Editorial
Not Your Older Brother’s Emo Band Recently a coworker asked me, apropos of nothing, “Wait, are you emo?” Which is sort of like asking a dude listening to Drake, “Are you hip hop?” Or like asking an Insane Clown Posse fan, “Are you awful?” The semantics of how to use adjectives aside, there seems to be a very real disconnect between how the genre of emo music was viewed in the collective cultural mindset ten years ago, and how it ought to be viewed today. If you’ll allow me, this merits correcting. For those of you who stopped paying attention during the Bush administration, you may remember emo music as a series of laughable clichés. Clichés you clung tight to because Pete Wentz understood you better than your parents. There were painted nails and trips in the family mini-van to Hot Topic. You probably knew every palm-muted power chord and put more effort into coordinating which of your friends sang which part of the Taking Back Sunday harmony than you did into lying about your science fair results. Did you have to sweep your bangs aside to see all the My Chemical Romance songs in your LimeWire feed? Yeah, like, same. So, I’m sure as you got older you laughed it off as a phase (hey, at least it wasn’t ska, right?) and tore the All Time Low poster down from your wall. Now let’s kickflip into 2017,
Spring 2017
22
shall we? I want you to suspend the belief that this is how emo music must be. The operatic harmonies, chorus after chorus of breakups and bitter ex’s, the self-loathing sing-alongs. There’s so much more going on in emo music today. There’s music of substance being made. Music that can seem so important, beating your journal entries to the punch, even after your prefrontal cortex has fully developed.
There’s so much more going on in emo music today. There’s music of substance being made. I suppose the biggest bridge between your older brother’s emo bands and today’s is that they both present ideas that are often spoken about in hushed tones — mental health, addiction, feelings — with an intensity and openness unmatched elsewhere in guitar music. Today though, there’s less glam to the presentation of it, and more emphasis on the articulation. Take last year’s standout, Pinegrove, for example, who aptly bill themselves tongue-in-cheekily as “music for the promotion of introspective partying.” If you need songs that make you want to write lyrics on your battered Converse, look no further than them.
Gut-punch lines like “One day I won’t need your love / One day I won’t define myself by the one I’m thinking of,” stand alone, leaving no need for flashy guitars or glossy studio harmonies. And today there’s a lot more variety to what constitutes an emo band, so much so that you’ll say, “Wow, that’s a lot of varieties of emo bands.” Say you miss that Blink-182-inspired pop-punk sound? Modern Baseball and Sorority Noise have got you covered. Need a little screaming thrown in there to get the adrenaline flowing? Try The Hotelier. Just wanna feel things that you didn’t know were in you? Give The World is a Beautiful Place and I am No Longer Afraid to Die a shot. Ever thought, “Hey, what if there was also a banjo in this song?” So has Pinegrove. And every single one of them has something important to say. There’s a common trope about emo music that it’s all just sad guys whining about girls (albeit with killer choruses). I would argue that while heartbreak is universally felt and thus expressed in every genre in music to some degree, emo bands today write songs focused on a much greater range of topics.