there that’s reading this has not heard that Embrace record, you have to go out and get it today. That was a massive reason why all the bands in that era sounded like they sounded. It was so much of Embrace. They were beautiful and sad and melodic and cool.”
Fred Mascherino: “I really liked Fugazi. Their ethics were so up here. (Motions above his head.)”
“I learned how to write lyrics by listening to Fugazi,” says Matt Pryor, vocalist and guitarist of The Get Up Kids. “They would always write really abstract lyrics about really specific things. I kind of took that approach.”
It may seem counterintuitive that the vulnerability and melody for which emo became known actually stems partially from one of the biggest icons in hardcore, Ian MacKaye, cofounder of Dischord, as well as vocalist for Embrace, Fugazi, Minor Threat, and Teen Idles. But, upon closer examination, we can see the first breadcrumbs of emo in Minor Threat songs, even though he still, for the life of him, can’t tell you what emo music is or why he’s relevant to it. (Chris Conley: “Oh, give me a break. That’s just silly.”)
“People often say that Embrace or Rites of Spring were the first bands to really talk about their feelings.” MacKaye reflects. “But if you listen to Minor Threat, there’s a song called ‘Look Back & Laugh,’ where I not only talk about my feelings, I actually articulate them and enumerate them and give them voices. It was just interesting to me that somehow emotion was a new component to punk, since for me that was certainly not the case. It was always about emotion.”
“I’m telling you I want it to work
I don’t like being hurt
Something’s not right inside
And I can’t always put it aside
What can we do, what can we do?”
—Minor Threat, “Look Back & Laugh”
“I think there’s a tendency to oversimplify,” MacKaye continues. “Emo is interesting, because it’s not a term I ever used with any seriousness. It was a derisive term making fun of Embrace and Rites of Spring. There was an ongoing joke in Washington, where there was hardcore, then metalcore, then deathcore, then rasta-core and krishna-core and jazz-core. At Dischord, we made up a fake chart of different -cores. Brian Baker—he was the bass player of Minor Threat and then he was in this band Dag Nasty—was the one I think (and I wish I could find it, I think it was in a Thrasher Magazine) said, ‘Those guys are playing emocore and talking about their feelings.’ And he was making fun of us as emotional hardcore. It was just ridiculous, we thought, because we were punks making punk music.”
So to satisfy the question of “What is emo?” in one sense is to say that it is a subgenre of punk and hardcore. Or rather, it is the tagline associated with a particularly emotional brand of punk and hardcore that nobody wanted to be associated with in the first place. When the term “emo” first got thrown around, there was essentially already a built-in handbook for how to mock it.
“Rites of Spring was one of the greatest bands ever live,” MacKaye asserts. MacKaye, who has meticulously catalogued all of his experiences in the DC punk and hardcore scenes of the 1980s, cites a previous journal entry: ‘July 29th, 1984—Rites of Spring go on. Great show. Guy [Picciotto] snaps his guitar in half while he flips over the bass cabinet.’ ”
As for what other people thought about the band, MacKaye says, “There was a mythology around them about everybody crying all the time, which was not really true.”
But, if it’s not true, then where do these jokes and mythologies come from? To have arisen at all, they have to have been based in some small grain of fact. While they may not have been sobbing into handkerchiefs on stage, Rites of Spring certainly did create a new sound that marked a turning point for punk and hardcore.
“I think Guy’s vocals were so mind-blowing,” MacKaye recalls. “Nobody, including the band, had ever heard Guy’s voice. They just practiced in the basement with no PA. So when we recorded and Guy went in to record the vocals, he just laid it out so hard. And that first session, I think he was pretty upset. They worked so hard and then Mike Fellows (bass) had decided to leave, so it was loaded. Guy just threw down so hard, and that was really exciting to hear.”
“Remainder” by Rites of Spring (excerpt)
We are all trapped in prisons of the mind,
It’s a hard sensibility
But we’ll see it through in time
But when words come between us
Noiseless in the air
Believe me, I know it’s so easy to despair
But don’t
Tonight I’m talking to myself
There’s no one that I know as well
Thoughts collide without a sound
Frantic, fighting to be found
And I’ve found things in this life
That still are real
A remainder refusing to be concealed
And I’ve found the answer lies in a real emotion
Not the self-indulgence of a self-devotion
For the first time, there was a punk band whose lyrics were extremely poetic and introspective—more so than Minor Threat’s songs. Rites of Spring offered the same kind of punk beats and sensibilities that virtually any other punk band offered, but they were the first to pair these things with more distinctive riffs and guitar melodies and deeply reflective, personal lyrics that rode on vocals that were sometimes very guttural and scream-oriented. Songs such as “Deeper Than Inside” and “Remainder” very obviously provided the next generation of punk and hardcore kids with the raw materials they would use to make what would later become known as emo.
“Deeper Than Inside” by Rites of Spring (excerpt)
I’m going down, going down, deeper than inside
The world is my fuse
And once inside gonna tear till there’s nothing left To find
And you wonder just how close close-up can be?
But while Rites of Spring made such an impact as to lead US Executive Director of Kerrang! Ethan Fixell to refer to them as “the holy grail of emo,” the band, which had formed in 1984, did not have a lengthy career.
“Rites of Spring played maybe two or three shows outside of Washington,” MacKaye says. “I think they did one show in New York and one show in Detroit with Sonic Youth. I think they played about seventeen shows, period. But I always tell people, ‘There were only twelve people at the dinner with Jesus, right?’ That seemed to get the word out…’ ”
Chapter 2
An Emo by Any Other Name…
“Being called emo is a scarlet E across your
