"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos; that some culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"
This immortal monologue from High Fidelity (the opening of which was aped, sadly, by Fall Out Boy) sums up how I've come to feel about music in general, and act as a preface for my heartfelt plea for the evening.
Can we stop calling music "emo" as though that by itself was a bad thing? I know, I know, "emo" doesn't just mean "emotional music" but is an entire subgenre focused on heavy self-pity, angst, and screaming. Here's the thing, though, we blur that line a lot. We apply the "emo" label to almost any band the average age of which is under thirty and which isn't pop of some form. We've come up with about fifteen different distinctions (emo-punk, screamo, emo-pop) to try to delineate between different "types" of emo. Can we just do away with the "emo" portion of that?
All music is emotional in nature. To become a great artist, you have to be miserable. Most every song you hear outside of pop or dance/techno/trance is about some form of emotion. It can be happy, it can be sad, it can be morose, it can be melancholy, but it's all "emo". We just don't call bands we like by that title, because we can look past the melodrama, past the angst, to the parts we enjoy.
I'm not a particular fan of most popular teen bands, but I can name any number of bands I really like which are just as melodramatic and angsty as even the worst emo song. Kate Nash is a good example.
This immortal monologue from High Fidelity (the opening of which was aped, sadly, by Fall Out Boy) sums up how I've come to feel about music in general, and act as a preface for my heartfelt plea for the evening.
Can we stop calling music "emo" as though that by itself was a bad thing? I know, I know, "emo" doesn't just mean "emotional music" but is an entire subgenre focused on heavy self-pity, angst, and screaming. Here's the thing, though, we blur that line a lot. We apply the "emo" label to almost any band the average age of which is under thirty and which isn't pop of some form. We've come up with about fifteen different distinctions (emo-punk, screamo, emo-pop) to try to delineate between different "types" of emo. Can we just do away with the "emo" portion of that?
All music is emotional in nature. To become a great artist, you have to be miserable. Most every song you hear outside of pop or dance/techno/trance is about some form of emotion. It can be happy, it can be sad, it can be morose, it can be melancholy, but it's all "emo". We just don't call bands we like by that title, because we can look past the melodrama, past the angst, to the parts we enjoy.
I'm not a particular fan of most popular teen bands, but I can name any number of bands I really like which are just as melodramatic and angsty as even the worst emo song. Kate Nash is a good example.
