Posts tagged: wuss

Fueled by Ramen recording artist Cobra Starship is a very modern band. They are currently on tour, opening for Fall Out Boy, along with fellow openers Paul Wall, +44, and The Academy is . . . Cobra Starship’s name sounds like a cross between TheCobrasnake and late Jefferson Airplane. They’ve got a song on the Snakes on a Plane and the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie soundtracks, ringtones available, a Glamour Kills clothing endorsement, and impressively pimped out profiles on all the good social networking sites. They even (I’m sure ironically) cover Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” The CS site itself contains a sort of pseudo-ironic “typical” rockstar history, which is probably actually based on true events but liberally gilded. Band leader Gabe Saporta’s animal familiar-dictated mission is apparently teaching “hipsters to not take themselves so seriously and by telling emo kids to stop being pussies.”

I guess Cobra Starship’s genre is Self-Deprecating Post-Emo? I don’t know. The salient point for Blue Blood readers is that Xanthia Doll appears dancing her yellow-clad booty off in their new video for their long-windedly-named single “Send My Love To The Dancefloor, I’ll See You In Hell (Hey Mister DJ)” from their album, While The City Sleeps, We Rule The Streets. Xanthia says, “I’m so happy I’m in it! It was a lot of fun to be a part of! Just look for red hair and a bright yellow jacket and you’ll see me! Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!!!”

Xanthia’s positive attitude is a lot of fun, but I have to admit that I like my rockstars to truly own what they do. If I were more familiar with modern emo, apparently Cobra Starship’s Gabe tapped a …

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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 …

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