Greenwald, Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo (2003)
The word “emo” has quite nearly overshadowed the music it attempts to describe. Actually, many people would claim that it has. Depending on who you ask, the word “emo” is either an unwanted shackle or a suitable shoe. Half of the people who grew up playing in bands that generally fall under this category hate the word because it was something somebody outside of the scene came up with. For my part, when I was in middle school and high school, “emo” was definitely thrown around as more of an insult than the name of a genre. To be labeled “emo” was to be cast as an outsider. If you were dubbed emo, something was wrong with you. But at the same time, I liked the fact that I was emo. I thought the bands that I listened to, like Taking Back Sunday and The Used, were emo, and I loved them for that because they were painfully honest about pain. Babs Szabo, one of the cofounders of the now extremely popular club event Emo Nite, happens to feel similarly:
“I think even at the time when the term ‘emo’ was viewed somewhat negatively,” she says, “it still didn’t impact people wanting to be a part of the culture. When I was in high school, it definitely was not cool to be emo in school. But outside of it, when you went to see shows, that’s when you were part of a community. That was the only time I felt like I was a part of something and not an outsider.”
Ethan Fixell (Kerrang!): “There’s nothing about true, legitimate emo that’s worth making fun of. Some would argue that we have Jimmy Eat World to blame, as the success of their single ‘The Middle’ opened a path to mainstream success for pop punk bands, and the lines between genres became so blurred that emo became a catch-all term for pop punk with whiny vocals and sensitive lyrics—music that’s easy to ridicule as saccharine or cheesy. By 2004/2005, the term ‘emo’ would become a punchline. (For the record, the term seems to be gaining dignity over time, especially with the fourth wave of emo bands that now pay homage to first and second wave acts.)”
William Goldsmith (Sunny Day Real Estate): “The whole emo thing…so this is not meant to be in anyway insulting to anybody that is into that label, but in the punk rock scene, the first time I ever heard anybody use that word, it was a way of insulting someone. I had never heard that before, but it was very obvious it was an insult. I don’t really know what happened, but I guess somebody in the industry had to come up with a way to sort of market it or put a label on it. At that time, there was grunge. Now here was this other thing, and they were like, ‘Shit, what are we gonna call this?’ When I found out that there was a new genre of music called emo and that we were one of the pioneers of it, I was like, ‘WHAT?! Wait! That was the insult! It’s not a genre of music!’ So that was kind of hard to deal with.”
Matt Pryor: “The term ‘punk’ was derogatory initially, too. It’s an evolution of language, but it is very much a case of outsiders.”
Shane Told (Silverstein): “The main [movement] I’d say I would compare [emo] to is the goth movement. Really, the emo thing was an extension of that, repackaged and repurposed. Now, ‘goth’ made sense because ‘goth’ stood for ‘gothic,’ which everyone thinks of as dark and black. But ‘emo’ is such an easy-to-make-fun-of word. ‘Oh, you’re emo.’ So I think it was really easy for somebody who had no association with it […] to poke fun at it. You could poke fun at it based on a guy like me, up there borderline crying on stage. Or, you could poke fun at some girl who has her hair fourteen different colors and piercings in her face.”
Tom Mullen (Washed Up Emo): “After 150 plus interviews for my podcast, the tag ‘emo’ still has weight to this day and has survived while being the most hated word to describe a genre. [It] is pretty remarkable.”
Chris Simpson (Mineral): “I don’t love it, as terms go. To me, it doesn’t feel useful in the sense that such a large amount of things have that term slapped on it; a lot of different sounding bands, to my ears. It seems to be more of an aesthetic than a sound. I don’t know what it means, really.”
Steve Lamos (American Football): “I don’t know why people associate us with [emo]. I guess ‘cause of Mike [Kinsella]. Nobody really cared about American Football when we existed the first time. I think there’s been some interesting revision of history as people have picked up on that first record, and now they associate us with that music in a way that I certainly don’t think they did at the time. I thought of The Promise Ring or Grade or Cap’n Jazz as that genre. But I have no idea why American Football is necessarily included in that, other than the Mike connection. But if that’s the kind of music that attracts the weirdos and the people who feel like a square peg in a round hole, then I’m fine with it. Nobody really seems to want to claim this title for themselves, but maybe that’s what emo means.”
Ian MacKaye: “Thursday…are they an emo band? The Promise Ring? Jets to Brazil? So, anything that Blake [Schwarzenbach] was in…Huh. I don’t want to dismiss emo. It’s such an obscure form and so hard to define. I don’t know what the criteria is to be emo.”
Kenny Vasoli (The Starting Line): “If you sing about relationships and you have kind of a high voice, you might be in an emo band.”
Eddie Reyes (Taking Back Sunday): “People always said that we were emo, and we never ever thought we were. To us, the real emo bands died out in the late ‘90s. For some strange reason, someone in some big magazine decided to attach that name to the music that came out of the punk rock scene. It was just instant—everyone’s emo. My Chem never thought they were emo; they thought they were punk rock kids from Jersey. It’s kind of like when you watch Dave Grohl talk about the Seattle punk scene and all of a sudden they were grunge, and they were like, ‘What the fuck is grunge?’ ”
Chris Conley (Saves The Day): “It kind of depends on who you’re asking. I think it’s amazing, because I first heard the word ‘emo’ when it was about Sunny Day Real Estate and Embrace.”
Ethan Fixell: “The first time I ever heard the word ‘emo’ was while recording an EP with my high school band at Mike Watts’s Vu Du Studios in Long Island, New York. An engineer named Sean Hanney told me that our music shared a lot of similarities with a movement that was happening at the time: this ‘emo’ thing. He played me Saves The Day’s Through Being Cool, and I was totally into it. Shortly after, I read a piece in a 1999 issue of Guitar World by Jim DeRogatis that was titled, ‘Emo (The Genre That Dare Not Speak Its Name).’ ”
“Emo (The Genre That Dare Not Speak Its Name)”
by Jim DeRogatis (Guitar World, 1999)
Once again there’s a hard-rocking sound galvanizing the underground. You can call it post-hardcore. You can call it post-punk. You can take a step back and just call it indie-rock. Any name you choose is bound to prompt an argument with somebody, so you might as well bite the bullet and call it the name that nobody likes: Emo.
Tom Mullen: “The words ‘emo’ and ‘emotion’ are things I would see at early shows when screamo bands would pour out everything they had on the stage, and by the end they’d all be so tired and exhausted from the set. The entire time watching it would be this feeling of the show being on the brink of breaking, but it never does. That tension, that moment of feeling like the music can go anywhere […] is what emotional means to me and what emo has always meant to me.”
Chris Conley: “Anybody [who] says they don’t like emo that was part of emo is just fronting. It’s lame.”
Eddie Reyes: “I feel like the people that hate it don’t really hate it. I think that they are truly emo kids deep down inside that just think it’s cool to hate it. I’m a fuckin’ emo kid.”
It would seem that the jury is out on whether “emo” is a good thing or a bad
