Six months ago all I listened to was winsome indie pop and, like, club music from 2009. I don’t know what happened.
Anyway I’m sitting on a Pepe Silvia-level conspiracy board of research that I did to write about emo music that I ended up not using, so I thought I’d throw a bunch of it together and pass it on as a fun little text collage.
Here’s some of my notes:
I basically stole the conceit of the spinny little Scenestory header map from SB Nation’s History of the Seattle Mariners documentary, even though it works totally differently as still images rather than in a video and I changed the color scheme.
Where every title/subtitle came from, except for the ones I just made up
I love to cite sources.
“Boiling frogs” — “Matt Lunsford: The American Football record was a ‘frog in the boiling water’ effect. I mean it was such a slow burn for so long that no one noticed this was burning for 15 years.”
I heard they all went to college. I heard they all have degrees. Isn’t that weird? — “Jawbreaker were unique to themselves, they were their own thing, and their whole persona was kind of mysterious: ‘I heard they all went to college. I heard they all have degrees. Isn’t that weird?’ They’re really smart and I think people were sometimes scared to approach them because they seemed like this sort of smart-guy band or whatever, and they weren’t like overly punk rock, aesthetically. They had their own style.”
“Teen Girl Squad” — this webseries from a million years ago that is never not stuck in my head
We’d see ourselves in a magazine and it was like, “Again?” Everyone must have been so sick of us. — I can’t find it now so I assume it was from a scanned magazine that someone posted on Tumblr or LiveJournal but this was from a My Chemical Romance interview
“We all keep most of the same secrets” — this essay by Norman Brannon of Texas Is The Reason, about what he learned interviewing musicians for a hardcore fanzine in the ‘90s: “In any given issue, you’d read about suicide attempts, traumatic childhood abuse, HIV scares, and attempts at getting psychological help. As time went on, I realized that the guiding principle I used in most of the interviews was the same: It was my conviction then, as it is now, that we all keep most of the same secrets.”
I have no illusions of smashing capitalism or dissuading the advertising industry from its business. Nor of returning to a past which is long gone, for both economic and cultural reasons. I have a much more modest goal: of keeping the idea of selling out alive. Of pointing to a line in the sand that has been casually erased and saying, “This still exists.” The broke young people who are the most passionate music fans in this world may not have the money or connections to be heard in the boardrooms of the world's biggest companies. But collectively, they have something even more powerful: the ability to call bullshit. The ability to deny their approval, which is what all those billions of dollars of advertising spending are really seeking. No matter how much companies talk about it, there really is no “authentic” “DNA” that resides inside a brand. There is only a shiny outward surface, composed of fictions, designed to get you to buy things. There is no soul inside.
I originally wanted to drill harder into the conflict between emo being perceived as a part of hardcore and that that changed when bands started getting lots and lots of young female fans, but some tangents have to get cut for time, c’est la vie. If that idea interests you further I read an interview the other day while I was waiting for my socially distanced coffee pickup where Hannah Ewens, author of Fangirl: Scenes From Modern Music Culture, talked about being inspired to write the book after seeing multiple generations of fangirls at a recent emo show. I have not read the book, because I’m still working on the same music history book I was reading in April, but you could, if you want.
A list of traits I’ve decided equal emo if you toss them all in a bag, shake ‘em up real good, and grab a handful
Fucking with the normal, straightforward method of naming things (e.g. full-sentence song titles like “Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off” or throwing in unusual capitalization and punctuation like “nothing,nowhere.” and “hellogoodbye”)
A lot of people will tell you that hating your ex-girlfriend is a key element but really it’s about having intense and unhealthy relationships with everyone in your life and it’s just socially acceptable to write songs about hating your ex-girlfriend because our society hates women in general
Counterpoint vocal melodies a la Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar” and Taking Back Sunday’s “Cute Without The ‘E’ (Cut From The Team)”
I thought I had more items for this list but I guess that was it
Check ‘em out: “Best Year in Music,” a super fun interactive graph by The Pudding that tracks every top Billboard hit over time and Every Noise at Once, an interactive map of every genre Spotify uses to categorize music.
Anyway, the thesis of this project is this tweet I did over a year ago:
I’m, like, 40-65% joking.
Thanks for reading.