What I Talk About When I Talk About Emo An Essay by
If you read my article on Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit last year, are aware of my internet presence, or have had a conversation about music (or really anything else) with me in the last twenty months or so, you’re probably all-too-aware of my affinity for emo. More often than not, the utterance of that word is an invitation for a confused or incredulous response, be it verbal or in facial expression. Thanks in part to the associations attached to that word in the early years of the current millennium and in part to an American cultural disdain for emotional openness, emo has become somewhat of a dirty word. If this piece distances the music from the stigma, that would be a positive outcome, but it would be a mistake to view that objective as this piece’s singular mission. Rather, it should be thought of as a burden, a prerequisite to a real discussion of what makes emo what it is. Join me reader, as we ride the angst-train to sad-town and explore what makes emo as powerful as it is to those who connect to it. There’s no way around it: this is inherently at least partially a conversation about genre. Genre is a nebulous fucking concept, with any attempt at discussion about it marred by shifting definitions, assertions of subjective observation as fact, and attempts to segment music into neat boxes of congruence. In essence, genre is a one-dimensional concept poorly fitted to analyze an infinite-dimensional space. However, considering that this piece is on the surface about a specific genre of music, it is a concept that is impossible to avoid. I’m not really interested in the question of whether My Chemical Romance or Mayday Parade or [insert popular poppunk or pop-metal band] is emo, but inevita10
David Demark
bly, that question will come up (to answer in brief: they aren’t emo as I define it but other people probably would call it that and I don’t fuckin own the word, shit). And of course, as long as the topic of genre is inescapable, my conception of emo is certainly shaped by musical trends that could be said to constitute a self-contained genre. For the most part, what I know as emo comes from the Midwestern emo movement of the mid-to-late 1990’s and the music that movement inspired. That said, my knowledge of the genre is very much incomplete, and this should not be seen as a survey but rather an exploration.