It’s over, emo. We’re done with you. It’s been 20 years. Why can’t you just move on?
Most emo kids are dorky enough to know the enshrined canon and history of emo, which starts in DC in ‘85 or so with Embrace and Rites of Spring. This period in history might as well be the Siege of Stalingrad to most of the grumpy larvae who cry along with Dashboard Confessional, and it’s not really accurate anyway. The first band from DC that I ever heard labeled “emo” or “emocore” was Beefeater, whose absence from the canon is mystifying, since their stance was militant vegetarian and their bass player sported the original emo beard. (Note: I grew up in DC and I saw Minor Threat live, okay, so if you’re under 35 and not a Mackaye, do not come at me with a bunch of noise you read on the web somewhere.)
As a further point, just to illustrate the roach-like endurance of emo themes, please note that emo goes back not 20 years but 200. The original emo heart-throb was Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Werther was the original emo kid, with his journals, passionate friendships, condescension to mere mortals, pathological narcissism, and of course, his tragic love of an unattainable woman. The book started a craze among the youth of the day, who imitated Werther’s style of dress, godawful poesy, and suicide. Sorrows is still taught as a classic of 18th century romantic lit, and although Goethe went on to write reams of poetry, essays, criticism, and scientific work, in his lifetime he never managed to shake off little Werther. Emo kids are like fucking barnacles.
I’m not going to drone on about which bands are true emo and which bands are plain-vanilla indie and which bands are commercial twaddle and which bands are sniveling shit. I’m not in a position to judge these things, because if something can even be plausibly mislabeled as emo, I probably loathe it. This is because emo is unendurable if you’re not an emo kid.
And what is an emo kid? Besides a pussy’s pussy?
Not that there’s anything intrinsically pussy about singing about the women you’ve wronged or who’ve wronged you. Without ruinous affairs, bluesmen would have had nothing but poverty and whiskey to sing about, a state of affairs that could have left us with no sources for American popular music other than polka. The telling difference between a bluesman and an emo kid is the number of women involved. Bluesmen come by their world-weariness honestly, by having stormy affairs with lots of cruel, wanton, mistreating, yet kind-hearted women. An emo kid can get three albums of endless whinnying out of one woman, who can’t have known what she was getting into. (The other big difference is that a bluesman’s woman would probably love to tell her side of the story. The chick who broke Mr. Confessionals heart doesn’t have to say a word. I mean, shit, who’d dump him?)
No, an emo kid is not a bluesman, no matter how much whiskey you slip into his or her Sprite. An emo kid is made up of many things: goth self-pity and eyeliner, indie kid dork chic and studied dirtiness, a bit of punk self-righteous obnoxiousness, all drowned in adolescent self-absorption.
Because above all, an emo kid is a kid. And the hardest thing to give up about childhood isn’t the freedom, the innocence, or the security (or the illusions thereof). It’s the whining. French auteur Francois Truffaut once said his films focused on children because he was not interested at all in the emotions of adults. This is another way of saying that no one wants to hear grown people whining. No one expects dignity from children, who have an excuse for not knowing that life isn’t fair. But the older you get, the more grating it is to hear you wailing about how much it all hurts. If you get big enough to be punchable, you’d better learn a little stoicism and ironic detachment before they get beaten into you.
Horribly, we must admit that all of us have been emo kids at one point. We’ve all been misunderstood. We’ve all had our hearts torn out and dropped on our Chuck Taylors. We’ve all had our personal notes read before the class. And somewhere in the recesses of our mind, we’ve all written sick-making poetry about it. But we eventually realized that we weren’t alone, and that everyone had felt like this once. And we realized that we were the only ones still whining and sulking. And we shut the fuck up and got on with our lives.
Links of historic interest. Get educated!:
Minor Threat
Rites of Spring
Beefeater
Embrace
The Sorrows of Young Werther
