So, I'm back. I plan on updates these days, with one minor caveat: not all reviews will be new music. I don't have a terrible amount of money to spend outside of my usual bourbon and pistachio budget, so I can't go out and risk $12-$18 on every new indie release, so blog posts will include things I've found, already have, and a few essays as well.
That said, I'm going to dump off something that I've been wanting to say for a long time: Emo doesn't exist. This has been swarming in my head like a pack of drunken hornets for a few years now. A while ago, the term "emo" didn't bother me as much, because it was a quasi-pejorative term of endearment to describe certain bands that typically wrote songs that made mountains out of emotional molehills, but nowadays the term "emo" is pretty much a fully-pejorative term that macho pricks like to use to describe anything that doesn't appeal to their desired self-image of badass masculine bullshit.
To disprove the existence of emo, the first step would be to find its origins. Emo as a musical descriptor first found use during the early-'80s hardcore boom, the pioneer group being Rites of Spring. On paper, Rites of Spring was similar to any other hardcore punk band with the added distinction of lyrical content that mostly focused on emotional anguish revolving around any real topic. This caught on with a lot of bands, inspiring groups like Embrace and Beefeater to try their hands at a similar sound.
It all seems innocent enough, right? Lots of sub-genres are born not only of unique musical traits, but also of unique lyrical traits. The odd thing is that no other main genre of music did this. Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan touched on emotional issues, but they weren't dubbed or dismissed as "emofolk." And if you told a Led Zeppelin fan that Zep was "emo-rock" because they wrote some angsty lyrics, you'd get punched in the head, so why modern music wait so long in order to "create" emo?
The thing is, in hardcore, a sub-genre of music that seems almost hell-bent on tough-guy singers trying their best to look as powerful as they possibly can, a skinny kid screaming about how sad he is sticks out like a sore thumb. So in an effort to keep their desired masculine images going, hardcore kids were all too happy to throw around terms such as "emo-core" to seperate their scene from these groups of kids that were openly weeping in public while Guy Piciotto screamed his head off.
Looking back, "emo" has been applied to bands all over the spectrum, the following being the most mainstream of those who have earned the title of an "emo" band over the past twenty years:
Rites of Spring
Embrace
Beefeater
The Cure
Bauhaus
The Smiths
The Mountain Goats
Jawbreaker (See also: Jets to Brazil)
Neutral Milk Hotel
Sunny Day Real Estate
Jimmy Eat World
Saves the Day
Dashboard Confessional
Weezer
My Chemical Romance
Fallout Boy
Panic! at the Disco
...and so on. Now look at that list, and find a solid, concrete similarity between every single one of them. You'll find pockets of them, easily picking out the confessional, Screeching Weasel-esque pop-punk bands like Fallout Boy and Panic!, or the tormented-poet-with-a-dirty-Takamine acts like Neutral and Mountain Goats showing their Bob Dylan love, but beyond those few substantial conclaves of similar styles there is no major all-encompassing similarity that you can use to dump them all in the same box, save for the tenuous accusation that they all occasionally write emotionally confessional lyrics.
So why go through all of this just to rag on a single word? Because the term "emo" is nowadays used to discredit anything not appealing to one's worldview that all men must be strong, and emotional confession are for women, which doesn't matter, because even when women do it, it should be shunned. So in order to stop a trend that could ruin the introduction of great new music and musical ideas, the word must be made to seem even more meaningless than it is, and to remove its sting so that we can get more great bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and Jawbreaker.
